On Stage

...His staging suggests nothing so much as some urban-renewal project that ran amok, knocking down Theseus' palace along with Quince's slum, and stopping after it had plowed under Oberon's teeming forest, too...

...Kott being Kott, he makes so much of the "madness" of this night that "the lovers are ashamed . . . and do not want to talk about it"—yet they do, telling one another and Theseus, too...

...Patrick Garland's direction delivers them more consistently in House, and the lovely Miss Bloom is far better in this lesser play, too...

...This said...

...Timeliness may have had something to do with Hillard Elk-ins' reviving A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, to alternate in repertory Off-Broadway as vehicles for his wife, Claire Bloom...

...Brook needn't have driven them so...

...Paul B. Price reinforced my growing dread of actors who retain their middle initials by strenuously overplaying Estragon in a manner reminiscent of a young Lou Gilbert...

...At No, No, Nanette, nostalgia causes the audience to cheer Ruby Keeler, Patsy Kelly and Jack Gilford for acting their age and nothing else and to scream with delight as the chorus taps its toothy way through simple-minded Busby Berkeley routines...

...Despite this production's failings and an occasional falling off in Beckett's writing—a religious symbol clashed too gratingly or a joke made too obvious—Waiting still holds my attention as a distillation of our all too human condition into stage vignettes...

...It does enough if it grips us, moves us, reminds us in a time of infinite waste and destruction that man can create, and recreate...

...Henderson Forsythe, a crusty old-country-doctor sort of Vladimir, is surprisingly good most of the time...

...These unhappy few sit out performances of the classics now in a perpetual cringe as one timely horror after another is revealed onstage...

...they burn energy unnecessarily, bursting into a raga when a song is required ("Ye spotted snakes") and indulging in folk-rock moaning when none is...

...The quartet of well-born Athenian lovers in modish tie-dyed garb might just as well be grubby and lower-class also, since this Dream is not about love on all levels but about sex, a topic always relevant at the box office...

...With Shakespeare's special merriment and magic down for the count, Dream might just as well be played in the glaring white void that is Sally Jacobs' set, and Oberon and Puck might just as well swing on a trapeze or juggle silver plates on a wand, for it is not verbal delights we are to enjoy...

...Nostalgia, that other philistine force in our theater, remains at large...

...Pause...

...I must concede the timeliness of Brook's conception, and I urge his acrobatic and rather repulsive troupe (surely this is the "Plebeian Shakespeare Company") not to work so hard at appearing relevant...

...And how those lines have gained in meaning and bitter hilarity: "Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors...

...Everyone approves—except that judicious, grieving minority of theatergoers Hamlet spoke of, who know there must be more to a revival than trendy costuming and vulgarity...

...One requires no proof that witches exist to be enthralled by Macbeth's lunge for power, and no current event to make Nora's moral growth or Hedda's fateful decisions gripping...

...Let us not speak well of it either...

...Some exposition in House is a bit creaky, but after we cross his rickety passages, we enter scenes where, as E. M. Forster unimprovably put it, "his stage throbs with a mysteri-ousness . . . with beckonings, tremblings, sudden compressions of the air, and his characters as they wrangle among the oval tables and stoves are watched by an unseen power that slips between their words...

...Their predecessors had found the play "obscure" and "gloomy" when it first appeared here back in 1956...

...Her Hedda lacks Ibsen's steely terseness from the first...

...The poetry is either lost in the rowdiness or obliterated by deliberate misreading, as though Brook wanted to put the word in its place in this age of McLuhan...

...Dan Stone, the assistant stage manager, was Lucky this evening, replacing Anthony Holland (Stone is obviously very talented and very young—for Lucky, anyway...

...Roy Shuman's old duffer of a Tesman is farcical, and the cast's nonreaction to Hedda's suicide indicates lassitude, not shock...

...As she grows before us from an utterly endearing child-bride into a woman of great moral courage, she reminds us that theater is indeed an art, and thus need perform no utilitarian service involving politics or fashion...

...Because fashion is not my field or my concern, I have to report that Schneider's staging is fussy and strained, as if he could only occasionally bear to face the great void of stasis Beckett found so grimly amusing...

