Pure Fantasy
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel A Passion for Clarity Many critics used to talk about the characters in Shakespeare's plays as though they were real people with lives of their own. A Juliet to...
...Jones, to psychoanalyze...
...Neither Bosco nor Watson overwhelms the supporting cast...
...He has invested Much Ado with a great deal of dumb show and by-play to touch up the comedy, but his contribution would be worth much less if he did not have in Philip Bosco a rare Benedick to sustain it, an actor who can do devastating justice to his pungent lines but wilt under the ripostes of Beatrice (ably played by Jacqueline Brookes) with only the turn of a lip or the narrowing of an eye...
...A Juliet to whom one could make love...
...Lionel Abel, in a memorable chapter of his Metatheatre, goes so far as to see Hamlet and Claudius as "playwrights" of a play within a play and the other characters as "actors" who defer to their instructions...
...In constellation around the Hamlet of Richard Burton there revolve the sluggish Ophelia of Linda Marsh, the plaintive Gertrude of Eileen Herlie, the stringy Laertes of John Cullum, and the tame Claudius of Alfred Drake...
...Allen Fletcher directed both plays...
...Brecht once pointed out that "there is nothing more foolish than directing Shakespeare so that he becomes clear...
...A Portia to turn to for legal advice...
...this is not Elsinore, nor the Globe, nor even quite an up-to-date setting, though Gertrude does sport a country-club mink, Claudius a cardigan, and Polonius a business suit with vest that suggests he is running a savingsand-loan association on the side...
...Yet there is a passion for clarity, even if it means tampering to settle the ambiguities, in all three productions, so that in each case Hamlet seems to stand for less than it does on the printed page...
...Each is an artificial construct, a series of theatrical imitations...
...Burr may not yield another such evening in his life, but that hardly matters...
...The criticism of the past 30 years—that of, say, Henri Fluchère, Maynard Mack, Wolfgang Clemen, and the Leavisites— has shown not only that a characte like Hamlet cannot exist outside the play, but that he does not govern, much less transcend, the plot and the language...
...He is an adept enough actor...
...But the theatricality, such as it is, soon pales...
...Lester Rawlins, resigned after a dispute with producer Joseph Verner Reed...
...some of them whoop and clap as Claudius is hit by Hamlet's sword...
...But even if he were, he should not have been allowed to take it over so ruthlessly...
...Rather, he is determined by the lines he speaks, the lines spoken about him, and the events in which he takes part...
...Khachaturianlike music invades and underlines the action...
...He looks back in anger when he should be looking forward in trepidation...
...so has the great soliloquy, "How all occasions do inform against me...
...listening behind a clothes rack...
...Burton is a curious performer to watch...
...he was called in at desperately short notice on the second night, when Alfred Ryder's voice dried up...
...When the humor and mystery of Hamlet are wiped out, it slumps to the level of an adventure story, and that is how the audiences at Stratford take it...
...Scene by scene, this is an awesomely literal conception...
...As last season's The Winter's Tale showed, this company is more at ease with comedy than with tragedy, and I wish that Papp would give an airing to some of the lighter "outdoor" plays he has not broached in the Park: Two Gentlemen of Verona, All's Well, Cymbeline, Love's Labor's Lost, and The MerryWives of Windsor, to which his troupe's aptitudes and the Delacorte Theatre itself seem more suited...
...Sir John Gielgud ventures partway toward theatricality at the LuntFontanne Theatre by staging Hamlet as a rehearsal...
...Only Hume Cronyn as Polonius—a Max Beerbohm cartoon, the body all head and the head all brow—offers Burton any opposing quality, and that drastically damaged by the senility of the role...
...The virtue of each of these productions is devoted handling of the central role, and this radiates confidence to the rest of the cast...
...The business of an actor, therefore, is not to resolve the questions, riddles and enigmas of Hamlet into a false unity, a fixed personality— "the essence of Hamlet"—but simply to state these contradictions, to serve the material to his audiences and let them digest it for themselves...
