Word: ophelia
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...effective production, effective largely because Gielgud never makes fetishes out of his innovations. He puts costumes on his actors when their absence might be confusing--the priest who buries Ophelia is surpliced and Osric carries his elaborate hat. The "play within the play" is performed in costume. Hamlet sports a jersey and trousers, if not a cloak, of "inky black...
...John Callum's Laertes is simply a stupid, shallow young man. Claudius slaps down the rebellion that Laertes leads to the palace and lectures him like a boy, and the depth of Ophelia's passion at her father's death shows up his foolishness. He stabs Hamlet not as a desperate act on the part of an honorable man, but as the venal act of a fool. The textual validity of the interpretation is somewhat questionable; Hamlet, after all, thinks of Laertes as a "very noble youth." Callum, however, makes a consistent and plausible character...
...Linda Marsh's Ophelia undergoes a miraculous transformation midway through the play. During most of the first act she is positively embarrassing, her diction sloppy and her affected gestures worse. But with the "mad scene," her acting undergoes as sharp a transformation as her appearance. She comes onstage with eyes bloodshot, voice quavering and she throws herself upon Horatio, unbuttoning her blouse, pulling up her skirt, then writhing on the stage she gives vent to the sexual impulses her father had ordered her to chain up. It is a powerful...
...books. Each weds his own deepest inadequacy, his for love, hers for learning. In an exquisitely modulated performance, Barbara Loden never mimics Marilyn Monroe so far as to mock her, and when the self-destructive ordeal of drink and barbiturates begins, she becomes as pitiably touching as the drowning Ophelia...
...Ophelia has men in her madness. In her last scene, she flings her dress up over her head with sexual ardor before a group of soldiers. "This vivid contrast to her initial purity," says Zeffirelli, "shows that in the mind of every middle-class well-bred girl the thought of sex exists in its wildest form...