On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage THE PRINCE AND THE BUTTERFLY BY STEFAN KANFER A CRESTFALLEN university student comes home. The young man expected to inherit the family business af ter his father's recent death. But...
...He has his foot on the brake, but he has his foot on the gas equally...
...The playwright sometimes knows, the director never...
...Unlike the others, his wardrobe reflects his state of mind...
...Initial publicity releases offered little enticement...
...Atkins, an outstanding actress, is linked to a bomb...
...A self-destructing spiral staircase that dominates Act One is mainly used as a platform on which to pose...
...James Acheson's costumes show the power of black—except for Laertes' Graustarkian red and gold uniform...
...Damian Lewis provides a vigorous Laertes and, in the role of Ophelia, Tara FitzGerald is a poignant victim, more affecting in her sane moments than in her scenes of lunacy...
...The only reason this household stays afloat is the money lavished on it by Le-onie (Eileen Atkins), Yvonne's unmarried sister...
...Indeed, the Greek goddess had it easy...
...Meantime, Yvonne's husband George (Roger Rees), a bumbling inventor, is conducting an affair with some unnamed piece of fluff...
...When Elvis Presley died, an agent was reported to have exclaimed, "Good career move...
...I only direct contemporary plays," he commented when Hamlet was in rehearsal...
...Good for him, that is...
...For if the actor has made little immediate profit, he establishes a powerful stage presence and a phenomenal memory...
...For good and ill, Mathias has broken this butterfly on a wheel of tactlessness...
...The quest for novelty occasionally goes awry...
...The ectoplasmic appearance of the senior Hamlet, the showpiece introspections ("To be, or not to be," "O...
...Without estate or position, seized by melancholia, the student considers doing away with himself...
...Marais garnered especially fine notices for his performance in the wartime production of Les Parents Terribles...
...and that he can decelerate and make his heart seem to break in slow motion...
...In two words, Sean Mathias...
...At 32 the rising player is poised to resound in movie houses and theaters deep into the next century...
...In fact, what we get is over-the-top camp in the worst possible taste...
...But these are minor cracks in an artful presentation...
...Director Jonathan Kent, evoking his extraordinary production of Medea last season, made certain that a surprise lurks in every familiar corner...
...Similarly, Peter J. Davison's weighty set conveys a vanished grandeur—and then features contemporary angles and architectural styles...
...In 1954 he directed a film version with unaccustomed reserve...
...No madness in this Hamlet...
...She was only chained to a rock...
...not very dignified...
...When the writer/artist was not stoned on opium he was excited by the spectacle of Occupied France, full of blond German boys in crisp gray uniforms...
...she has taken it upon herself to supply the care and discipline her nephew has lacked all his life...
...In the middle of Act One Cocteau adds his Gallic twist: Michael's girlfriend and George's amour are—zutalors!—one and the same...
...Terence Rigby makes an admirably plebeian Gravedigger, doubles as the Ghost and triples as the Player King...
...A cast of unknowns were to be led by Ralph Fiennes, an Englishman who pronounces his name Rafe Fines...
...So can Rees, who made a brilliant Nicholas Nickleby...
...Had a group of assassins set out to diminish Cocteau's reputation (an admirable goal, in my view), they could not have done more damage...
...They happen to have been written 400 years ago or 2,000 years ago...
...Upon her refusal, he wrestles the ingenue to the ground and sticks his hand up her dress...
...demands George, reciting Indiscretions' one funny line...
...What went wrong...
...His biographer, Francis Steeg-muller, quotes a letter from Jean to a friend: "Miracles are happening everywhere, and I am intensely curious about this unreal Paris...
...When he is not whining or slavering over his lady love, Michael maniacally bounces on Mama's bed to remind us how childlike he is...
...Thepredictable collisions, mistaken identities, hysterical fits, and abortive romances ensue, performed as if this were an acting class in how to make comedy repulsive, embarrass actors and insult audiences...
...The work was never more than an exercise in self-indulgence, but Cocteau kept it alive through numerous revivals...
...In a trice she becomes tractable and soft-spoken...
...If he lacks an intellectual dimension, he more than compensates with emotional conviction...
...The production at the Be-lasco Theater, however, goes back to basics and creates an unexpected triumph...
...Best left un-described is the moment when Madeleine, placed below Leonie, looks up the elder woman's skirt...
...The mood is not abetted by "The Mousetrap," the play within the play, which includes some garish effects better suited to 42nd Street than to Broadway...
...And Fiennes makes all this appear logical: Hamlet speaks rapidly because everything around him is moving at indecent haste, from the unseemly remarriage of Gertrude (Francesca An-nis), to the cascade of apothegms flowing out of that ultimate courtier, Polonius (Peter Eyre...
...Such is the skeletal outline of Hamlet, and it is customarily neglected by actors and directors seeking to make a name for themselves...
...In a perverse way, the present production at the Barrymore Theater sets things right...
...They refer to the character, not the star...
...For one thing, the speeches are delivered at twice the normal tempo...
...then again, neither do any of Stephen Brimson Lewis' costumes or sets...
...It is now called Indiscretions, implying that Jeremy Sam's translation is a wry, understated sex comedy...
