Stage:

...Bergman's glosses on the play, visual images primarily, were not difficult to grasp, but the play too often slipped through the directorial apercus...

...There were things to admire in the production...

...Ulf Johanson was a wonderfully comic Polonius, having developed an eccentric sideways step which let him approach everyone and everything crabwise...

...It was always interesting to watch, to see what was going to come next, but Hamlet should leave the playgoer exclaiming, "Oh, yes," not muttering, "Oh, come on...

...Full of professional hubris, I answered, "No, but I understand theater...

...As for Bergman's more obvious inventions, many of them would have seemed doubtful in any language...

...GERALD WEALES...

...If this were somehow a love play that had gone awry, what were to make of the ending in which Fortinbras and his thugs burst in, machine guns chattering, and dragged Horatio to an off-stage execution...

...One of the reasons Hamlet looked as good as it did was that Christopher Plummer and Glen-da Jackson had come to town for a limited run in a Macbeth that had no redeeming feature...

...As often happens when I face unfamiliar plays in unfamiliar languages, I had no trouble following the plot...

...Jan Waldekranz's Horatio went a long way toward explaining Hamlet's attachment to that usually tedious character by playing him as a knockabout college chum who shared Hamlet's wit and foolishness, if not his melancholy...

...With no command of Swedish, I never knew whether I was mistakenly assigning Stormare to the wrong crowd, the words-without-meaning Hamlets who sing or eat their speeches for effects that have little to do with Shakespeare's lines...

...It was a nice satiric idea that Fortin-bras's final praise of Hamlet be delivered as false humility for TV cameras, but unless the play be taken simply as good clean (or not so clean) fun, there seemed no point to it...

...Ophelia spent a good part of the play on-stage, hovering just outside the circle in which a scene was being played...

...Perhaps they should have played it in Swedish...

...The meat of this play, however, was its verbal jokes and, as I sat silently amid the laughter of the audience, a sickly grin on my face, I came to understand the manager's question...

...My misgivings about Stormare's highly praised performance were heightened when he lay flat on his back, his head tipped over a step, and delivered a soliloquy while his upside-down head eyed the audience...

...When the all-purpose chorus, dressed in red and white, formed a semicircle around them and, led by Polonius, applauded ritually, were we to take the business as a comment on the lubriciousness of the court, the flattery of underlings, or a reminder that this is a play...

...Clearly the most exciting thing about Macbeth was the backstage battle in which one director after another bit the dust as the production dragged its way toward New York, but there was no way to put that on-stage...

...Alan Scarfe seemed at first to find a character in Macduff, but when he hit his first big speech, he seemed to say, oh, what the hell, and began to declaim it as though this were prize day at an English public school...

...Perhaps my difficulty with Hamlet was that I knew what was going on, but that, sentence by sentence, I often did not know what was being said...

...This was a device that Jonathan Miller imposed on his leading actor at the Greenwich Theatre in 1974 in what I still think of as the silliest Hamlet I have ever seen...

...My Indian misadventure came to mind recently when I went to see Ingmar Bergman's Brooklyn Academy of Music production of Hamlet in Swedish, after having read an interview (New York Times, June 5) in which the director dismissed the language problem by describing how moved he was by a Russian film in which he had no idea what was going on...

...We were left with the ruins of a good casting idea...

...She was even on hand to watch her own funeral...

...Plummer, as Macbeth, seemed as embalmed as he does in The Sound of Music, and his sonorous recitation of the lines had the intellectual depth of a trainman calling destinations by rote...

...Jackson, who may have had something in mind about Lady Macbeth, settled for meaningless gestures like putting her arms rigidly to her sides and turning her palms outward presumably to convey determination or retching in the background, perhaps to indicate that this was a production that made her want to throw up...

...An outrageous reading can sometimes provide a startling sense of lightness to a character or a scene, but-unless a play is taken as a series of unrelated images-there should be some interconnection...

...If there was a defining line running through Bergman's production, I missed it...

...Take three problem images: . Early in the play, before the first court scene, Claudius and Gertrude circled around the stage in a playful sexual romp, middle-aged lust that underlined what compelled them to murder...

...Are we to assume that she was the motivation for most of the play's action...

...When Peter Stormare's athletic Hamlet knocked Ophelia around, like a wife abuser having a good day, I understood that he was telling her to get thee to a nunnery with a vengeance, but more often I wanted to know what line he was on so that I could tell whether the actor's emphasis was gratuitous (as it often was when Nicol Williamson and/or Richard Burton played the role) or making some point beyond a display of his frenetic energy...