THEATRE
Giggling Prince
HILARY SPURLING
Hamlet (Stratford-on-Avon) A Midsummer Night's Dream (Regent's Park Open Air Theatre) Trevor Nunn's production of Hamlet is set by Christopher Morley on a bare stage in black and white and monochrome. The players' dresses—blue and orange, green and scarlet on their gaudy painted stage—are the first and only colours in this production. A flood of bleached and weathered wooden boards shelves steeply up to meet a white, sloping, slatted roof. A narrow wall of black slats at the back divides the two. Trapped between the tilted roof and floor, boxed in on either side by high, black, slatted walls, is a great airy empty space: Mr Morley has built not so much a stage-set as a theatre, a receptacle to hold a play. One has the same feeling of expectancy in Greek or Roman amphitheatres, and presumably Shakespeare's audience had it too in the vast, colonnaded wooden theatres, open to the skies and seating as many as three thousand people, of Elizabethan London.
So that what is after all an abstract setting —abstract in the sense that it eschews repre- sentation or illusion and explores instead the formal properties of light and line and mass —has also that freedom, so dearly bought in the pictorial arts this century, to draw on wider sources than those of the immediate past. A strip of harsh, white light stretching across the front of the stage against the formless void behind suggests readily enough the dark corridors, the arrases and peep- holes of Elsinore; three figures move steal- thily in the shadows before dawn, silhouetted from beneath in a beam of light which strays upwards through the trap-door open- ing on the castle roof, in the play's first scene.
And, for ceremony and spectacle, this setting has a splendour which—precisely be- cause it escapes entirely the painted scenery and chiaroscuro lighting of nineteenth cen- tury theatre—stretches back to an older, more rhetorical tradition: light spills down on the massed court, standing shoulder to shoulder and perfectly motionless in heavy, white, furred robes, and on Claudius's coarse, staring face as he delivers his first speeches in the tones, at once unctuous and hectoring, of a politician at a public meet- ing. Hard to convey the magnificence and the menacing bleakness of this scene or, for that matter, the electric brilliance of the final duel (a triumph even by this company's stringent fighting standards) between Ham- let and Laertes, whipping over the stage in great arcs and arabesques between courtiers posed massively, like boulders, on a bare, chalky ground.
But this gleaming austerity is not simply beautiful to look at; it also provides a setting in which the text itself shines with rare clar- ity and -force. And by the same token, whatever is trite or feeble in the present pro- duction—the regulation crucifix, the hero stripped to his jock-strap for no apparent reason, all the familiar temptations which the current regime at Stratford finds it so difficult to resist—seems peculiarly pointless; a number of weak performances in an ensemble by no means as strong as it might be are cruelly exposed. Strength, however; flourishes mightily in this setting: David Waller's Claudius, a gross and fulsome lecher, describes a formidable descent from the rich hypocrisy of his opening speeches to the first thin taste of fear; from the scene in which, lurching slightly and reach- ing for the bottle, he plots murder with Laertes to his last, hollow scene with Ger- trude (a marvellously detailed performance by Brenda Bruce) in which pride, power, lust even have turned to ashes in his mouth. Sebastian Shaw's Polonius—a creature so accustomed to skirt treachery and pain that in the end nothing in him stirs except his mouth, issuing endless bulletins on the vacancy within—is a performance as humor- ous as it is bleak; Barry Stanton's grave- digger, manoeuvring a scrap of cheese towards the empty grave to demonstrate his rigmarole about the drowning man, is a master of the ancient art of one-upmanship.
But perhaps the most enchanting thing in this production is Helen Mirren's Ophelia: a quaint, dependent child, her grasp on the outer world none too firm to start with and beginning already to desert her as, crouched alone on a single, long, white pew which runs almost the width of the stage, she waits helplessly, like an animal too terrified to bolt, in the trap set for Hamlet. It is a bril- liant stroke to set the nunnery scene at the back of a church, so that Hamlet's prayer, his frenzy, Ophelia's mute hysteria beat on one another in a curiously shifting atmos- phere of real and sham piety. Miss Mirren's mad scenes—and indeed her funeral, for seldom was a corpse so chilly lifeless—are small masterpieces, both in detail and for their shapeliness and rhythm.
Alan Howard's Hamlet is less happy: this is a performance which promises, by fits and starts, rather more than it eventually de-
livers. His grave, withdrawn dejection in the first scene sets him most delicately apart from this blatantly false court; his 'To be or not to be' is beautifully done; and he has throughout moments of a grim, hard, desola- tion. But elsewhere he falls back on a kind of childishness—tremulous giggles, little hops and skips, an almost coy pathos at the end of the closet scene—which is both tiresome in itself and wretchedly at odds with the text; for, whatever one may see in Hamlet, it is scarcely possibly to play him as a numbskull or even as a woebegone and wil- ful adolescent. Hence perhaps the curious coldness of this production which, for all its lucidity and grandeur, seldom rises to the passionate climaxes of the play: a defect which, as has happened so often at Strat- ford, will no doubt be remedied with time.
Meanwhile, in Regent's Park, one meets an altogether staider class of person in A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Richard Digby Day and designed with re- markable vulgarity by Kit Surrey and Mark Negin: Titania in a bikini and a blue rinsed wig, her fairies dressed chiefly in somewhat flashy flowers, a Puck who frisks archly about the stage like Peter Pan in a poor year, demonstrate rather clearly the need for the kind of revolution practised by the RSC. But Darryl Kavann's Oberon, and most espe- cially Muriel Barker's louche, lean, sharp First Fairy, suggest something of the malev- olent inhumanity of this Athenian wood; Trevor Peacock's Bottom and Ronnie Stevens's Quince make an engaging pair of bullies, and Peter Whitbread's Theseus is an endearing host. This is, in short, a solid and more or less dependable production, whose chief pleasures are the tart and comical exchanges between the Hermia and Helena of Felicity Kendal and Annabel Leventon.
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