...He hadplayed thefictiveNaziof Schindlers List...
...But that was not to be...
...what a rogue and peasant slave am I"), the address to the players ("Suit the word to the action, the action to the word"), the Oedipal relationship of Hamlet and his mother Gertrude, the question of whether the protagonist is mad or sane?these traditionally take precedence over the story line...
...Later, a Nazi officer described Cocteau as "sympathetic, yet tormented like one living in a hell of his own—but a comfortable hell...
...Eyre invests Polonius with more dignity than pomposity, reversing the standard interpretation...
...By that time all the famous recitations have come and gone, and not one of them seemed familiar...
...Those who expect the customary Freudian gloss must look elsewhere...
...No, not very dignified...
...Annis radiates sexual attraction, but not toward her son...
...It was technically adept and had an accomplished cast...
...For another, the costumes place the play in an indefinably European court just slightly before our century...
...Confronting Madeleine, George demands that she discourage Michael's affections...
...As the objects of her unrequited affection, Rees and Law are fauns in stag's clothing, and Turner is worse: a road company Tallulah, complete with foghorn voice and overstated gestures...
...From here on his agent can claim that he represents a legend...
...Then a thought occurs to him: Perhaps his uncle has murdered his father...
...Not content with merely behaving in an eccentric manner, George goes around caparisoned in World War I aviator goggles and leather helmet...
...But very content, with his lover Jean Marais at his side...
...Whenever anything can be shown with a nuance it is displayed in a frenzy...
...The Oedipal attachment that was missing in Hamlet is piled on in Indiscretions: Mother and son thrash around the bedcovers like porpoises in the North Atlantic...
...Although the young man has the maturity of a teenager, he has been staying out nights, having it on with a young lady, Madeleine (Cynthia Nixon...
...Essentially Indiscretions is Farce 101: Yvonne (Kathleen Turner) spends her days in bed, obsessively concerned with her 22-year-old son Michael (Jude Law...
...It is the actor's triumph that he can accelerate and make three hours seem to pass in a moment...
...Steegmuller goes on to criticize Coc-teau's "repellent detachment...
...Long ago Jean Cocteau offered a shrewd definition of tact: "Knowing how far we may go too far...
...They have nothing to do with the matters at hand...
...in Quiz Show he impersonated the real Charles Van Doren, scion of an intellectual family who faked his way to national celebrity...
...JEAN COCTEAU had a good war...
...In the scene with Yorick's skull, for example, light flows upward from the grave, a touch more appropriate for Stephen King than Prince Hamlet...
...One can imagine the same reaction to Fiennes' appearance in a production that irked the West End traditionalists, and that is playing a limited run in New York...
...As Claudius, James Lauren-son blends nobility and villainy...
...Michael is now the surrogate for her affection...
...His tergiversations go on too long, though, with catastrophic results...
...He is too kind...
...Still, every star needs its firmament, and this Hamlet would not glitter without the support of virtuoso players...
...As the play progresses Hamlet's somber garments become fewer and more tattered, until, at the end, he is barefoot and almost shirtless...
...She was terrific only a few years ago as the centerpiece of the film Body Heat, therefore she can act...
...Eileen Atkins goes through her paces with a stoicism that would do credit to Andromeda...
...The disaster begins with the retitling of Les Parents Terribles...
...few were so indiscreet as to mention the author's experiences in '40s Paris...
...He devises a subtle and horrific plan...
...Harold Nicholson's diaries recall Cocteau at the end of the War looking like "an aging cockatoo," excusing himself for never joining the Resistance...
...his are the impulses and hesitations of a Victorian undergraduate at the end of his tether...
...Asked about his view of Hamlet, Fiennes once stated, "There's a book by Ted Hughes about Shakespeare where he says that Hamlet is driving a truck toward the edge of a cliff with all of the characters in the play aboard...
...his subject lacked little except decency during the years of the Occupation...
...In that case revenge should be the answer, not suicide...
...But as the work at the Belasco proves, Fiennes has something compelling of his own to offer: white heat...
...Fiennes' last words onstage are "the rest is silence...
...How could it happen in a city this size...
...In a word, direction...
...With one honorable exception the play is tromped to death by the theatrical equivalent of circus elephants...
...These film roles revealed a wide range, yet they hardly suggested an actor capable of the greatest part in the English language...
...By then he was La Belle France's "industrious butterfly," and moral amnesia was a la mode...
...The critics loved it...
...Fiennes had neither the elegance of John Gielgud, nor the magnetism of Laurence Olivier, nor the thrumming egotism of Richard Burton, nor even, to cite a more recent Hamlet, the marquee value of Kevin Klein...
...that this too too solid flesh would melt," "O...
...The list of lapses in taste and wit is nearly as long as the play...
...His mother has taken a new husband—his father's brother, no less—and now the uncle controls the glory, the money and the power...
...The actor starred in many Cocteau plays for the Vichy French and their German colleagues...
...Long ago Leonie wanted to marry George, and she is still in love with him...
...His Melancholy Dane begins with his back to the audience, then turns around and explodes in fervor and anguish...
...Like the rest of the cast, he is dressed in late Victorian costume...
Vol. 78 • June 1995 • No. 5
