Word: hamlets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
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...