Shakespeare's Ages of Man

Sir John Gielgud's Shakespeare's Ages of Man is a solo recital of some thirty speeches from the plays and about a dozen sonnets--which are read entire. I suspect that the production was invented as a vehicle for making money.

Moneymaking enterprises are not necessarily to be scorned, especially when they involve one of the two or three greatest Shakespearean actors of the day. But I think Ages of Man would draw a mixed verdict whatever its origins. Any such jumble must inevitably be at once too much and too little.

The program is divided into three parts: youth, manhood, and old age. Thus Romeo's speeches, Polonius's advice, and some of the cautionary sonnets go in part one, and the final section includes the deaths of Romeo, Lear and Clarence, among others.

If the division was intended to give the program some sort of unity, the effort was half-hearted and doomed. Readings by a single, gifted actor can be effective indeed, as others in the Great Players' Series have demonstrated. But not when the material is the most famous--and the most telling--bits and snatches of Shakespeare. Richard II abdicates, and before his robes are fairly off, Hamlet is making plans. Romeo dies with a kiss on his lips, steps modestly back amid applause, and reads a sonnet. To juxtapose great speeches is to pretend that their greatness is sham, and give weight to the Puritan notion that the theatre is only a dirty trick.

But if desecrations of this kind--to use his own description--must be done, Gielgud is the man to officiate. Everyone should see Gielgud; if one cannot see him in a play, better to see him read the Sunday Times than not see him at all.

When he first comes on stage, he is disappointing; without makeup and costumes, he looks like Arthur Murray. But he gives each fragment a life of its own--which is one reason they seem so wrong together. As he changes from Hamlet to Polonius, from Hotspur to Richard II to Lear, his voice and his very face change with the part.

So go and see him. He can catch and hold his audience with each role in turn. But he can leave it only the memory of a man in a dinner-jacket on a bare stage.