NONFICTION - Nov. 15, 1992

ACTING SHAKESPEARE by John Gielgud (Charles Scribner’s Sons/A Robert Stewart Book: $20; 192 pp.). Fans of John Gielgud are likely to be disappointed with this volume, which doesn’t add up to 200 pages despite being padded out with an extensive introduction (by frequent Gielgud collaborator John Miller) and four appendices. “Acting Shakespeare” has its charms nonetheless, and they derive almost entirely from the fact that Gielgud is such a pure representation of classic British acting. He is unpretentious--Gielgud admits that he “devoured” reviews and never forgot the bad ones--and always expects others, it seems, to be the same. The most amusing passage in “Acting Shakespeare” comes when Gielgud recounts his ill-fated staging of Hamlet in New York in 1964. It was bad enough that Richard Burton, the star, created what Gielgud calls “a Shropshire Lad Hamlet”; worse was the casting process for the other roles, the American actors wanting to get involved in deep discussions about their characters’ motivations. “If I said: ‘You’re just meant to support Hamlet,’ ” Gielgud writes, “they were very hurt and cross.” The one revelation in the book may be the fact that Gielgud approached numerous directors about filming “The Tempest”--including Akiro Kurosawa, Alain Resnais, Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergman--only to be turned down, this long-held ambition only coming to pass with Peter Greenaway’s agreeing to film the play as “Prospero’s Books.”