新共和的文章: Shakespeare in Bloom

王敖

ROBERT BRUSTEIN ON THEATER
Shakespeare in Bloom

   
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Post date 12.05.03 | Issue date 12.15.03    E-mail this article

Harold Bloom is enjoying a vogue these days and so is his favorite author. In the last few weeks, at least five new Shakespeare productions have opened that are in some way indebted to this inveterate Bardolator. Like Samuel Johnson, his rotund critical forbear, Harold Bloom believes that Shakespeare is a "mortal god" to whom we owe everything, including our notions of what constitutes the human. If in previous ages theater labored under the shadow of William Shakespeare, Shakespeare has lately been laboring (in America at least) under the shadow of Harold Bloom.   

Congenial as it is to Shakespearean scholarship, Bloom\'s large shadow sometimes threatens to eclipse Shakespearean production. Although he acknowledges that the plays were written to be performed, Bloom (like many scholar-critics) seems to prefer Shakespeare on the page to Shakespeare on the stage. It is true that he will occasionally honor the odd Shakespeare performance, providing it is traditional enough. He is full of praise for the way John Gielgud warbled the Bard\'s native woodnotes, especially in Hamlet, and he is not reluctant to admit that Ralph Richardson\'s celebrated Falstaff changed his life. But those performances are more than half a century old. The more recent watershed Midsummer Night\'s Dream\'s--notably Peter Brooks\'s trapeze version with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Alvin Epstein\'s amalgam of the text with Purcell\'s Fairy Queen for the Yale Repertory Theatre--left Bloom colder than Hamlet\'s ghost. In his compendious study Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, which appeared in 1998, Bloom is hardly the best guide to acting and directing the plays, if indeed these professions hold any interest for him at all.  

For Bloom, the stage is full of impurities and the best theater is in his head. "I have never seen a performance," he writes about The Two Noble Kinsmen, "and don\'t particularly want to, since Shakespeare\'s contributions to the play are scarcely dramatic." It is true that this is hardly Shakespeare\'s finest writing. It is also true that no more than two-fifths of the work have been attributed to him. The rest belongs to his contemporary John Fletcher, whose customary collaborator was Francis Beaumont. Fletcher was celebrated for having invented a new middle genre that he identified as "tragi-comedy"--"not so called," he wrote, "in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy."  

The Two Noble Kinsmen not only brings one of its characters near death, it pushes him over the edge in a plot resolving accident. But otherwise, like most of Shakespeare\'s late romances, the play has all the far-fetched qualities of a tragic-comic fairy tale. Based on Chaucer\'s "The Knight\'s Tale," The Two Noble Kinsmen weaves an intriguing story without much depth of character, using verse that is often bland and lacking in imagery. In the last act, where Shakespeare\'s hand is most evident (very likely the last words he ever wrote for the stage), the poetry intensifies. But the plot, which is almost certainly provided by Fletcher, is virtually a grab bag of Shakespearean characters and motifs.  

At the New York Public Theater, in a staging by Darko Tresnjak, these characters and motifs are presented with a minimum of embroidery. Laid in a court ruled by the same Theseus and Hippolyta who presided over Athens in A Midsummer Night\'s Dream, the play tells the story of two Theban cousins, Arcite and Palamon, who swear eternal friendship, rather like Proteus and Valentine in The Two Gentleman of Verona, only to fall out in a similar way over love of the same woman. Captured in war, they treat their imprisonment as a form of penitential purification, in the manner of Lear; but it is not long before they are baiting each other, much like Hal and Hotspur, in preparation for battle over Hippolyta\'s sister Emilia. There are borrowings from Cymbeline and Timon as well, not to mention the theft of a whole character from Hamlet. The Jailer\'s Daughter, who goes mad for love of Palamon, could be Ophelia\'s double. Fletcher even gives her the opportunity to sing sad songs in a watery location (among them Desdemona\'s "Willow, Willow, Willow") and later has her distribute posies and make lewd jokes. One suspects that Fletcher enlisted Shakespeare in this project not so much to exploit his poetic genius as to ensure against being sued for plagiarism.

Unlike Bloom, I was happy to have the opportunity to see this rarely produced play because the story holds one\'s attention, and because the director and his cast are able to tell it without much more in the way of stage effects than a triangular cage to represent the prison and primary color lights to underline emotional changes. Not all of the acting is memorable, but I was particularly touched by three repertory- trained veterans--Sam Tsoutsouvas as Theseus, Jonathan Fried as the Jailer, and Candy Buckley in a variety of roles--as well as by David Harbour and Graham Hamilton playing Arcite and Palamon, and Doan Ly as Emilia. Let me suggest another reason for seeing this play. It contains sexual ambiguities--Emilia\'s speech about "the true love \'tween maid and maid" and Arcite\'s remark to Palamon about how "we are one another\'s wife"--that could be cited in support of recent rulings on gay marriage.



Falstaff is Bloom\'s favorite character, the one with whom he identifies most closely and most noisily. He has spilled a lot of ink trying to rescue the reputation of the fat knight from the moral disapproval of what he calls "academic puritans and professorial power freaks." This may have led him to over-estimate Falstaff\'s virtues--"a comic Socrates," he calls him, "neither immoral nor amoral but of another realm"; and the current production of Henry IV at the Vivian Beaumont, as a long article in The New York Times tells us, is partly an effort to redress the balance. The director, Jack O\'Brien, has set out to show the darker side of a character who, rather than being Bloom\'s "embodiment of human freedom," has serious flaws.

