Shakespeare on the West Coast, at Ashland and San Diego

Abstract

HE play is still the thing, not exploitation of a star or a director, at the two long-established Shakespeare summer theaters on the west coast. The four plays of the 1965 Oregon Shakespeare Festival at Ashland were Henry VI, Part 2, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Winter's Tale. The Old Globe Theater at San Diego, California, chose Henry VIII, Coriolanus, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Give these companies another fifty years and they may be searching for novelty in sociological, Freudian, beatnik Hamlets: for the present their intent is not to impose interpretations, but to draw out of the plays all they can find within them. Their Elizabethan stages allow continuous action. At least five out of the seven plays were stirring, imaginative productions. Macbeth, at Ashland, was directed by Richard Risso with so much skill, so rich an imagination that it held the suspense even through the series of final battle scenes, up to the last instant. Macbeth himself, Jim Baker, a twenty-two year old, with a youthful spring in his walk, a big man with bushy beard who could make up to look like a powerful warrior, played with a rising fury and power and still had breath enough left at the finish for deadly sword fighting. He lacked variety of voice; he could not call back sympathy in one speech, like Walter Hampden, but, perhaps for this reason, he was all the more the dangerous beast, the tyrant we were glad to see destroyed. The hard brilliance of Zoe Kamitses' Lady Macbeth had a Medusa fascination to turn her partner's heart to stone. Her driving strength held the first bloody-minded speeches, and the inner collapse was evident in her stricken, weary figure in regal scarlet after the wreck of the banquet. Less light for the terror of the murder scene-and where was the notable storm?-Kirk Mee's Porter, that needed a sharper, ironic wit, and the single lapse-the artificial electronics of whispering voices for the prophesying heads -were the only deficiencies. In the superb apparition scene, tall kings in black robes and crowns, hands crossed like tomb effigies, paced from a far door to encircle Macbeth-the charm wound up. The Weird Sisters, even in a daylight opening, were figures of the earth and beyond nature. Their crooked staves caught the light and made patterns of confused triangles, the accent of the lines suggested incantation without falling into doggerel. The banquet was dominated by brute power, retainers on the balcony above with torches and standards. Banquo entered so quietly that only a murmur in the audience called attention to him.