Word: shakespearean
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Jamie Hanes portrays a strong, if unspectacular Tom. He delivers best in Tom's narrator role, reflecting over the poetry of his own sentences, speaking softly, a clear ribbon of regret winding through the words. But at tims, Hanes' voice rings too smoothly, Shakespearean in tone, stagy. Tom is a writer, not an actor, and the immense presence that Hanes gives his character is oddly wrong, too smug, too fulsomely gesturing, too much exterior acting. It is a terrific role, at once subtle and obvious, but the actor's energetic anger, bitterness and sense of adventure must come from deep...
Across the street, at the home of Shakespearean scholar Harry Levin, Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature, no one answered the door. Only a small bowl of treats stood outside. As Macbeth said. "This supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good...
Lebow rears his tall bulk up, out of the general confusion at ground level, and almost manages to clear away the smoke Cain's direction pours forth. This is a confident Lear, a rarity considering how many critics believe the role nearly unplayable. Lebow's accomplished command of the Shakespearean line never falters under the unreasonable demands of his role; try shouting "vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts" sometime, for example, and see how easy...
...Lear leaves you with a lot of questions about the place of innovation on the Shakespearean stage. No one would argue for a theater of sterility, shunning all new ideas as "deviations from the author's intentions." But when you have a competent group of performers, and at least one actor of stature and brilliance who can use a play like Lear as a personal vehicle, it seems a cheat to squander the resources on half-baked ideas, directorial interpretations that aren't followed through, and "innovations" that clash with each other. Cain should either have moved in and molded...
...other Shakespearean play has elicited such a range of interpretation and evaluation. If Agate declared it one of his "unfavorite" plays in the canon, Dover Wilson thought it Shakespeare's greatest work, Wilson Knight and Henry James placed it at the top of English literature, and Quiller-Couch proclaimed it the supreme work in all literature. For me, it has unsurpassed moments, but as a whole ranks below The Winter's Tale among the four late romances. Everyone agrees that the play means more than it says, but what that meaning is remains a bone of vigorous contention...