Word: pompey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Only once does the BSC seize the play's dark side and expose it to the audience. As Pompey the whoremaster (Mark Cartier) gives the audience a tour of the riff-raff in the prison, he opens trapdoors in the stage floor which serve as cell doors--and long arms reach out, grabbing for him, trying to drag him down. It's a good bit of stage business, and it's also an eerie picture of the starved world of Measure for Measure, sucking its inhabitants into the abyss...
...each other from across the pool, their passions mingling in the sea-air, their bodies metaphorically pulled under by the whimsical undertow of Fortune; Cleopatra viciously dunking the poor schlemiel who swims out with the news of Antony's political marriage to Caesar's sister Octavia; Antony, Caesar, and Pompey carousing drunkenly on the eve of their battle, chucking each other off the raft with merry abandon; a broken, wasted Enobarbus sinking from his skeletal ladder into the shadowy waters, his body clutching at bones as it gently bobs on the surface...
During a pitching, drunken revel aboard Pompey's ship, an infantry officer watches the rulers of the ancient world reeling around the deck and yearns that the earth were "on wheels." That is very nearly what Director Peter Brook has achieved in his whirling, boisterous version of Shakespeare's long, intractable tragedy, which opened last week in Stratford-upon-Avon. The play is not very often produced: exclusive of intermission, it runs 3% hours and with 42 scenes is as sprawling as a map of the Roman Empire...
Peter Stein as a bawd gives one of the best performances of the evening. He had oily charm and a comic ability to keep his head when those about are losing theirs. Stein's Pompey is an ordinary fellow but for the faint stench of evil about him. He is funny without being simple...
...tart with a loaf of bread, and the kneeing of an officer in the groin by a brothel-keeper. Ronald Frazier is amusing enough as Elbow, the malapropistic constable (a type better managed in the Dogberry of Much Ado About Nothing); and so is the clowning tapster Pompey of Rex Everhart, who has been doing such roles for the AST off and on since its first season. Gene Nye turns the disreputable Froth into a stuttering nincompoop that is vastly overdone; measure. Mr. Nye, please...