Word: ophelia
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...Council Scene, I wonder whether Hamlet would really remain sitting on the floor when speaking with the Queen. But later there no doubt that Hamlet is feigning madness--a topic of endless controversy over the generations. Gilbert (without collaboration from Sullivan) wrote a delightful burlesque of Hamlet in which Ophelia runs through a host of theories and concludes. "Hamlet is idiotically sane With lucid intervals of lunacy...
...Basil Decongestant and Lady Wilmaslipshow cavorted on stage, be-fogged alums and sotted students groped with one another, threw rice and generally had a hell of a time. So what if they couldn't hear Captain Comic, aka Lord Clark of Kent, aka Chad Hummel or even less from Ophelia Thise, played by Michael Anderson, who is mirable dictum, president of Hasty Pudding Theatricals. And may be there did seem to be two too many dancers on the stage all the time. Who, after all, really cares...
...rights, this play, like Antony and Cleopatra, should have a double title-something like Macbeth and Wife or Two on the Heath-for Lady Macbeth is fully as important as her husband. Hamlet can get along with a second-rate Ophelia, but if the actress who plays Lady Macbeth is inadequate, or just barely good, the entire play suffers accordingly. That, in brief, is what is wrong with Nicol Williamson's production, which opened at Manhattan's Circle in the Square last week. Andrea Weber may be a gifted young actress, but she is definitely...
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...