A Young and Vital Prince of Denmark
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley A Young and Vital Prince of Denmark Hamlet. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Stuart Vaughan. Presented by Theatre Incorporated. At the...
...when Oedipus discovered that he had married his mother, Jocasta, she committed suicide and he reacted by blinding himself...
...The production, in speech and in action, ranges from the softly underdone to the violently overdone...
...In contrasting the two brothers, Hamlet points to the pictorial genealogy...
...but Madden maddeningly thrusts in the letter "n," thereby losing the double sense—the thought that Hamlet is "too much o' the son" of his father to be out of clouds of grief...
...The director, of course, should have known better...
...For a long time, there were two major ways to perform it: ranting or realistic...
...By the 10th century B.C...
...In one production the story itself was converted into modern terms: the uncle takes over a business empire that should have gone to the son...
...By the Middle Ages incest was unthinkable...
...Hamlet is now accepted by Freudians as presenting on stage the evolution of man's beliefs concerning incest, in earliest times the Egyptians and ? re-Attic Greeks saw the New Year as a prince slaying his fatherking, the Old Year, and marrying his mother...
...But throughout the play precision of diction and rapt reading take the place of solid thought and richer feeling...
...Donald Madden as Hamlet displays a rich voice with a wide range in ready command...
...In the current production, he deems it important to capture every syllable, every letter of his lines...
...Even the stage effects are too prominent...
...What is the style of the current Phoenix Theater production...
...These proved superficial devices...
...Much of this—like some of the delivery—is good...
...And the King, at the play's end, shakes a desperate but feeble sword at the oncoming Hamlet...
...King Claudius sends his messenger to England with so urgent a push that the poor fellow stumbles across the whole stage...
...At the Phoenix Theater...
...Then Sigmund Freud came along and unearthed another...
...Add to this kind of Hamlet a juvenile Laertes and a tittering Ophelia, and one remembers that in the early 19th century the play was once performed by 12-year-olds...
...Yet this remains a rather crude exteriorizing of the inner tensions...
...Reproaching his mother, Hamlet squeezes her face in both his hands, then tumbles her onto the floor...
...In recent years, Sir Laurence Olivier has been the best rhetorical Hamlet, Sir John Gielgud the best in the wiser natural vein...
...the essence remains caught in the acting style...
...Physically, too, there is much youthful stirring...
...I am too much in the sun...
...King Hamlet's widow marries not her son but her late husband's brother, yet her husband is still a rival to her son...
...Alexander Scourby enacts Claudius with the flatness of a suburban businessman who doesn't play golf...
...Thus, when Claudius reproaches him for being over-cloudy, Hamlet responds, in his first direct words of the play: "Not so, my lord...
...Many of the play's speeches, indeed, are spoken prone...
...The comic effects are good, although excessively obvious: Polonius (John Heffernan) talks in the high-pitched wondering voice of second childhood, Jared Reed is an excellent gravedigger and Nicholas Kepros makes good use of his moments as the effeminate Osric...
...It takes on additional meaning when we recognize that it is through the image of the hated Claudius that Hamlet stabs the interfering Polonius, and when by a trick of lighting the painted figure of the late King Hamlet becomes his active ghost...
...Laertes starts his journey, then Polonius' tug on his doublet holds him for the long speech of advice...
...Gertrude's room has, on the arras, the full-length image of the reigning King...
...the line of his predecessors is painted full on the rear curtain...
...We should like to see him play the role in 20 years...
...its maturity of judgment, however, is open to question...
...When the players retire after the weeping for Hecuba, Hamlet in self-scorn leaps halfway up the stage-arch and pounds the wall...
...Nature, who survived...
...In sum, this is a Hamlet of unquestioned vitality...
...But the temptation to excess is not resisted...
...Laertes, when he returns in anger, keeps his rapier point against the King's breast while questioning him...
...It has all the pop and effervescence of buoyant, almost flamboyant and boyish, youth...
...such incest was no longer morally acceptable...
...Claudius puts a friendly hand on Hamlet's shoulder, and the Prince in silence shudders away...
...Efforts have been made in the past to bring the play closer to us by setting the characters in modern dress: Prince Hamlet in tuxedo, the journeying Laertes in plus-fours...
...Freud uncovered the Oedipus complex, and John Barrymore's interpretation gave Hamlet not only grief and anger, but jealousy as a cause for killing his uncle-stepfather, Claudius...
...Every new performance of Hamlet raises the question of style...
...The line is properly printed "i' the sun...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 16
