Word: shakespeareanly
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...British are not notably enthralled with Lyndon Johnson. But when iconoclastic Director Joan Littlewood brought Barbara Garson's Mac-Bird to town, the critics threw every pan in the kitchen. After seeing the pseudo-Shakespearean parody about Johnson and the death of President Kennedy, the London Daily Mail's critic growled: "Immeasurably witless rubbish." The London Times sniffed: "It is pointless to get too indignant. The production successfully torpedoes what was already a fragile and leaky craft...
Setting the play inside an insane asylum, with the actors as a palsied herd of flustered souls, is the first and most grievous wrong. It is a commonplace of Shakespearean criticism to say that some of the characters in Twelfth Night act so cruel that they seem insane, but that is no license to turn the play into a cut-rate Marat-Sade. To interpret the play that way is to say, "Be calm, audience, real people are nice. You have to be bonkers to be vicious." The audience should not be allowed to rest so easy...
These people are from Measure for Measure and they won't put you in garden party spirits. (Neither will the numerous jokes that only a Shakespearean scholar can chortle over, nor the soliloquies, especially if you are secretly ambivalent about soliloquies.) But Measure for Measure isn't a daisies, quick laughter, jasmine tea affair. It's menacing. Daniel Seltzer's production wasn't menacing enough. We didn't feel oppressed as Angelo, Claudio, the studs, even Isabel fell under the repressive law. So the transformation at the end of the play from life under law to life under grace wasn...
...consistent tone can be imparted to a play that juxtaposes the somber drum roll of the Kennedy funeral cortege with such inane Shakespearean mutations as "Oh whine and pout/ That ever I was born to bury doubt." But MacBird's basic flaw is that Playwright Garson is a frivolous, scattershot satirist who has no moral vision of her own to counterpose whatever might be regarded as evil in her characters. She has written an apolitical play in which all choices seem silly. The Ken O'Duncs are presented as chilly, ruthless opportunists; MacBird is a mixture of corn...
...mark of distinction is not automatically stamped on every British theatrical export. The Bristol Old Vic, which made its Broadway debut with two Shakespearean plays last week in the midst of a four-month tour of the U.S. and Canada, is, as its name implies, a provincial repertory troupe. The company tends to substitute energy for excitement; it gives drama the steady, dependable joggle of a railroad trip, instead of scaling peaks or plumbing abysses. The actors read their lines with unfaltering clarity, but they seem less well acquainted with the minds and hearts of the characters they are playing...