Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Thursday, October 3, 1968 Pa e w7T E IC I A N D A L theatre music APA attempts sophisticated 'Hamlet'... U' Philharnioiiia: surprise! By DEBORAH LINDERMAN In what might be an effort to transcend the danger of producing a play like Hamlet-the danger being that so many people already know so many lines, how then do you make it fresh- the APA apparently decided that the best way was to get it over with as quickly as possible,. By this I mean that, possibly to avoid being stale, the current production aims instead for spoken understatement compensated by new dramatic effect. The result is a highly stagey, mannered; and withal dull Hamlet,- which, in an effort not to make a bad choice, chooses' nothing. You thus get the feeling that you are in Alice-in-Wonderland, and wish to say, oh that I had eyes that I could see such nothing. Probably with a determination not to "punch" the soliloquies, Ellis Rabb plays Hamlet with what first seems like a curious hypnotic blandness, which you gauge as a suppressed hysteria above to -burst. forth, but which in fact con- tinues at the same pitch throughout the play. There is very little modulation of effect, notably nothing which suggests any change in Hamlet's self-awareness, and after a tithe you feel you have been through all this before, as has Hamlet.; Rabb looks tormented, but the look and the pitch never change; there is no unleashing of Hamlet's angers, no rage beneath his ironies, no unruliness;, in his dissen'iblances. Perhaps this is meant to be an inter- pretation of a Hamlet,'very wordly, con- strained, civilized, in what is after all a high-toned court of such people; yet such controls would be bound to break at some point, and dissolve into rawer, discords. If this is sophisticated under- statement it is curious indeed when ap- . plied to such critical and melancholy, albeit "tried," lines as "From this time forth my thoughts be bloody or be noth- ing worth," or, "Thou wouldst not think how ill's all here about my heart," Indeed, for the production as a whole, the native hue of resolution is a bit sicklied oe'r, for it never achieves a style that makes clear the dramatist's intent for the play. Some rather firm conception of what it's all about and where it's going ought to be applied to a world of such confusions, both social and personal. The production conveys little sense of decay, of the quality of madness, of misplaced deaths and rt- uals, of any of the mixing of the modes of life on which the energy, vitality, and "nervousness" of Hamlet depend.. There are, however, two fine but fleet scenes which make dramatically clear the furius ironies on which Hamlet is. built: one shows the sense of jest-in- death where, in an excellent move, the grave-digger simply tosses Hamlet Yorick's skull. Another shows a most trenchant sense of antic-in-deadly- earnest as Hamlet deliberately dons one of the player's masks and stands taunt- ingly pefore his "parents." But mostly, because of the constrained and muted nature of the production, antic is only breezy and ironic brutality only morbid. Along these lines, Gertrude is fairly innocuous; at this stage in Shakespeare productions, there is no doubt about what's going on between Hamlet and his mother. But one of the snags of. the Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet has been that Gertrude is too shallow a figure for Hamlet's swollen emotions. Instead of the repeated body contact that we get here between them, a psy- chologically forceful Gertrude might, by mere felt presence, give dramatic credibility to the gap between Hamlet's turbulent and incapacitating fantasies and her part in stirring them. Another mannered quirk of this pro- duction is that Freud has been grafted onto Ophelia. She is played, not as a, delicate and fragile thing, but as one who has good motive for her madness. She spits at Gertrude the last of here "goodnight sweet ladies," and then, strangely, nurses a rag doll . at. her breast. The implication seems to be that this is the effigy- child she will never have by Hamlet now, things being what they are between him and his mother. This may be not implausible, but it shows up as a quirk in the production, perhaps because it is not dramatically prepared for by any good grounding with the "oedipal material." Cla udius achieves just the right tone, by siTply looking so much the "smiling, smiling, damned villain." Likewise,, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, perhaps because recent literature has elevated their status, deserve to be mentioned as alive simply in the way that they do so unctuously "smile and smile." Polonius has some lines that are so good that they have to be laughed at, but again delivers them only smoothly. The manner itself has some niceties and some falsities. The niceties are that the modern dress costuming turns out to be current bohemian equivalents of Elizabethan styles, so that although there are -no ruffs, we do not get a "daring" gray-flannel suit equation. And, the sets are happily without turrets and battlements, consisting of a "stone" wall backdrop, sometimes blacked out starkly in shadow,) and sometimes re- vealed floor to ceiling. The falsities, are that- there is an insistence on black as a prevailing motif, which is overstated, and seems to achieve only a requisite spooky atmos- phere without doing anything for any of the subtler opacities of the play. Worse, the ghost's appearance is accom- panied by amplified off-stage breathing. and the ghost himself looks like some tortured baroque narble statue trying