The Director’s Role at Canada’s Stratford

Abstract

ghosts: what they are, where they come from and why. There is the theme of the family with its tangled web of mother-son, father-son, father-mother relationships, a theme as old as drama itself. And there is the theme of lust (both blood-lust and sex-lust) pitted against love, a theme re-echoed on a less physical level in the clash between dark daemonism and rational action. All these are themes. After them come the questions: questions of the interpretation of complex characters, of the battered text, and of the unwieldy length of the play. Unless a director ponders the themes, he will be unable to arrive at any coherent view which alone can solve the questions satisfactorily for his actors and therefore for his audience. At Stratford, Ontario, this season, John Hirsch avoided such unifying thought. In the programme, where one has come to expect a Director's Note which gives some indication of the director's purpose, he avoided any commitment, just quoting Harry Levin's The Question of Hamlet, where the topicality of the play is asserted in these terms: