Sawyer Sparks Stratford 'Hamlet'

Steam-Kettle Hamlet. Feelings build up pressure inside him gradually until he blows his lid and there is a hot outburst. Then the process starts over again. In the over-all view of the role, this cycle emerges with too much regularity. After a while the graph of Sawyer's performance becomes too predictable. His farewell, however, is anything but predictable. He is the only Hamlet I have ever seen who, though stabbed and poisoned, remained standing on both legs right up to the very moment of death. I find that an admirable idea. One who recently contemplated suicide is fightingly reluctant to leave life behind.

Philip Bosco exhibits the clarity of diction we have come to expect of him, but it cannot be said that his King Claudius is one of his better portrayals. He does not seem at all royal. Murderer he may be, but Claudius is also an undeniably efficient administrator. In the Play Scene, he gives no signs of paying attention to what is going on until his cue to break the party up. This scene is, however, visually appealing. Five attendants stand about with ten-foot poles topped by simulated deer's heads, orange streamers, and flaming torches; the resulting Hallowe'enish atmosphere is appropriately scary.

Margaret Phillips appears to be awfully young for a queen with a 30-year-old prince as a son. The famous Closet Scene that they play together ought to rend the heart, but fails to; Sawyer must share the blame here. The Ghost (David Byrd) quite correctly makes a visible appearance in the scene; for, however mad Hamlet may be elsewhere, the Ghost is not a figment of Hamlet's imagination. The Ghost's entrances and exits are well handled in all three of his scenes, but his speech is too fast and impassioned, and lacks dignity.

Those who remember Earle Hyman's exemplary Horatio in the Festival's earlier production can only be disappointed by John Devlin's bland and colorless performance. Patrick Hines, who did Rosencrantz before, has moved up to Polonius. Given to excessive handclapping, he takes the easy way out and plays the role only for its comedy. Polonius is much more than the "foolish prating knave" Hamlet calls him.

Anne Byrd is successful with Ophelia's mad scenes, but her earlier ones have not been properly thought out. Her brother Laertes (Terence Scammell) is a good-looking adolescent, warm and bubbly, who gets into trouble only when he jumps into Ophelia's grave, where his ranting becomes completely unintelligible. (I'd like to see him try Romeo.) As the First Gravedigger, Rex Everhart extracts much from both the part and the ground, including, besides the two traditional skulls, an entire array of ribs, ulnas and femurs.

Todd Drexel's Osric, while dandyish, punctilious and well-oiled, manages for once to avoid being effeminate. Josef Sommer's handling of the First Player's ancient Roman narrative need not, I think, be quite so rhetorical.

Shakepeare's longest play has for this production been trimmed to a running time of two and three-quarter hours. Missing entirely are the Dumb Show (for which I have never understood the need anyhow, for the same thing is immediately run through again viva voce), together with Fortinbras, Cornelius and Voltimand. While Fortinbras' absence does not seriously affect the main line of the plot, it does--since he is a foil to Hamlet--mar the architectonic design of the whole. The cuts have led to a bit of tinkering with the lines.

John Duffy has composed dissonant incidental music, which unmistakably points up both the discordant atmosphere that permeates the castle at Elsinore and the distorted Mannerist style of the play itself. One of the numbers, which is heard several times, is a virtual paraphrase of the "Devil's Triumphal March" from Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat.

We have, in sum, a production that is far from continuously exciting. Yet producer Reed might have had much worse luck. For all its shortcomings, the show is a more satisfying venture than the miserable mishmash that Burton and Gielgud are currently mixed up in on Broadway; and Sawyer is now an actor who deserves careful watching.