VERSIONS OF SHAKEPEARE
win
be anxious to use tnem. So sImplified, tnis sounds a bit too much
likethe-house-that-Jack-built to have any but a fairly-tale truth, and,
of course, an art so carefully inbred would become too attenuated to
be worth preserving. This recipe for the fertilization of the arts is but
one of several with which it must be applied jointly; it cannot be
taken as a panacea.
At any rate, on Broadway today the process is only in its foetal
stage. No serious new techniques are yet being evolved from Shakes-
pearean productions; rather, tricks are being played on them. A spirit
of carnival excitement possesses these revivals, and an annual Shakes-
spearean World Series seems to have been written into the rules of
the game. Last year it was John Gielgud versus Leslie Howard with
Hamlet
as the ball park; this year it will be Orson Welles versus
Maurice Evans with
Henry IV, Part I.
(Mr. Evans on tour is doing
an occasional matinee with himself as Falstaff, and expects to bring
the play into town in the fall. Mr. Welles anticipates a spring pro-
duction with himself in the same role.) In these ostentatious rivalries
one can see the exploitation of Elizabethan plays in its most blatant
and harmless form. In the actual productions of GieIgud's
Hamlet
and Welles's
Caesar,
the exploiter, that is, the stunt artist, wears a
more successful disguise.
The two productions were poles apart in theory and in perform-
ance, but they met on common ground in their attitude toward the
material. In both cases there was a preoccupation with the forms of
the play at the expense, of course, of its meanings. Mr. Gielgud was
obsessed with the acting traditions of
Hamlet,
and a book recently
published by the Oxford University Press,
John Gieldgud's Hamlet
by Rosamond Gilder, makes this very clear. Mr. Gielgud himself has
a chapter on "Costumes, Scenery, and Stage Business," in which
he appears to have set up a virtual barricade of stage props between
himself and the lines of the play. He seems always more interested in
his differences or agreements with, say, Sir Henry Irving, as to whe-
ther or not a sword should be worn at a certain point, than in any
lessconspicuously physical feature of the production. His connoisseur-
ship of the fine points of past productions of
Hamlet
seduced him also
into a rather desperate hunt for new readings, new inflections in
familiar speeches. These were sometimes illuminating, more often
tortured and distracting. I do not mean to imply that Mr. Gielgud
had no conception of Hamlet. He did, but it was muffled by his
precious, strained, almost dandified manipulation of the baggage of
the production. His own performance was so decorated, so crammed
with minutiae of gesture, pause, and movement that its general out-
line
wa"
imperceptible to an audience.
The rococo style is of all styles probably the most inappropriate
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