to achieve the ethereal: its face is grey- ed and voice again dislocated offstage. People walk down the aisles to enter, for reasons which are dramatically in- tegral, as if they simply had no better place to come from.. And too many speeches are delivered in the most off- hand way: Hamlet, for exmple, speaks "what a piece of work is man" lying on his back, one booted foot crossing his knee. We thus get brief effect, artifically induced, and the violent ironies blunted' by a staginess too pretentious and culty. All in all, the monster has been decapi- tated before it would begin to bother people. By JIM PETERS I'd been told to be prepared, watch out, and not expect too much from the University Phil- harmonia. And so I was ready, sneer in hand, all set to cata- logue faults and shortcom- ings. But their concert last night at Hill Aud. under conductor Theo Alcantara turned out a big surprise, much to my pleas- ure. I was suspicious as soon as I saw the program; so much talk about the orchestra didn't seem quite believable with a wild bal- let score by Bartok scheduled to conclude the performance. There were, to be sure, prob- lems. Schumann's "Symphony; No. 4 in D Minor," which was the opener, ;gleamed with all the lustre and shine of a good per- formance, but under the bright surface lurked the common troubles of ensemble and in- tonation. The "langsam" 'introduction to the first movement blends very carefully into the fast sec- tion through a steady accelera- tion of tempo. The orchestra's too thin sound at the very be- ginning almost ruined Schu- mann's careful plan, but all of a sudden the power was there, and the movement finally got off the ground. I kept repeating to myself thoughts of ''wait and see,'' and the second movement seem- ed better. The pretty violin solo came off a little flat, however. The two final movements are linked by another complex bridge as in the beginning, and I felt that only the strict hand of the conductor kept things from, falling apart. But things weren't that bad. The sound was good; the fu- getto in the last movement, fol- lowed by a good strong finish, kept up the veneer. Maybe I'm just too swayed by overall sound and surface appearance, but' somehow I enjoyed it. Less could and shouldbe said about the second offering, San- uel Barber's . "Adagio for Strings." I found I took no notes on the performance, had no comments jotted down as I usually do there was a certain empty amorphous quality to their rendition which covered up the delicate intensity of the piece. Now I felt that maybe the opinions I had heard were true, but the final piece instantly re- versed my impressions. The dis- cordant, unrestrained "Miracul- ous Mandarin Suite" of Bela Bartok began, and all, at once things clicked into place. Bartok's music races then stops, grinds and stutters, blar- ing, shuddering discords and loud noises. More of the orchestra is re- quired here from the point of view of discipline and ensemble than in the other two pieces. And I didn't think the Phil- harmonia had it. But they certainly did. In the coup of the evening maestro Alcantara succeeded where I thought he never would, The music is heavily dominated by brass, and the players were ex- cellent. I want to mention par- ticularly the trombonists. The wild, urban setting seems to depend on the constant in- terplay between brass a n d strings, on the constant repeti- tion of sombre and ominous trumpet and trombone blasts. The work required of the trom- bone section in slides and runs and fast intricate playing makes many demands. Throughout the disjoined sec- tions, the orchestra wavered little in their intensity and control. There were some problems of coherence in the massed-forces portions, but the conductor kept most everything under control. At the beginning I wished the tempo had been somewhat fast- er, but even' this picked up soon enough. The Philharmonia is a young orchestra; most of the faces this year are new. They seemed to find the inspiration in the Bar- tok which was lacking in the Schumann and Barber pieces. But they've showed that they can be brilliant; and with a sure hand like Alcantara's to guide them, I'm confident their troubles will soon disappear. Ok __ i II UILD HOUSE-802 Monroe Friday, Oct. 4 NOON LUNCHEON 25c JAMES R. ROBERTSON Director of Residential College "Issues of Higher Education and the Campous" ... as Players wrestle with 'Jaccae '68' By MICHAEL ALLEN In some ways the University Players production of The Bacchae is exciting: there is a magnificent golden Dionysus, a bloody headless corpse and several fine frenzies reached by the Chorus. What's more there is some attempt to interpret the play in a modern idiom: there is a walky-talky, a flick knife, Teiresias wear§ dark glasses, :the; young Dionysus is disguised as. a mod and there,, is an effective mixture of hippie-pop, 'Ravi Shankar anl plain song. The Bacchae (directed by Richard Burgwin and Claribel Baird) is a difficult play. Did Euripides intend Pentheus to be a martyr for law and order, torn to pieces by the forces of anarchy? Or is Dionysus the good guy and Pentheus justly. punished for his 'impiety? Obviously neither of these ex- tremes is tenable, because b o t h_ Pentheus and DiQnysus are wrong; wrong, in the way they think and in the way they act. The first is stupidly arrogant and blasphemously rejects the divine (and Euripides makes very clear that Dionysus is truly divine however cruel or amoral he might be) and then follows' this up by readily agreeing to become a peeping Tom even if it means becoming a transvest- ite to do it (and there