I agree with both arguments in this age-old debate. It is highly probable, as some commentators have noted, that Shakespeare originally intended Falstaff to be a Vice figure seducing the prodigal son Prince Hal from his true path, with characters such as the Lord Chief Justice functioning to show him the way of righteousness. It is also true that Falstaff escaped from this projected morality play to become the full- blooded vitalist that Bloom and the rest of us admire, while Hal emerged as a bit of a prig sharing some of his brother Lancaster\'s Machiavellian genes.

But the controversy has virtually nothing to do with what is happening on the stage of the Beaumont. There that good actor Kevin Kline, tricked out with body padding and the traditional full white beard, is giving an intelligent reading of the role, but not one that captures more than its physical definition. There is little that is unexpected in his playing, no element of risk that would expose the dangerous side of the man. This is a character out of Lamb\'s Tales from Shakespeare, the roly- poly knight of the Victorian imagination. Discovered asleep against a beam on his first appearance, Kline needs a lot of help to rise to his feet. He clearly has a hell of a hangover. And his voice rumbles with authority. The actor is giving an excellent impersonation in every exterior way, but he is essentially an impostor, hidden behind his whiskers, like the domesticated, middle-class Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I had the opportunity not long ago to see Bloom interpret the character himself in a staged reading held with my company under the direction of Karin Coonrod. Obviously not an actor, Bloom nevertheless managed to essentialize Falstaff\'s intelligence, his wit, and particularly his depression and fatigue, using very little in the way of acting technique or interpretation. With his hooded eyes and his melancholy voice, he gave one of the saddest readings of the part I have ever heard. And that is precisely what is missing from Kline\'s performance: the tragic side of the character. Without that, you can\'t really find the comic side either. Neither do his companions in Eastcheap, least of all Ancient Pistol whose fustian Marlovian pretension has been reduced to a feeble apostrophe. The tavern scenes have neither punch nor pathos, the sublime induction scene has been sadly emasculated, and there\'s not a lot of fun even in the exposure of Falstaff\'s cowardice.  

Kline is smart enough to know the character is not entirely secure in the affections of Prince Hal. He has a lovely moment in the rejection scene: when Hal throws him to the ground, he gives the impression of shrinking into insignificance. But his reactions are often too perfunctory. The great line that signifies Falstaff\'s consciousness of a dismal friendless future ("Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound") is almost a throwaway.  

The rest of this lavish, highly-praised production, in an adaptation by Dakin Matthews that conflates the two parts of Henry IV into an evening lasting less than four hours, is full of dazzling stagecraft, particularly in the thunderous battle scenes, punctuated by smoke, fire, and Mark Bennett\'s explosive sounds. What it lacks is much evidence of a creative imagination. There is no sign whatever, except for Ethan Hawke\'s punk-rocker performance as Hotspur--butch-cut, bare-chested, pounding his fist against his palm--that this play is being produced in the opening years of the twenty-first century. Ralph Funicello\'s scaffolded set is geometric and functional enough, but Jess Goldstein\'s period costumes seem borrowed from fifteenth-century paintings. As for the cast, few of them have been allowed to justify Hamlet\'s conviction that they are "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time."  

The performance with the most pith, and the most purpose, is given by Michael Hayden, a late replacement for Billy Crudup as Prince Hal. He manages the difficult transition from truant prince to true king with admirable strength. I was also impressed by Richard Easton\'s crabbed aging Bolingbroke, Byron Jennings\'s saucy Worcester, Jeff Weiss\'s doddering Justice Shallow, and Anastasia Barzee\'s velvet-voiced Lady Mortimer. Indeed, there is hardly a weak performance in the evening, with the exception of an over-the-top Mistress Quickly by the usually dependable Dana Ivey. But there is too little of Shakespeare\'s divine comedy, depth, and imagination, and too much pageantry, stage effect, and spectacle to satisfy my taste or, I would guess, that of Harold Bloom.



I saw another traditionalist production recently at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, Peter Hall\'s As You Like It. As Rosalind it features Hall\'s daughter Rebecca, a tall, willowy beauty reminiscent of Emma Thompson. No doubt she will develop substantial acting weight, but those with memories of Katherine Hepburn or Vanessa Redgrave or even Gwyneth Paltrow in the role might find her a little undernourished at present. Playing a character who Bloom believes most fully represents "Shakespeare\'s own stance towards human nature," Rebecca Hall is winsome, flirtatious, and engaging. Disguised in a slouch fedora hat and man\'s open shirt, she towers over Rebecca Callard\'s diminutive Celia like an Elizabethan Mutt and Jeff. Her charm is undeniable, though her affected East End speech sometimes makes her sound like she\'s eating mashed potatoes (when Orlando observes "Your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling," he can\'t be listening). She is someone to be carefully watched and fairly admired, not prematurely lionized as she will be.

This As You Like It is a sober minimalist affair, clearly the work of a director who wants to achieve his effects with the least effort, as he did so masterfully in The Homecoming when the male characters pulled their cigars away from a single lighted match like a flower opening its petals. Hall\'s As You Like It does not possess the same energy or strength. John Gunter\'s setting for the Forest of Arden consists of exquisitely lighted trees against a bosky scrim. But the atmosphere is too somber and oppressive to convey the bucolic beauty of this enchanted place, that pastoral sweetness I remember so well from the Hepburn production when Ernest Thesiger spoke The Seven Ages of Man over a crackling fire that decades later I can still smell.

All of the performances are professional without being penetrating, confident without being electrifying, with the possible exception of David Yelland, doing an impressive doubling job as the raging usurper Duke Frederick and his gentle banished brother. But the show is tired. I spent a lot of this three-hour evening feeling a little bored, a trifle impatient, my mind wandering over such idle questions as why the great majority of Shakespeare\'s characters only have one name. I think I can guess why Harold Bloom would say that Sir John Falstaff remains a prime exception.

[此贴子已经被作者于2004-2-23 4:21:56编辑过]