Beyond the scream Hamlet’s last word may be ‘silence’. But in the Folio text of the play, it is followed by ‘O, o, o, o. Dyes’. One modern editor reasonably translates this into the stage direction: ‘He gives a long sigh and dies’. Actors often accompany and punctuate their articulate utterance with sighs, cries, groans, and moans, whether they are licensed by the text or not. The critic George Steiner shares a wonderfully vivid memory of the actress Helene Weigel playing the scene in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, when soldiers try to force Courage to identify the body of her dead son. Twice she refuses. And then: As the body was carried off, Weigel looked the other way and tore her mouth wide open . . . . The sound that came out was raw and terrible beyond any description I could give of it. But in fact there was no sound. Nothing. The sound was total silence. It was silence which screamed and screamed through the whole theatre so that the audience lowered its head as before a gust of wind. Tragedy A very short introduction Adrian Poole P 92
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 01:33:24 +0000