are, as critics have rushed to point out, pathological elements -in The' Bacchaae). But the god too is wrong: .he is motivated by rev nge. He knows it so that not only is Pentheus "justly' killed, but it is Agave and her sisters who kill him. It is the god's revenge for their NEGRO HISTORY, The history department's Ne- gro history series opens today with a lecture by Hollis Lynch of the University of Buffalo on "Some Aspects of Negro Ameri- can History." The lecture- will begin at 4:15 p.m. in Aud. A. having long ago slandered Sem- ele,'but, as Cadmus says, "Gods should be exempt from human passion's" -- like the lust for revenge. Dionysus' "justice" is seen at the end to be too dispro- portionate, too arbitrary, too cruel for us to accept it without question. Is this then a play built up on some straightforward dialec- tic between reason and emotion, or aristocratic scepticism and popular credulity, or order and those eruptive forces in us which surge up 'and destroy order? If so what sort of reconciliation or resolution does Euripides offer us? Obviously not an easy one. There is a dialectic, but it can- I not, be reduced to some one pair of abstract concepts, mainly be- cause of the mystery surround-' n g Dionysusand all he is and stands ,for. In some senses god and victim are alike: they de- fine each other, offset each other's limitations. Both are in- human; both are extremes. The one is too rational, the other too irrational (though this wasn't underlined at all in this produc- tion): both are contrasted to the Chorus which voices t h e tra'ditional norms, the norms which define, what is truly hu- man. Though the Chorus wor- ships Dionysus, at the end it is appalled by his ferocity. It is the mouthpieces of that group wisdom which Pentheus refuses, to listen to and which Dionysus is above: it is the con- scious which has come to terms with the subconscious forces of life, not allowing itself to be- come possessed by them l1i k e Agave, but not rejecting them utterly like her son. It knows how to be awed but not aband- oned. And this production had a good Chorus which did convey these things; one which also successfully coped with the limit- ations imposed by the stage and which broke up the group ode into' excited fragments, using song, dance,, chant and the rhy- thmic beating of feet and hands. It managed to break down the familiarity of the Greek con- vention and to convey a sense of group wisdom and group in- volvement, but it was not part of the mod element in the in- terpretation: in fact, the Chorus wasn't mod at all but neutral in its costuming, which was defin- itely not sexy or orgiastic, and ritualised in its gestures. Similarly with Agave (Clari- bel Baird), which was one of the finest individualhperformances last evening: she too seemed apart from any specifically mo- dern setting and her range and timing were exceptional. But the interpretation of Pentheus (William Hunt) and Dionysus (Michael Firestone) was not consistent with this. Their modishness failed to con- vince. Pentheusrwasa young right-wing bureaucrat a n d- Dionysus was a dissenting mod. But, it is these identifications, forced on us initially by the producer, which break the play into two. The result is that Pentheus and Dionysus were never satis- factorily related to the Chorus or Agave; they introduced an alien time scheme and a set of associations into the play which jarred with the rest of the pro- duction. In addition both actors, though effective at times, lack- ed sufficient variety: they both shouted too much and one got little sense of that great per- sonal animus which must exist between the two'!protagonists. Several of the minor parts were rendered well given the in- terpretational incongruity. Pen- theus' henchmen and the two messengers were fine and Teire- sias (James Hosbein) and Cad- mus (Robert McGill) were the two segile nincompoops they ought to be. This is an interesting per- formance: it is well worth see- ing. But its treatment of Euri- pides' central conflicts is not clear enough or consistent enough. Friday Evening GUILD DINNER For Reservations, Call 6 P.M. (at cost) 662-5189 Wednesday thru Saturday OCTOBER 2-5 I I- CINEMA1I BLOW-UP Dir. Antonioni with David Hemmings Vanessa Redgrave THREE SHOWS 7-9-11 Fria-Sat.---Oct: 4-5 Aud. A 75c ID req. I { RONNIE r wROSS and CAROLE WALLER : Iand the 4M CIRKUS Appearing at the 314 South 4th Avenue 761-3548 Se:'Li-ng Dinner 3 P.M. until 1 A.M. OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK from 3 P.M. to 2 A-M. ENTERTAINMENT plus FINE FOOD Pa s m m a S&ZA a 1ba -ba ait- a I UNIVERSITY PLAYERS with Clarihel B. Baird 8:00 P.M. Trueblood Theatre Box Office Open Daily at 12:30 DIAL 5-6290 i the PAULNEMAN MAjtim of ~jij4 r achel. rachel .__ ______ _ _...,, a_ v__ .__y ___ _. _t_ _r.._.. ..___.._._.:._. TODAY AT 1,3,5, 7, 9 P.M. GARGOYLE wwwwomi I PRESENTS Thursday and Friday LA TERRA TREMA (THE EARTH TREMBLES) Sicilian fishermen struggle against the oppressive forces of nature and society. Winner-Venice Film Festival (1948) Voted one of the 10 best films of all time by Sight and Sound (1962) 7:00 & 9:45 P.M. Architecture 662-8871 75c Auditorium BELA! TOGETHNER! SHOCKING! aI r1 I U Returnto the Womb Remember the guy with the funny things in his neck and the big feet? And remember the guy, with the long teeth, who was always thirsty for the red stuff and afraid of the daylight? Well, they're both back. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. "FRANKENSTEIN" and "DRACULA," in the two original 1930's versions. SO DROP IN, Issue I ON SALE U-. r c cUr.. nn c I E .b3 ' I E