Messing With the Bard

THE BIBLIOGRAPHY of critical works on Hamlet, they say, is twice as thick as the Warsaw telephone directory; and, on the average, a new study of the play has appeared every 12 days for the past 90 years. What's worse, these figures, instead of intimidating most directors, provoke them to wild excesses of interpretation. After all, they figure, Hamlet can take it.

The current production at the Boston Shakespeare Company (in rep with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) follows this creed wholeheartedly, quoting the above statistics in its program notes and approaching the play with an appetite for "deep meanings" that recalls the legend of the first-time viewer who exclaimed, "I don't know what everyone sees in this play--it's just a lot of cliched quotes strung together." A weighty interpretation is often provocative, even moving. But (the purist cries desperately), there must be a few subtleties of psychology or modernity that even Hamlet does not contain. And under the weight of speculation and experiment heaped on it by director Bill Cain, even Hamlet creaks.

The production's first big surprise comes with its Ophelia (Ursula Drabek), whom Cain sees not as a shrinking victim of cruelty and circumstance--the usual interpretation--but as a strong and independent woman. Creating this Ophelia takes imaginative line-reading, a good deal of un-Shakespearean byplay that never made it into a script, and some outright cheating--for instance, an extra exchange of "Ophelia!" and "NO!" as Polonius tries to force his daughter to tell the King about Hamlet's visit to her chamber.

Cain argues the existence of this intrepid rebel skilfully, somehow fitting all Ophelia's lines into the mold. This Ophelia never loses Hamlet's love but inexplicably goes mad when he is sent to England. To make this scenario convincing, though, Cain must stiflesome of the play's most exquisite and poisonous scenes--the ones in which Hamlet, supposedly mad, repudiates Ophelia and insults her. Cain relocates the first crucial Hamlet-Ophelia scene to the middle of the night, reckless of chronology--putting both players in nightclothes, reducing the acerbic dialogue to lovers' quips, and smothering unambiguous lines, such as "I loved you not," in amorous play and Drabek's long hair. Another scene, set during the play-within-a-play, is intentionally drowned out in the players' general clamor.

HAVING WANDERED from tradition with Ophelia, the production really takes off for parts unknown in its Hamlet. Cain describes the Prince in program notes as "always living at the limit of his destiny," a character who "stretches himself to and beyond his limits to make the world conform to his vision of it." Hamlet chooses once and for all to be rash, Cain says, in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy--which, incidentally, he reads as "To be, or not?...To be!"

Cain's main technical difficulty seems to be a tendency, after inventing an effective device, to continue using it until it has beaten the audience insensible. In the first courtroom scene, Polonius, at a signal from the King, begins to thump his stick on the floor. At each impact the courtiers clap in unison; gradually, the chamberlain accelerates his pounding till the room rings with hearty applause. All well and good; but, having established the procedures. Cain has Polonius repeat the gesture six of seven times before the scene closes, and at least four more times by the end of the play.

Worse, when Hamlet begins his "To Be" soliloquy, he is sitting in total darkness (and nightclothes) on the edge of the stage, a cigarette lighter in hand. "To be?" he asks, flicking on the lighter, "or," flicking it off, "not," flicking it on again, "to be?" Too much, even though the flame-play is brilliantly echoed at the end of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to illuminate a different line entirely.

Fortunately, most of the cast avoids the kind of overacting that could push Cain's overdirecting into disaster. Henry Wolonicz as Hamlet in particular surpasses the direction, creating a sympathetic and consistent prince even in the midst of Cain-created confusion.

Others fare less well, notably Sandra Shipley as Gertrude, who wanders about embracing every man who comes onstage, apparently pursuing the threads of a characterization that never solidifies into motivation. For Harvard audiences, an addition interesting to note is Courtenay Bernard Vance '82, recently of Leverett House and Black CAST, as the Player-King, whose confidence and power on stage easily matches that of his more seasoned colleagues.

EVERYTHING THAT FUMBLES and gets lost in Cain's laborious excavation of meanings from within is illuminated from without by the flip-side production. Tom Stoppard's wild and brilliant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, directed by Thomas Edward West.

In Stoppard's play "two of the most marginal characters in Shakespeare"--the pair of characterless spy-schoolfellows who conspire with Claudius against the Prince--occupy center stage, talking arguing and waiting while the action of Hamlet swirls incomprehensibly around them.

Coupling the two shows is by no means unheard of, and one director recently combined the two into a six-hour marathon. It is still a winning combination, carried out smoothly by the BSC. Most of the cast is identical for the two shows, with the disappointing exception of Hamlet himself, and selected routines evoke one show in the midst of another--notably, the first entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, in which the two, with more snap and individuality than such small parts would otherwise command, silently go through one of Stoppard's coin-flipping routines.

Likewise, the finest moment in Rosencrantz occurse when Hamlet, having rushed onstage (to R and G's usual befud-dlement), begins delivering a soliloquy to the theater's rear wall, and the parallel strikes home: When the Prince delivered that soliloquy in his own play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were upstage of him, seeing only his back. The audience has been placed entirely within the spies perspectives as minor characters within a larger show, summoned mysteriously from a place they cannot remember on a mission they cannot understand.

Upon this connection the rest of the play falls into place. And in the picture which it creates, Hamlet too takes on a clarity and reality than it could not realize if confined to Cain's relentless search for meanings in the unfathomably rich script. The "straight" interpretation of the Shakespeare that frames Stoppard's whimsy clashes oddly at times with the fanciful variations of Cain's direction, but no matter. This is what imaginative repertory ought to be--two plays that share everything and yet nothing, each distorting, reflecting, and illuminating the other.