RAF in 1943, Ashton created a new ballet for Helpmann, The Quest, a patriotic tale of Saint George, with music by William Walton, who commented that Helpmann in the lead "looked more like the Dragon than St George." The music has survived but the ballet has not. Helpmann returned to Hamlet in 1944 in the title role of the original play, with the Old Vic company. After the laudatory reviews for his Oberon, those for his Hamlet were more mixed. Ivor Brown thought it "eager, intelligent and exciting", Agate called Helpmann's prince "most heart-breaking" and the young Peter Brook found Helpmann's fast-paced performance highly exciting, but other critics thought it a lightweight interpretation, and opinions varied about the quality of Helpmann's verse-speaking. This was well received but their next production, a revival of Leonid Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped, quickly folded. In the same year Helpmann worked on the film The Red Shoes, which he and Leonid Massine choreographed and appeared in. Helpmann joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford-upon-Avon for the 1948 season, playing the title role in King John, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and alternating with Paul Scofield in a new production of Hamlet. 1950s In 1950 Helpmann directed an opera for the first time – the Covent Garden production of Madama Butterfly, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in the title role. The production outlasted its director: after many revivals its final performances at the Royal Opera House were in 1993. The following year he joined Olivier and Vivien Leigh at the St James's Theatre, where they presented Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Helpmann played Octavius Caesar in the first and Apollodorus in the second. When the productions were taken to Broadway at the end of the year he played the same roles. He appeared in another Shaw play the following year, as the male lead, the Doctor, opposite Katharine Hepburn as Epifania, in The Millionairess. Between these plays Helpmann acted in the Powell and Pressburger film The Tales of Hoffmann, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and choreographed by Ashton. Helpmann played all four of the villains in the various stories within the opera, his singing voice dubbed by the Welsh bass Bruce Dargavel. In 1953 Helpmann returned to the Old Vic, directing a new production of Murder in the Cathedral with Robert Donat as Becket. On Coronation night in June 1953 Helpmann