Willy Loman at Elsinore

By T.E. Kalem

HAMLET

by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Hamlet is a loser. He loses his father, his crown and the woman he loves. His university chums betray him, his sanity all but deserts him, and at 30, he dies by the poisoned tip of a rapier.

Hamlet is a knowing loser. It is the difference between accident and fate that makes a destiny tragic, and Hamlet recognizes that difference. This militated against Richard Burton a few seasons ago because Burton is viscerally a born winner. It works against Stacy Keach, who seems by temperament to be very much the extravert.

Keach's Hamlet, in the current New York Shakespeare Festival production at Central Park's Delacorte Theater, is not the brooding surgeon of his agonized soul, not a raging, grieving mourner at the yawning grave of all existence. Instead he is a kind of Danish Willy Loman. He would like to be well-liked at Elsinore. He barely sniffs the stench of corruption at the court but is baffled by the toughness of the territory, as if it were New England. And like Willy Loman, he is virtually humorless, unable to season his despair or get a proper perspective on himself. Because he is an extravert, Keach is weakest in the soliloquies, good in all the social scenes, the guying of Polonius, and brilliant in the duel with Laertes, which for feral second-to-second menace has never been better staged.

In Hamlet, the supporting players have no choice but to be supporting players, yet in this production one sometimes wonders if they are supporting Hamlet. As Claudius, James Earl Jones has evolved an eccentric interpretation, bubbling with some roguish interior humor and bursting into toothy, malicious glee. Given a riding crop, he might be the head of an old Hollywood studio rather than the ruler of a realm. An oddly placid Colleen Dewhurst makes Gertrude seem more the painted than the panting queen. Barnard Hughes' Polonius is the traditional chalk-dust didactician, but Kitty Winn's mad scene does not come a moment too soon for an Ophelia who makes one wonder what Hamlet ever saw in her.

And yet . . . and yet. Director Gerald Freedman has done something that redeems even his most wayward players. He trusts the play, hews cleanly to the text, and the god of playwrights again performs the dramatic miracle that is forever Hamlet.

T.E. Kalem

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