Plays Pleasant and Plays Unpleasant

Summary

[A review of Shakespeare productions during the winter of 1953-4, with special reference to All's Well That Ends Well at the Old Vic and A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.]

BY

RICHARD DAVID

For the collector of Shakespearian performances the winter of 1953-4 was a disappointing season. There were workmanlike productions in plenty, faithful, coherent, agreeable, but quite without the power to engender that exaltation, that spirit of delight, that comes so rarely but repays all when it does. Such a workmanlike job was the Othello that opened the Stratford season, nobly mounted by Tanya Moiseiwitsch, with a great yellow and red awning (Plate VA) to give a sultry siroccan air to Iago's temptation of the Moor. Such were Coriolanus and Twelfth Night at the Vic, the routine bonhomie of the latter relieved by the (perhaps excessive) violence of Claire Bloom's Viola, a tigress rather than the usual mouse. Less successful was the Old Vic's first production, Hamlet, taken at a hissing and whispering prestissimo appropriate perhaps to the assassination scene in Macbeth but not to a play that both dramatically and linguistically demands space and time in which to develop and round out itself. The director, Michael Benthall, presumably hoped to achieve continuous tension by this speed; but Hamlet does not acquire its momentum by steady acceleration, as Othello and Macbeth; it is rather a series of increasing surges with a period of rest or recoil after each while power is gathered for the next.