...There is the usual swirling of cloaks and torches...
...His very bewilderment lent the play a kind of tension that I, for one, never hope to see exceeded, an impression that he had visited insanity and come back to brag about it if he could only find time...
...and the show would be unremarkable in every way if it were not for the stunning performance of Robert Burr, whose Hamlet is something of a sensation...
...Blasted along his entire right side—crippled leg held straight by a thong, claw hand, scarred jaw, eyelid spitted half down—he makes a frighteningly plausible transition from the early Gloucester, revelling in his malice, to the final image of the King crying for a horse as he drags himself across the battlefield by one arm...
...What made him an event was that he undertook the part after only three hours of rehearsal, yet he leapt about the complicated boards with a never-cometomorrow abandon...
...When Burton's Hamlet is talking to Ophelia after "To be or not to be," he clearly sees Claudius and Polonius, those two "lawful espials...
...A third Hamlet, on view at the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut, has found a superb Claudius in Philip Bosco and a bctter-than average (because less-than-innocent) Ophelia in Ann Gee Byrd, but much of the play has been cut away, as in the days before Forbes-Robertson...
...Even Gielgud's dead King sounds less like an old soldier than the Ghost of Christmas Past...
...At this point, it is not possible to say whether the lackluster tone of the production is due to his selfconsciousness or to a wavering between the work of two directors...
...15 minutes after the opening the actors are unraveling another "interpretation" of Hamlet, instead of an exposition of the total play...
...Tom Sawyer, who replaced Rawlins, has dignity and a rich natural voice...
...He is naturally unclear...
...A Hamlet to swap ghost stories with, over coffee and Danish (or even, in the case cf the good Dr...
...Gielgud and Papp spare the knives and take the text down to about three-andthree-quarter hours...
...Fortinbras has been eliminated...
...And later, in the swordfight, he picks up Laertes' weapon deliberately, as though aware that it is poisoned, whereas the text says merely, "In scuffling, they exchange rapiers...
...he pushes on humorlessly, taking and giving cues...
...They each succeed because they reproduce the complexities of the text...
...Howard Da Silva as Claudius bears an uncanny facial resemblance to Edward VII but is less, much less spirited...
...Nor are the plays portraits of a real world...
...This Hamlet could have blown the rest of the cast into the wings with one outburst and, during the enactment of Gonzago's murder, he practically did...
...To see Shakespeare staged with appropriate verve one must go to Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing, which are also in the Stratford repertory...
...The cock belts out a genuine crow, and the Ghost really does start like a guilty thing...
...In other respects, Papp's version, like Gielgud's, suffers from oversimplification, from weak casting and a consequent imbalance in the power struggle...
...In Central Park Joseph Papp has directed a conventional, if processional, Hamlet opening with a mime scene in which the last funeral rites are administered to the dead king before the play strictly begins...
...they bend to its whims and contradictions and out of them put together something greater than a full-bodied characterization: a fullblooded play...
...He is one of the few undoubted presences in the theater today, and would make an admirable Tamburlaine...
...he is a hero...
...With his bluntness and glass-shattering voice, his clipped-out word patterns, his aspirated grunts and barks between lines and phrases, his manipulation of the other actors as though they were props, his nail-chewing, and his frenzies played to the hilt or possibly beyond the handle, he speaks boldness and certitude in a part that argues equivocation and doubt...
...Similarly, Douglas Watson is the anchor man for Richard III...
...Early in the season director Douglas Seale and his leading player...
...Julie Harris as Ophelia strews the usual flowers in the Mad Scene which, as usual, comes across more as a Drunk Scene...
...He is absolute matter...
...he does not embellish but neither does he fill out the role...
...Temperamentally he is not flexible enough for the play...
...At Stratford it runs for three hours and 10 minutes...
...Burr is Burton's understudy at the Lunt-Fontanne...
...Nan Martin is an astonishingly ordinary Gertrude...
Vol. 47 • July 1964 • No. 14
