Word: ophelia
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...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...
...volatile tangle of will, thought, word and deed. Hamlet is also the first supremely self-conscious hero to tread the stage. This is where Richard Pasco's failure is most manifest. He portrays a computer's Hamlet, mechanically feeding himself punch cards marked Father's Ghost, Ophelia, Laertes, Horatio, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and responding mechanically to them. His co-players do not perceptibly help by acting like crumpled punch cards...
...that kind of versatility. But her age is unimportant. Katharine Cornell calls her "the best young actress I know," and Helen Hayes, who is trouping this season with APA, says that she is "the Joan of Arc of the old pros." Sir Laurence Olivier, who invited her to play Ophelia in the London première of the National Theater Company in 1963, and also directed her in Uncle Vanya, says that she played "the most beautiful scene I've ever seen in my life...