Theatre
Timber !
By BAMBER GASCOICNE
IN the same week as Zeffirelli's superb pro- duction of Romeo and Juliet ends its run at the Old Vic up pops Peter Hall's version at Strat- ford : a satyr to Hyper- ion. It is hard to believe that both productions were of the same play.
A director of Shakespeare, unless he is lucky enough to have an audience which is new to the play, must find a way of making the play new to the audience. This doesn't mean that he must produce a string of gimmicks or a topsy-turvy interpretation, but that he must give action and character such life that the words will arise from the situation as naturally as if they had never before been spoken. In a good Shakes- pearian production one marvels how well the action fits the words; in an even better one, how well the words fit the action.
Excepting the impossibly pre-Raphaelite finale —Tryst at the Tomb—Zeflirelli made almost every line of every scene seem fresh. Peter Hall makes almost none of them so. In tempo, tone and implication his direction is either obvious or inexplicable. His cast, perhaps as a result, seemed on the first night strangely removed from the events. They played as though they had heard, two minutes before the curtain went up, that war had been declared. Brian Murray, having taken over as Romeo from Zia Mohyeddin at only a few days' notice, can hardly be blamed for the dullness of his performance. Dorothy Tutin's Juliet has great charm but lacks the sweet excite- ment of first love at first sight. As Friar Law- rence, Max Adrian, so superb as Jaques in As You Like It, loses too much when he has to sup- press his comic personality, and Ian Barmen's idea of Mercutio's banter is to shout the lines like a town crier. Relief comes from Edith Evans's comfortable Nurse and from Newton Blick, the most reliable member of the company, as Capu- let. The silliness of some of the minor characters, including a quarrelsome Tweedledum of a servant with a saucepan on his head, must presumably be laid at Peter Hall's door.
I usually like Sean Kenny's use of wood in his designs. This time it is ludicrous. In the middle of a maze of stray pillars and elegant painted masonry a lean wooden staircase streaks upwards with bare planks and hollow treads. The timber has become nothing but a signature tune. Kenny's idea for the Capulet family vault is fascinating—the bodies of Juliet's kinsmen are stacked above each other like bottles in a wine rack—but the edifice itself stands in the set like a pill-box in an ornamental garden. Confusion is added by Peter Hall's indecision as to whether or not to use the set realistically. At one point Romeo walks straight through the wall over which he has just so laboriously climbed.
Previous page
