• U.S.

Theater: Mocking Bard

3 minute read
TIME

The 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.

Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s sour comedies. It is a play about honor that is marked by the lack of it: the lovers are mostly lechers, and purity is mocked as pretense. Concerned about the state of public morals, the Duke of Vienna selects Angelo, a man of seemingly flinty virtues, to take full power over the state. He enforces the laws with undeviating severity while the Duke masquerades as a lowly friar. In a fury of purity, Angelo orders a young gentleman, Claudio, to be executed for fornication. Claudio’s sister Isabella, a novice in religious habit, pleads with Angelo to show mercy. Suddenly his puritanical iciness melts into lust, and he offers Isabella her brother’s life in exchange for her body. Through one of Shakespeare’s wrong-girl-in-the-right-bed ploys, Isabella preserves not only Claudio’s life but her own honor.

Time has not been entirely kind to Measure for Measure. The modern temper finds more humor than honor in struggles to preserve chastity. Moreover, there is something unappealing about nearly every character in the play. Though it has a happy ending, Measure for Measure is not a happy play. It is one of those dramas in which humanity seemed to raise a stench in Shakespeare’s nostrils.

Hamlet, as the theatrical cliché has it, is the play in which the title actor cannot fail. It might be truer to say that he can never wholly succeed. The part demands the range of a concert virtuoso, for Hamlet is both gentle and brutal, passionate and detached, slow to act yet violent in action—a volatile tangle of will, thought, word and deed. Hamlet is also the first supremely self-conscious hero to tread the stage. This is where Richard Pasco’s failure is most manifest. He portrays a computer’s Hamlet, mechanically feeding himself punch cards marked Father’s Ghost, Ophelia, Laertes, Horatio, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and responding mechanically to them. His co-players do not perceptibly help by acting like crumpled punch cards.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com