The Theater: Toppled King/Torn Mind

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The enterprising Brooklyn Academy of Music (TIME, Jan. 14) is currently enlivening the borough with a four-month British Theater Season. With a flare of trumpets, a skirl of bagpipes and a welcoming speech from London-born, Brooklyn-bred New York City Mayor Abraham Beame, the Royal Shakespeare Company inaugurated the season with Richard II and Sylvia Plath.

It is the U.S. debut for the R.S.C., which ranks second only to the National Theater (originally the Old Vic) in prestige among British repertory companies. Some London drama critics even prefer it to the older troupe. Playgoers' expectations were high, perhaps too high. While these two idiosyncratic productions have not precisely dashed those expectations, they have perceptibly dampened them.

RICHARD II. This is not one of Shakespeare's master plays, and it has no titan of a hero at its epicenter. But it can be a wonderfully engrossing drama, and it does contain grand, stirring and passionate speeches. In this presentation the play is reduced to a tepid tempest in a cracked teacup.

Richard is a vain monarch who laughs at the discomfiture of his nobles, ravages their estates, and surrounds himself with fops and flatterers. Too late he finds himself deserted and his angry lords allied to his enemy Bolingbroke, who marches triumphantly across England to secure Richard's abdication and his crown.

To personify Richard's weakness, Ian Richardson plays the King as a kind of drag queen. This is disastrous. The epicene approach robs the audience of the pity it should feel for Richard's painful self-knowledge in adversity, and mutes his ringing defense of the divine prerogatives of kingship: "The breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord."

In a play laced with some of Shakespeare's most musical poetry, Richardson delivers his lines with inflexible metronomic monotony. Only Richard Pasco as Bolingbroke has a regal voice and bearing. He and Richardson switch roles at every other performance, but Pasco does not alter the effete interpretation of the King.

In a production that is stilted, mannered and ludicrously stylized, Director John Barton appears to have rummaged through Peter Brook's wastebasket for directorial inspiration while scanting Shakespeare's genius.

SYLVIA PLATH. Romantic cults seem to spring up rapidly round poets who die young. An element of thanatophilia enters into the worship of such poets. It is somehow felt that they were purified by dying and spared the physical and moral corruption to which ordinary mortals are subject.

Think of Shelley, who died by drowning and whose heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by his fellow romantic, Trelawney. Or of Dylan Thomas, a sacrificial votary of drink (Olympian draughts, of course). Since the winter day in 1963 when Sylvia Plath turned on the gas and laid her head in her kitchen oven, she has become a goddess of the thanatophiliacs.

Latterly, she has also become a symbolic figure to women's liberationists, who think of her as a victimized woman. Plath was broke and alone with her two small children when she died.