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Essential
information regarding Kozintsev's film version
In Russia, Hamlet remains
first of all a person - his individuality itself challenges
authority. In 1971, at Moscow’s Taganka Theater, Yuri Lyubimov
opened a production that ran in repertory until 1980 (217
performances in all), when the early death of Vladimir Vysotsky, the
poet-singer-actor who had played the lead and given the production
its special character, brought it to a premature end. Lyubimov had
been put in charge of the Taganka in 1964, the year that Kozintsev’s
Hamlet appeared. The
theater’s beginnings were made possible by the Khrushchev "thaw",
although it soon began to generate a little too much heat for the
wan Soviet spring. Eventually becoming an emblem of social and moral
opposition to the regime, the Taganka succeeded in feeding the
spiritual hunger of oppressed Russians.
In
purely theatrical terms, Lyubimov’s Hamlet was noteworthy for the
cinematic montage of the mise-en-sceneand
the presence of a dominant stenographic image - a ubiquitous,
constantly moving curtain (designed by David Borovsky); but far more
important was its cultural role and the spiritual power of its
leading performer. When he took on Hamlet, Vysotsky was already well
known as a troubadour of spiritual freedom - he was "the living soul
and conscience of his time" (Gershkovich, 129), much loved
throughout the Soviet Union because his songs spoke truth in the
oblique ways typical of heavily censored societies. He died during
the Moscow Olympics, and people abandoned their stadiums and TV sets
to participate in a spontaneous memorial service. Though there had
been no announcement of his death in the press, within hours
everyone in Moscow knew of it, and thousands gathered near the
theater, where his legendary guitar was displayed, to recite his
poems and honor his memory. At the funeral a few days later,
mourners jammed the streets all around the Taganka, but only a few
were able to file past the coffin before it was whisked away, while
someone on a rooftop with a loud voice described the scene to the
pressing crowd. "After Vysotsky’s funeral," said Lyubimov, "I began
to respect the people of Moscow".
For all the obvious differences, the
scene is reminiscent of David Garrick’s brilliant obsequies two
hundred years earlier. Those were officially sanctioned, orderly,
designed to honor the greatest English actor as a national hero.
Vysotsky’s were unofficial and disorderly, a sign of repressed
desire for freedom in defiance of oppressive authority. But Vysotsky
was also a national hero, and, like Garrick, he was especially
identified with Hamlet. In part, he appeared with his guitar. The
production began on a bare stage, open to the whitewashed back wall,
which was adorned only with a heavy wooden cross. Two silhouetted
gravediggers swigged vodka and tossed dirt and skulls out of an open
grave downstage (the grave remained throughout). Hamlet, in casual
modern dress, approached the grave and, accompanying
himself on the guitar, recited Pasternak’s Hamlet poem from
the banned Dr. Zhivago:
The stir is over. I step forth
on the boards.
Leaning against upright by the entrance
I strain to make the far-off echo yield
A cue to the events that may come in my day.
Pasternak’s great
translation of Hamlet defined the character in Russian terms -
serious, dedicated, self-sacrificing; he is a witness, even a
Christ-like sufferer who "gives up his will in order to ‘do the will
of him that sent him’ Hamlet is not a drama of weakness, but of duty
and self-denial." He has been allotted the role of "judge of his own
time and servant of the future" (Pasternak, quoted in Rowe 148). His
reality, as the poem suggest, is interwoven with that of the actor,
in struggle with himself, putting himself on the line in order to
explode "the misrepresentations which produced moral failure in
Soviet life" (Golub 161):
And yet the order of the acts
has been schemed and plotted
And nothing an avert the final curtain’s fall.
I stand alone. All else is swamped in Pharisaism.
To live life to the end is not to cross a field.
The visual and
symbolic dominance of the Taganka’s mobile curtain was designed to
carry the production’s distinctively Soviet meaning. Coarsely woven
of wool, though appearing like macramé with "threads hanging in evil
bundles", the curtain controlled the action, falling from the
ceiling after the opening song, moving around and between the
actors,
like a giant monster . . . setting the pace, and holding within
its folds the symbols and tools of power - black armbands, swords,
goblet, thrones edged with knives. It envelops Ophelia, intimidates
Polonius, protects Gertrude , supports Claudius and threatens
Hamlet. Finally it sweeps the stage clean and moves toward the
audience as though to destroy it too. (M. Croyden, quoted in Leiter
145)
. . . . The theatrical emphasis did not, however, transform the
meaning of the play into an endless succession of mirrored images.
Rather, it spoke of the theater’s power to construct for its public
truth matters. Vysotsky’s style of playing fit in with this
conception. His strategy was to maintain the distance between actor
and role (as in Zadek and Muller though for a different purpose),
not blending with the character but expressing his own personal
relationship to it. Thus he remained the singer, the troubadour
performing the part and communicating his relationship to Hamlet as
a way of disclosing his own isolation, of establishing his own
poetic voice, and most important of seeking a way to live. He began
the run as rather "nihilistic", but as his conception matured, his
Hamlet became more attuned, more a searcher for possible answers to
the "necessary question" that he speaks of in his own poem called "My
Hamlet" (Gershkovich
128-9). The production, like the actor, came to speak for an
affirmation of life in the face of curtain and grave, a
post-Stalinist theme of "survival and salvation, rather than the
Stalin era’s death them, revenge" (Golub 166).
A year after Vysotsky’s death, Lyubimov put together a performance
collage entitle The
Poet Vladimir Vysotsky, which was banned before it opened,
though a few public "dress rehearsals’ escaped the censor’s fist.
Focusing on Vysotsky’s place in Soviet culture, the show re-enacted
his street songs, his anti-war songs, his evocations of everyday
Soviet life, all with an undercurrent of social alienation and a
muted desire to speak out. Interspersed throughout were references
to and fragments of Hamlet, such as a satiric dialogue in which the
King and Polonius discussed the strategic "madness" of Hamlet’s
"singing hooliganism" or, as a culmination, a reprise of "To be or
not to be", the cornerstone of Pasternak’s and Vysotsky conception.
From a song about Russian baths the performance shifted without
pause to Vysotsky’s recorded voice swiftly traversing the soliloquy:
"so a thought turns us all into cowards and our decisiveness withers
like a flower . . . Thoughts that at first promised success die with
a sweep of a hand." The finale returned to the singer and his songs,
producing a double image of hpe and defiance against death and loss:
"They’ve cornered me, cornered me -/ But the huntsman isn’t left
with anything . . ." was followed by "I didn’t have time . . . to
finish living. I won’t have time to finish singing . . . " At the
end the voice faltered, like Hamlet’s, into a long silence (Gershkovich
116-26).
-Hamlet,
by Anthony B. Dawson, Manchaster Univesity Press, NY, 1995 |
