Word: ophelia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...soliloquies are delivered as if Hamlet were in desperate need of geriatric drugs. Rabb is too monotonous for eloquence and too weary for anger. The rest of the cast is almost uniformly inept. Horatio is played like a lost Boy Scout, Gertrude as a matronly simp and Ophelia as an epileptic. Only Richard Easton's Claudius has the dignity of a solid stage presence, and Philip Minor's First Gravedigger has wry antic authority. In view of his acting and directing, perhaps Ellis Rabb should really be listed as the First Gravedigger...
Dressed in a scruffy black cardigan and tights, Williamson has set his emotional barometer for a hurricane from the beginning. He is tuned to his own internal weather, and to hell with the climate outside. He has already slept with his Ophelia, and in the "Get thee to a nunnery" scene he blatantly snuggles in the horizontal with her, defying Polonius to catch them in the act. Few actors can be more sexually insinuative in speech than Williamson, though in Hamlet's dirty, double-meaning banter with Ophelia ("country matters?") the voice is not that of a suitor...
...surface, Stoppard has devised an astoundingly clever theatrical trick. We see only the few scraps of Hamlet that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern see. Since they see so little, Hamlet, Claudius, Ophelia and the rest become merely bit parts in Stoppard's play. We see a mammoth tragedy from the worst possible vantage point, and what little of Shakespeare remains in the play seems ridiculous and funny in this context...
...punks in The Incident (TIME, Nov. 10), brings to the title role an imaginative boisterousness not unlike his superior work in that film; Ralph Waite is a dashingly demagogic Claudius. Anita Dangler is a fluttery flibbertigibbet of a Gertrude, while April Shawhan is a sexy, miniskirted Ophelia. Gait MacDermot's pounding rock background seems at least as appropriate to this version of the play as the gentle pleasing of a lute might have been in a 17th century production. Papp's new Hamlet will not crowd traditional stagings off the board, but it deserves credit for trying...
...instant she looked like a puckish milkmaid, the next like Ophelia going mad. The music was Schumann's cello concerto, a rapturous, heart-on-the-sleeve piece that was clearly intended to sear, not soothe, the savage breast. The cellist was Britain's Jacqueline Du Pré, who performed last week in Manhattan with Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic. It was a performance to be seen as much as heard, for Du Pré couldn't sit still a minute...