Toppled King/Torn Mind

By T.E.Kalem

The enterprising Brooklyn Academy of Music (TIME, Jan. 14) is currently enlivening the borough with a four-month British Theater Season. With a flare of trumpets, a skirl of bagpipes and a welcoming speech from London-born, Brooklyn-bred New York City Mayor Abraham Beame, the Royal Shakespeare Company inaugurated the season with Richard II and Sylvia Plath.

It is the U.S. debut for the R.S.C., which ranks second only to the National Theater (originally the Old Vic) in prestige among British repertory companies. Some London drama critics even prefer it to the older troupe. Playgoers' expectations were high, perhaps too high. While these two idiosyncratic productions have not precisely dashed those expectations, they have perceptibly dampened them.

RICHARD II. This is not one of Shakespeare's master plays, and it has no titan of a hero at its epicenter. But it can be a wonderfully engrossing drama, and it does contain grand, stirring and passionate speeches. In this presentation the play is reduced to a tepid tempest in a cracked teacup.

Richard is a vain monarch who laughs at the discomfiture of his nobles, ravages their estates, and surrounds himself with fops and flatterers. Too late he finds himself deserted and his angry lords allied to his enemy Bolingbroke, who marches triumphantly across England to secure Richard's abdication and his crown.

To personify Richard's weakness, Ian Richardson plays the King as a kind of drag queen. This is disastrous. The epicene approach robs the audience of the pity it should feel for Richard's painful self-knowledge in adversity, and mutes his ringing defense of the divine prerogatives of kingship: "The breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord."

In a play laced with some of Shakespeare's most musical poetry, Richardson delivers his lines with inflexible metronomic monotony. Only Richard Pasco as Bolingbroke has a regal voice and bearing. He and Richardson switch roles at every other performance, but Pasco does not alter the effete interpretation of the King.

In a production that is stilted, mannered and ludicrously stylized, Director John Barton appears to have rummaged through Peter Brook's wastebasket for directorial inspiration while scanting Shakespeare's genius.

SYLVIA PLATH. Romantic cults seem to spring up rapidly round poets who die young. An element of thanatophilia enters into the worship of such poets. It is somehow felt that they were purified by dying and spared the physical and moral corruption to which ordinary mortals are subject.

Think of Shelley, who died by drowning and whose heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by his fellow romantic, Trelawney. Or of Dylan Thomas, a sacrificial votary of drink (Olympian draughts, of course). Since the winter day in 1963 when Sylvia Plath turned on the gas and laid her head in her kitchen oven, she has become a goddess of the thanatophiliacs.

Latterly, she has also become a symbolic figure to women's liberationists, who think of her as a victimized woman. Plath was broke and alone with her two small children when she died.

But the poems show that morbidity had always been her native element. In the Ariel poems, published posthumously, madness is her theme, her scream and her doom. Ominous presences lurk in the shadows of her lines. Objects, col ors, odors, nature itself claw at the raw, chafed nerves of her being. In these last works she was half in love with death and courted it to attain the only peace that her tormented spirit could apparently know.

All this is abundantly plain in the R.S.C.'s staged reading from her works. The trouble is that there is nothing to dramatize. The lines are autotelic. Adding facial expressions, making gestures, moving about the stage, even if done by three women instead of one, provide no additional dramatic dimension. Nor do they evoke any emotion or achieve any resonance that does not already exist on the printed page.

The women (Brenda Bruce, Estelle Kohler, Louise Jameson) have good voices, speak with commendable clarity, and represent varying facets of Sylvia Plath's personality. The stage is almost bone bare. The women wear what look like white nightgowns in the first act, and white surgical gowns and caps in Act II. This effects a contrast with the Stygian-dark moods and bloodletting images of the poems.

The hall of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in which Sylvia Plath is being presented offers audiences a tier of backless stone-hard benches set so closely together that one playgoer's knees poke into another playgoer's back. Combined with Plathian dementia, it is a rather grim evening for body and soul. .T. F. Kalen

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