Shakespeare in California, 1974-75

Abstract

O F THE FORTY-TWO SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTIONS I saw in and around the 1974-75 academic year, six gave me the feeling I most value in the theatre. The feeling sets in during the last lines of the play and carries over into the actors' bows. One feels surprised and grateful and strangely powerful. Everything has come together; one does not know what all the elements are or were, but like Henry Vaughan one has seen the metaphysical order of the universe at first hand. For me the physical symptoms of such evenings are quasi-sentimental: I feel myself in danger of weeping and thus violating the code of manly stupidity. Clapping is not just appropriate but necessary. One wants to shake hands with the rest of the audience, congratulate them on having been there, exchange addresses, and promise to keep in touch. One leaves the theatre as if one were walking down a gangplank to clain West 45th Street for Queen Isabella. One of those six productions, Audrey Stanley's Winter's Tale at the Oregon Festival, is geographically ineligible for this review, but-although I will cover three bona fide Shakespeare festivals and touch on a good many other productions (including the Charlton Heston Macbeth)-the following essay in and on practical theatre criticism will be shaped around the other five. They are (1) a Tempest and (2) a Measure for Measure in San Diego, (3) a Hamlet by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, (4) a 1 Henry VI put on by an improbable, improbably named, and improbably successful gypsy company called Birnam Wood, and (5) an absolutely theatrical, nearly indescribable solo performance of seventy Shakespeare sonnets by Robert Boerum, an actor I never heard of before or since. Two of those five were provided by the San Diego National Shakespeare Festival (Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, 3 June-14 September 1975), so I will start there. The director for the San Diego Tempest was Ellis Rabb, an accomplished director but one who has been recently given to entering Interesting Interpretations in the ongoing international competition to