Hamlet

OLD PLAYS

Enter Hamlet, handcuffed, in a wheeled coffin. He looks scornfully at King Claudius and Queen Gertrude sleeping in a bed near by, yanks the blankets from them, climbs out of the coffin. "O! that this too too solid flesh would melt," he moans. Thus begins the strange version of Hamlet that Director Joseph Papp presented last week at his Public Theater in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. In his years as producer of New York's open-air Shakespeare summer festival in Central Park, Papp has proved his ability to do the Bard straight. This time he does Shakespeare free and fancy. To a background of mind-bending rock music, his characters speak of Denmark, although they are costumed to suggest a modern military camp. Yet it is abundantly clear that the time and place of the action are any time and any place, no time and no place. Papp, in other words, has located Hamlet deep in the mind of its characters, which, it may be argued, was Shakespeare's intent. The results are uneven, but dazzling and convincing at their best. Papp has drastically shortened the play to a running time of under two hours, compressing both plot and characters. The ghost is presented as an antic extension of Hamlet's own ego -- epitomized in one scene in which Hamlet becomes a ventriloquist's dummy on his father's knee. Later, Hamlet also turns up as the Gravedigger, hiding behind a Latin accent; in this guise he delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy, thus turning the graveyard scene into a grisly essay on the meaning of death. The players' dumb show is omitted; instead, Hamlet lures his stepfather into mouthing the incriminating lines himself, until the drunken monarch suddenly stops in horror-struck realization of what he has said. The mindless bloodshed of the final scenes is emphasized by having the players settle their arguments in a chilling game of Russian roulette.

This kind of tampering with the text can easily be put down as theatrical sacrilege, for which there is considerable precedent in the annals of performed Shakespeare. But Papp has clearly made a serious attempt to demonstrate the viability of Shakespeare's insights into men's weaknesses in terms of modern theater. His Hamlet is a gathering of fantasies, envisaged by the leading players. The fantasies seldom interlock; emotions are inner, private and unshared, until they clash in a series of brutal, shattering collisions. Shakespeare's language remains undisturbed in this version, but Papp's imaginative scissoring and repasting has sculptured a Hamlet of crystalline tensity.

Papp's vision of the play is a daring one; he has communicated some, but not all of it, to his cast. Martin Sheen, recently seen as one of the punks in The Incident (TIME, Nov. 10), brings to the title role an imaginative boisterousness not unlike his superior work in that film; Ralph Waite is a dashingly demagogic Claudius. Anita Dangler is a fluttery flibbertigibbet of a Gertrude, while April Shawhan is a sexy, miniskirted Ophelia. Gait MacDermot's pounding rock background seems at least as appropriate to this version of the play as the gentle pleasing of a lute might have been in a 17th century production. Papp's new Hamlet will not crowd traditional stagings off the board, but it deserves credit for trying to cast fresh light on the iridescent original.

DANCE

Out of the Rain

Purists still insist on an artistic division between modern dance and ballet: the one should be symbolic, angular, Freudian and sparse; the other dramatic, explicit and lush. But the wall between the two is crumbling rapidly. In any number of U.S. cities, a succession of ensembles on tour have given dance buffs ample opportunity to witness growing evidence of the intersection between modern dance and ballet. Such works as Robert Jeffrey's Astarte and the Harkness Ballet's Time Out of Mind created much of their impact by incorporating modern-dance patterns into ballet. Last week, at Manhattan's Billy Rose Theater, the Paul Taylor Dance Company demonstrated how ideas from ballet have infiltrated modern dance as well, in a graceful amalgamation of soloistic symbolism and an overall feeling for impulse and design.

Not too long ago, Taylor, who studied and danced with Martha Graham for six years, was considered an avant-garde experimenter in choreographic Dada. He composed dances to the sound of rain, and once fashioned a piece in which a couple stood stock-still for four minutes. But in Taylor's Lento, one of the new pieces of his company's current season, his dancers weave gentle patterns to Haydn chamber music, as simple and charming as any moment from Les Sylphides. Another new work, called Agathe's Tale, commits an even stranger breach of experimentalist etiquette: it tells a story. A virgin, fought over by the Angel Raphael and Satan, ditches them both for the bucolic, sensual pleasures of Pan.

Far from being a sellout to storybook ballet, Agathe is a wholly original synthesis of a variety of dance arts. Eileen Cropley's every motion depicts the transformation of the girl from maidenly naivete to knowing womanhood; her timid, mincing steps broaden gradually to final exultant leaps. As Satan, Taylor circles the stage like a great, muscular swooping bird of prey, while Dan Wagoner flutters nervously as a sardonic, sanctimonious Angel and Daniel Williams creates a Pan who seems the exact personification of drool.

In command of movement, in variety of expression, Taylor's company of eleven dancers has moved steadily into the top rank of America's smaller dance groups. Like most of them, its appeal is special, its audiences are small and its financial problems great. But, in the unmistakable flowering of interest in ballet that is currently sweeping across the U.S., Taylor's choreographic synthesis may very well help bring modern dance, no less than ballet, into the affections of American audiences.

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