Word: papp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This play by Jakov Lind, an Austrian Jew who now lives in London, is a brutal, bitter, boring and unsubtle savaging of German-or is it Western?-culture. Fortunately, it is also a brilliant production, supervised by Central Park's old Shakespeare wallah, Joseph Papp...
...wheeled coffin. He looks scornfully at King Claudius and Queen Gertrude sleeping in a bed near by, yanks the blankets from them, climbs out of the coffin. "O! that this too too solid flesh would melt," he moans. Thus begins the strange version of Hamlet that Director Joseph Papp presented last week at his Public Theater in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. In his years as producer of New York's open-air Shakespeare summer festival in Central Park, Papp has proved his ability to do the Bard straight. This time he does Shakespeare free and fancy...
This kind of tampering with the text can easily be put down as theatrical sacrilege, for which there is considerable precedent in the annals of performed Shakespeare. But Papp has clearly made a serious attempt to demonstrate the viability of Shakespeare's insights into men's weaknesses in terms of modern theater. His Hamlet is a gathering of fantasies, envisaged by the leading players. The fantasies seldom interlock; emotions are inner, private and unshared, until they clash in a series of brutal, shattering collisions. Shakespeare's language remains undisturbed in this version, but Papp's imaginative...
...Papp's vision of the play is a daring one; he has communicated some, but not all of it, to his cast. Martin Sheen, recently seen as one of the 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...
...YORK CITY. Richard Burton's Hamlet will continue to run for two more weeks on Broadway; during its extended run, Burton's standby, Robert Burr, played Hamlet for Joseph Papp's free Shakespeare group in Central Park in a production that, with Julie Harris as Ophelia, outdistanced the one on Broadway in nearly every respect save the performance of Burton himself. Papp's group is still doing a successful, broad-laugh presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream from a collapsible mobile theater touring the five Boroughs* (TIME, July 10), and at present in Central...