Word: ophelia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...March pre-dawn, staring into the Charles like derelicts trying to drown the pain of too many lonely nights. Elaine decided to jump first. She dived into the current, came bobbing up out of instinct, and waved to the four on the bridge. Her hair swirled around the Ophelia in denim as the eddies carried her out of sight...
...test of passion be blindness, then [Virginia's] affections were not very deeply engaged." Virginia sharpens that point in the play: "Life and a lover she thought. It does not scan." For Woolf, her work was her life. While she would drown herself as pitiably as Ophelia, she could not drown her vocation in Vita...