...It is one level of the play—or, rather, was till the respectful Brook flattened it...

...Now Theseus and Hippolyta discuss their coming marriage in tones of dread, albeit with words of expectation...

...Beckett seems to be the fashionable modern master in our season of minimal art and radical-chic despair...

...Aside from a jarring reference to woman's place in future society that adaptor Christopher Hampton has Lovborg make, Elkins' productions do not update Ibsen...

...Peter Brook's profanely acclaimed production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which his Royal Shakespeare Company has been imported to perform for a "limited engagement," represents the triumph of farce, cleverness and relevance—it has been called "Shakespeare for our time"—over such niceties as comedy, genius, poetry, imagination, and charm...

...Let us not speak of it at all...

...Hailing ineptness because it's old is as bad as acclaiming vandalism because it's new...

...Puck does not chat with a sprite in Act II, Scene 1, to establish the fairyland imagery, but with four hippie creeps, who speak the same lines in overlapping, chaotic succession...

...It's a pity someone did not replace Edward Winter, who spluttered away some of the play's best lines as Pozzo...

...From the audience's topical standpoint, Ibsen's power will wane as job discrimination ends and day-care centers proliferate...

...The lovers are continually grappling and Bottom sports a monstrous phallus...

...it is the very timelessness of Waiting that keeps it timely...

...His direction never quite catches the proper mood...

...While randiness and plain nas-tiness certainly can be found in the text, so can affection and sweetness...

...Ibsen had her enter and get on with it...

...On Stage THE IRRELEVANCE OF RELEVANCE BY HARRIS GREEN Productions of the classics today provide the kind of suspense and shock that can accompany the unbandaging of a dearly beloved after plastic surgery...

...Kott's remarkable ability to find only the brutish and nightmarish in this play makes him seem authoritative in Academia and Thespia...

...Ibsen built with the great materials of drama—tension, conflict, character, destiny...

...By abusing Shakespeare for his own greater glory, he has already shown how with-it he is in this era of the great polluters...

...Shakespeare being Shakespeare, he gave us many facets in which to see ourselves reflected: immortals and mortals, terrors and hilarities, earthiness and airiness...

...Garland gives his wife A Star's Entrance by having her "discovered" in a curtained alcove, tinkling at the piano...

...Actually, all that moonlight and stuff was not something Max Rein-hardt devised for Warner Brothers back in the '30s...

...They climb ladders and swing on ropes...

...Not surprisingly, Dream now occurs on the kind of empty, steeply raked stage we have come to expect in a Peter Brook production, with the actors standing off to the side among the musicians, watching one another perform—the familiar horror-show tableau of Marat/Sade...

...Schneider is to be congratulated for not littering his production with specific topical allusions...

...In an age that solipsistically demands relevance of its art, any alteration or distortion is acclaimed if it gives a play written in a lesser time the look of having been tossed off last month...

...The new generation of trend-spotters are hailing him as a prophet in their rave reviews of Alan Schneider's Off-Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot...

...John Bury's spare, gray designs for Hedda promise these qualities...

...David Merrick must be counting on it to send Carol Chan-ning and Sid Caesar fans flocking to Four on a Garden, for there is nothing in it to watch but these two able clowns...

...still, I sensed spectators becoming excited whenever Nora seemed to be a foremother of Women's Lib, or when Hedda seemed to be driven to suicide merely by maternity and Judge Brack's male chauvinism...

...But Brook being Brook, he stresses the earthy and thus errs as badly as the old-fashioned directors, who were unspeakably cute and genteel about a work bursting with energy...

...One never knows what unprecedented butchery may be unveiled next...

...Pause...

...Any morning, I can find at least three front-page stories in the New York Times that Becket has summed up with two lines of dialogue and a stage direction: " 'Well, shall we go?' 'Yes, let's go.' (They do not move...

...Typically, those reviewers who haven't missed a bandwagon since they got their posts have hailed Brook for not tampering with the text and for banishing all that airy-fairy, moonlight-and-gossamer tradition, to stage a truly lusty Dream like the one analyzed in Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary...

...Patricia Elliott and Kate Wilkinson give apt, graceful performances in both plays, but it is Claire Bloom as Nora who triumphs...