REFURBISHED CLASSICS
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage REFURBISHED CLASSICS BYA LBERT BERMEL T M. he Young Vic's Scapino provided a rare reminder that theater can be the most reciprocal of the arts. The performers so blatantly enjoyed...
...The novel's drawing together of Bloom and Dedalus, Ulysses and Tele-machus, Jehovah and Christ finds no active dramatic equivalent...
...The CSC has lately revised its production of Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy, a Jacobean free-for-all...
...Vindice, the hero, whose fiancee was violated and then poisoned, sets out to punish the culprit, a Duke...
...As Vindice, Dennis Lipscomb is a smooth juvenile lead who never touches the maniacal center of this woman-hating prude...
...Chunks of James Joyce for the literary set...
...After this pact with himself Vindice worms his way into court circles, dispatches the Duke, and brings about the deaths of the Duke's sons in a banquet massacre that sees bodies going down faster than in Hamlet...
...A naked Molly Bloom, also for the literary set...
...when they need a motive he prompts them by waving a hand or pointing...
...second, a Japanese karate fiend...
...The courtiers are depersonalized by masks that they hold before their garishly reddened faces and by their curly, powdered wigs...
...They establish a quick intimacy with their listeners...
...u lysses in Nighttown could be a winning political ticket...
...Jim Dale converted the head clown, Scapino (Moliere's own role), into a stand-up comic—what Dale happens to be when he is not acting with the Young Vic...
...The performers so blatantly enjoyed themselves you grew headily alert to their every movement, word and grimace...
...There Christopher Martin plies his trades of director, actor and contributory designer of lighting, scenery and costumes...
...Martin, the best actor, has stayed out of this cast...
...Tourneur concocted some startling scenes...
...Since the idea of vengeance is what propels the story, Martin personifies it as a specter with a death's head who remains on stage throughout, a mute conductor of the action, fluently played in mime rhythms by Harris Laskawy...
...For Italians, fragments of Latin...
...Dale feigned a bright argument between Scapino and these impersonations, calling on the audience to help out by stamping like a regiment of soldiers as he coughed up separate voices for a sergeant, a lieutenant and several recruits...
...One tiny part, that of a messenger, burgeoned into a second lead...
...Handsome, well-born and useless, they found themselves temporarily on stage without Scapino, on whom they had hung their hopes, and could think of nothing better to do than loiter in the sun...
...The British Theater Season" at the Academy brought over the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Young Vic and the Actors Company in an audacious program that also involved the London visitors in teaching at Brooklyn College's School of the Performing Arts...
...During pauses in the quarreling he walloped the sackful of Geronte with a giant Italian sausage...
...The production took over the Lepercq Space, a sort of vaulted barn in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with walls 40 feet high and rows of plastic chairs on creaky bleachers...
...and your responsiveness in turn fed back into a show that worked at a heightened, even feverish, pitch...
...The cavernous proscenium of the Winter Garden Theater swallows up the actors, as well as the spectacular effects devised by the director, Burgess Meredith, and his assistants...
...At present 10 plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strind-berg, Pinter, and other heavies rotate on the bill...
...Earlier this season a short version of the play ("Unfinished Miracle," NL, February 4), one supposedly predigested for children, was presented as a dignified "classical comedy" disfigured by beatings and other lowbrow lazzi...
...it has a little something to offer everybody...
...A quick sequence when Blazes Boylan flings off his clothes and humps Molly right there on her bed, for theater-is-action ideologues...
...For Jews, Yiddish exclamations and a portion of the Kol Nidre...
...This "Vengeance" summons the characters and dismisses them...
...he treated most of the episodes as modernized vaudeville acts, a string of solos, duets and collective romps that came very close to the original's raucous spirit...
...Not only did he follow Moliere's full text...
...In one, Vindice in disguise persuades his mother to sell his sister to one of the Duke's sons as a concubine—whereupon he swears to run her through for procuring her own daughter...
...Dedalus (Tom Lee Jones) is a pinched rhetorician who moves toward Mostel's sentimental Bloom not out of sempiternal impulses but because the director has told him to...
...This Nighttown lacks Sca-pino's definition in its individual parts...
...For the Irish vote, a Dublin locale and loquacity...
...The director of the Young Vic, Frank Dunlop, took a truer tack by speaking to the child in every grown-up, yet without ever condescending...
