Word: caine
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...