'Hamlet' Opens at Stratford Festival After Star, Director Resign in Huff

STRATFORD, Conn., July 3--Some rather unseemly behavior has been going on of late in connection with the Stratford production of Hamlet, which the American Shakepeare Festival belatedly got around to opening officially last night.

Douglas Seale had been hired as director. A Briton with many years of Shakespearean experience, Seale, who will be remembered locally for his exciting Henry V in Sanders Theatre eight years ago, handled two of the Festival's plays last season. So he was far from an unknown quantity. In addition, Lester Rawlins, a fine award-winning actor, had been engaged to play Hamlet.

Performances before preview audiences of school pupils were already under way when it was announced a few weeks ago that Seale and Rawlins had quit as a result of "artistic differences" with this season's producer, Joseph Verner Reed, who also happens to be chairman of the institution's Board of Trustees.

I know nothing of the details of this dispute; but I do know that a producer is an administrative official and not an artistic one, and I do not hesitate to point an accusing finger at Reed. Having brought in a tested director, Reed had absolutely no business meddling in matters of dramatic interpretation.

I am deeply interested in Seale's and Rawlins' conception of Hamlet, and I have little curiosity about Reed's; so I object strongly to being deprived of a Seale-Rawlins production. Such unwarranted interference is bad enough when it occurs on Broadway; it is all the more disgraceful when it plagues a permanent, long-standing Shakespearean institution.

The printed program last evening bore a carefully ink-stamped addition so that we might know who delivered the prologue to the play-within-a-play, a matter of three lines. Yet the program did not list the designer of the settings (which are properly sparse, and include a gorgeous pseudo-tapestry that is dropped from time to time) or the designer of the lighting (which is only so-so).

But, worst of all, no director is listed. (A fellow critic told me he thought Allen Fletcher, who was in charge of the summer's other two plays, had a hand in it.) It is hard enough at best for audiences and critics to attribute praise or blame for aspects of a production, but the director shoulders over-all artistic responsibility. Whose Hamlet did I see? Was much of Seale's direction retained? To what extent did Fletcher participate? Or did Reed barge in and take over, or at least insist on giving personal approval? Or were a lot of the players left to their own instinctual devices?

Only one person has really benefitted from all this mess--and that is the new Hamlet. With the departure of Rawlins, it was at last decided to promote his understudy into the part. This is a chap by the name of Tom Sawyer. He was an obscure young actor of whom little seems to have been ferreted out, for he has refused to allow himself to be photographed, biographed, or interviewed. But he is obscure no more.

While Sawyer's Hamlet is uneven, it is nonetheless an impressive start. Properly sporting a beard (which many Hamlets neglect), he looks right for the part, although I have yet to see the fat Hamlet that Shakespeare himself specified. His performance is a great improvement over the one that Fritz Weaver wheezed his way through on this same stage in 1958.

Sawyer has a rich baritone voice of wide range, which he only rarely pushes to stridency. His classical diction is close to flawless (including every last y-sound in words like 'dew' and 'suit'), and he speaks with an unusual feeling for the musicality of the lines. In fact, he shows, in the excerpts from the "pious chanson" about Jephthah's daughter, that he has a splendid singing voice. And his apostrophe to Man is itself a beautifully modulated song.

One of the things that make this the role of all roles is that Hamlet is, like most of us mortals, such a bundle of inconsistencies. In a way he is thus the most "realistic" of Shakespeare's great protagonists, as well as the most enigmatic. One can say almost anything about Hamlet and find justification for it somewhere in the play's text. In this inexhaustibility lies much of the work's eternal fascination.

Among the many questions to be settled by any player is how much of Hamlet's madness is real and how much feigned. For Sawyer, a good deal is real. In the "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy he even becomes quite violently deranged. He does not give us the 18th-century melancholy aristocrat, or the 19th-century fragile neurasthenic. Nor does he recall Barrymore's Laborious Hamlet, or Olivier's Athletic Hamlet, or Weaver's Feverish Hamlet.

Sawyer's is what might be called a