On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley A Turkish Oratorio at the UN And Two Take-Offs on Shakespeare Yu-niis Emre. By Ahmed Adnan Saygun. The Symphony of the Air and the Crane Chorus (of the N. Y. State...
...Edwin Booth...
...Rice's dialogue is literate, at times even eloquent...
...Saygun's impressive and moving oratorio deserves to be heard again...
...The Symphony of the Air and the Crane Chorus (of the N. Y. State University at Potsdam...
...THE Book of fob is the one drama in the Bible, ancient yet keenly applicable to our time...
...The first part pictures the sadness and loneliness of man, desolate in a world that seems evil and devoid of purpose...
...By Elmer Rice...
...Psychoanalysis is1— however cathartic on the couch—too much talk for the boards...
...In part two, man questions and rebels against his unhappy lot...
...Part three hails the divine spirit of Love...
...Presented by the Playwrights' Company and Franchot Productions...
...On Broadway, in the meantime, two plays have inaugurated the "Unkind to Shakespeare Week.'" Jose Ferrer, instead of venturing to star in one of the major plays, gives us a lecture by critic William Winter illustrated by flashes of Ferrer playing Edwin Booth playing Shakespeare...
...hence the characters seem less persons than pawns...
...It is perhaps unwittingly that Saygun follows Job...
...It has just been set into modern form by Archibald MacLeish, to be enacted on Broadway this season...
...Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt...
...He calls his work Yunus Emre, after a fellow Turk, a mystic of the 13th century, whose poems form the words of the oratorio...
...the irony is biting and neatly wry...
...Presented by Mr...
...Conducted by Leopold Stokowski...
...It slips at one point, in not making clear why "Gertrude"—Grace Nicholson, on whose rolling acres the action occurs—becomes convinced that her second husband had murdered her first...
...Ferrer's soliloquy shows that he's left them alone...
...Cue for Passion...
...We are interested in the intellectual exercise...
...It has been performed upon the New York stage...
...An intermezzo heralds the coming of the Redeemer: Love...
...The direction has brought out the best in a fluid cast, especially in John Kerr (Hamlet) and Diana Wynyard (Gertrude...
...The eternal drama of man's hope, man's faith in love, rising over the else unbearable torments of the world, is followed with concordant flow by the voices and the orchestra...
...In the story—in any story he undertakes, for Elmer Rice is our best dramaturgist, with an excellent sense of structure as well as a warm human sympathy—'there is material for an effective play...
...The chess game onstage is played again across the footlights...
...we observe that, while Booth may have been one of America's great Shakespearean actors, Ferrer, unfortunately, is not...
...At Henry Miller's Theater...
...And it has been set to music in a magnificent oratorio by Ahmed Adnan Saygun, just conducted by Leopold Stokowski at the United Nations...
...Here, the family and friejids (Gertrude, Claudius, Ophelia, Polonius, Horatio-Rosencrantz) all apply it to the erratic young man, until the concentrated dose by his criminologist friend, with his own perhaps too quick understanding, leave hope of peace at the end...
...By Milton Geiger...
...We recognize, for instance, that the only way a modern Hamlet can converse with his father's ghost is in his cups...
...But Rice presses the parallels with Hamlet so closely that we tend to waitoh for the likenesses and the variations, and thus unconsciously resist the emotional flow of the immediate story...
...Directed by Jose Ferrer...
...Ferrer and the Playwrights' Company...
...At the United Nations...
...Directed by the author...
...At the 46th Street Theater...
...But by that time Shakespeare and good theater have been talked under the table...
...Flute and strings cross over each other and the total effect is one of solemn brooding, lifted to exaltation...
...The main "cut" by which Rice deviates from Shakespeare invites disaster...
...To complete the treatment, "the most unkindest cut of all" came the next night, when Elmer Rice transported Hamlet to Southern California...
...The highlight of the evening is supposedly Booth rendering Hamlet's first soliloquy...
...John Gielgud's Hamlet showed awareness of recent Hamlet studies...
...a,nd when he says that the world is an unweeded garden, "things rank and gross in nature possess it merely," he hopes that we won't notice that last word—although in Shakespeare's time "merely" meant "completely...
...he exclaims, ignoring the favored restoration to "sullied flesh...
...A moment when "Booth" uses an old word from Romeo and Juliet, and the actress asks what it means, reminds us that an actor should at least try to understand his playwright...
...Instead of poetry we get psychoanalysis...
Vol. 41 • December 1958 • No. 46
