Word: cains
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
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...