Hamlet "De-Bunked"

Hamlet "DeBunked"

Drama-loving Moscow was argumentatively agog last week over a brand new Hamlet. In this Soviet production the Prince of Denmark speaks Shakespeare's lines not in languid introspection but as a robust, royal go-getter intent on just one thing, seizing the Throne.

Ophelia, played as a sensuous husband-hunter bent on getting the go-getter, babbles in Shakespeare's "mad scene" because she has just had a few drinks. She falls into the river and drowns after she has had a few more.

The soliloquy "To be or not to be" is in Moscow a dialog between Horatio and Hamlet, the latter played by barrel-chested, vigorous Comrade Gorunov. The Ghost of Hamlet's father never appears, but Hamlet dresses up in his father's armor, puts on a false beard, parades in the eerie moonlight and by pretending to be the detd King's ghost rallies superstitious officers to support Prince Hamlet in his coup 'd'etat.

In Russia drama is definitely important. Therefore the new Hamlet was reviewed for the Moscow News by the Soviet Union's most important hostess, Mme Maxim Maximovitch Litvinov, wife of the Foreign Minister at whose sumptuous official residence prominent foreigners are feted with caviar & champagne.

Off duty, famed and popular Ivy Litvinov keeps house for her husband in a studiously drab flat, enlivened only by her sparkle. Born in England, she knows her Shakespeare, is a niece of the late Sir A. Maurice Low, onetime London Morning Post correspondent at Washington. In her review, which she entitled Hamlet "DeBunked" and signed "Ivy Low," the Foreign Minister's spouse wrote:

"Although the audience . . . behaved as if they were being forcibly fed with something very new and strange, Nikolai Akimov's brilliant production is in truth an extremely respectful and scientific restoration of the original Hamlet and may be compared to the slow, painstaking work of the archeologist, removing with infinite patience and delicacy the layers of dust and refuse deposited by the centuries. . . .

"The producer has given a hearty, unhesitating answer to the famous 'enigma' of Hamlet's 'madness.' The answer that Hamlet himself gave to his mother: 'Lay not that flattering unction to your soul!' The theory of madness is a very flattering unction to the middle class soul. Hence the thousands of suicides in England 'while of unsound mind.'

"Not intolerable conditions, not years of unemployment, not the slow torture of semi-starvation makes the worker cast himself in desperation from the nearest bridge. The fellow must be mad to want to leave this best of all possible worlds. . . .

"It is safe to say that no producer will be able to ignore this performance. Future Hamlets will have to be affected by it, or fall by their own weight. Never before can an audience have gone home arguing so furiously as to what Shakespeare really meant."

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