...Ed Wittstein's scenery, mostly underlit slopes and outlines, is not explored or used organically...
...But the director made the other characters count, too, including the minor ones...
...Now additional bits have been poured in from all over the book...
...The Neapolitan ambience did handsomely for a deformed circus ring populated by clowns who posed as human beings...
...The Nighttown atmosphere for fans of witchcraft and diabolism...
...The play's quartet of lovers, usually a drag on the evening, won their share of laughs as well...
...Dale's chatty, improvisatory technique (resembling Archie Rice's in John Osborne's The Entertainer) fit Scapino's character, probably because the two have a common corn-media dell'arte origin...
...Even the more striking realizations—stately, plump Buck Mulligan (David Ogden Stiers), the transvestite whoremaster Bella-Bel-lo (Swen Swenson), lascivious Molly Bloom (Fionnuala Flanagan) —are sucked down into the Broad-wayish bigness, vagueness, sameness...
...When Marjorie Barkentin's dramatization first lifted the top off the Rooftop Theatre downtown in 1958 it dwelt on a single segment from Ulysses, Leopold Bloom's nightmare...
...The auditorium does not have enough of an incline, and the seats are directly behind one another, making for terrible sightlines...
...In a way, internationalism also pervades the Abbey Theater on East 13th Street, home of New York's (and maybe the country's) most intrepid repertory group, the Classic Stage Company (CSC...
...they even encourage hecklers, whom they good-naturedly exploit as stooges...
...Waiters were conjurors...
...In another, he perfumes his fiancee's skull, dresses it in a hood and entices the Duke to kiss its mouth socket, which he has smeared with poison...
...His show-stopper was a 15-minute sequence in which Scapino bundled the old miser Geronte into a sack on the pretext of rescuing him from, first, a Long John Silver type on a crutch...
...It is a gigantic, difficult drama to aspire to, and well worth this particular try...
...Dunlop, however, orchestrated their sighs and languorous gestures into a quiet scene that broke up the rush of intrigue and still contrived to be funny and socially pointed...
...Martin has stylized and unified its multiple settings by having open, arched doorways for entrances, overhung by sheets of translucent, dark plastic that look like threatening rain clouds...
...This Scapino, which recently ended its run—a French play set in Italy and staged by an English troupe— is a microcosm of the international brotherliness of culture that we often praise but seldom finance...
...and third, a regiment of marching soldiers—all played by Scapino himself...
...But once the antics got under way you forgot your cramped knees and the guy in the seat behind who was picking out celebrities in the audience at the top of his whisper...
...Unhappily, the platform is a lot flimsier than its planks...
...The backers believed they were investing in high-priced real estate and they find themselves the owners of a swamp...
...Yet The Revenger's Tragedy represents an improvement over earlier CSC productions—like its Macbeth...
...To be honest," he declares, "is not to be in the world...
...for in this oversized box Carl Toms had constructed a cheerful, abstract Naples consisting of a patch of blue cloth on the floor for a harbor, plus a sprinkling of balconies and arenas embellished with wicker baskets, orange crates and posters...
...the result is a dilution of Joyce's world and underworld...
...British music hall comedians work differently from their American counterparts...
...Zero Mostel for Zero-worshipers and rhinoceroses...
...they snatched tablecloths out from under dishes or hurled a wine flask and a plateful of spaghetti to each other, catching them deftly...
...Andrew Robertson insinuated this outsider into the hubbub as a panhandler who ate other people's food, lustily fortified some choral singing, and bobbed up in the front of every grouping like a wedding guest determined to be photographed with the bride and groom...
...when they run short of bribes he produces bags of gold from his cloak...
...Early French scholars condemned this "inferior" sequence, yet to see it done today with unabashed extravagance is to watch Moliere inventing at high farcical pressure, and giving the actor every inducement to cut loose and fly...
...it does not compensate by offering grand, overall conceptions like the ones Martin has imposed on The Revenger's Tragedy...
...The play revels in its display of corruption and duplicity at the court of some unspecified Italian city whose aristocrats bear names like Spurio, Ambitioso and Super-vacuo...
...Several, with no gifts for shaping and projecting a personality, struggle to get by on affectation...
...The remaining CSC actors have only modest instincts for the stage...
Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 9
