Word: soliloquy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Among the many questions to be settled by any player is how much of Hamlet's madness is real and how much feigned. For Sawyer, a good deal is real. In the "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy he even becomes quite violently deranged. He does not give us the 18th-century melancholy aristocrat, or the 19th-century fragile neurasthenic. Nor does he recall Barrymore's Laborious Hamlet, or Olivier's Athletic Hamlet, or Weaver's Feverish Hamlet...
...little credit goes to Tharon Musser's inspired lighting throughout. The show opens with Richard delivering his celebrated soliloquy in pitch darkness. Only as it continues do the lights come up to reveal a steeply raked stage with an oppressive, gray two-level set, and Richard (Douglas Watson), with a big cross hung about his hypocritical neck, sitting on the floor until he begins to crawl like an animal. Only gradually are we aware of his ugly visage, hunched back, deformed right hand, and a misshapen leg that necessitates the strapping on of an artificial foot...
...opening night, Monette at first forced his rakishness and wit but after a fine soliloquy following the sonnet scene, his roguish skepticism seemed more natural. Miss Friend's controlled humor complemented her royal bearing. Rittenhouse looked nice...
What probably most moved the sisters was a raging soliloquy by a young actress named Diana Sands. Her lover has been murdered by a white man. Standing alone in a spotlight with the stage dark behind her, her pretty face turns visibly gaunt with agony as she hurls her love-born hate at God's "icy snow-white heaven! If He is somewhere around this fearful planet, if I ever see Him, I will spit in his face! In God's face! How dare He presume to judge a living soul . . . Oh, let me be pregnant...
Where directors David Mills and Edward Leavitt have taken liberties with the text, their additions are striking. As the watchman finishes his opening soliloquy and leaves the stage, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus burst through the curtain and look with surprise, with fear, finally with scorn on the beacon that tells them Agamemnon will be returning from Troy. While the king is being welcomed home by his queen, the herald who had earlier trumpeted his own joy at returning to Argos watches his wife turn away from him, a symbol of what will happen to Agamemnon...