Revised Standard Dane

Act III, Scene 1, Prince Hamlet is alone. "To be, or not to be--what the hell?" he intoned.

This was the new Hamlet of Franco Zeffirelli. Last year, in a choreography of flashing swords held like switchblades, the 28-year-old Italian director caused a transatlantic sensation by staging the Old Vic's final Romeo and Juliet as if it were an adaptation of West Side Story. This year, in a production that has become a Roman sellout, he has excised most of the melancholia from the melancholy Dane, replacing it with angry young slang and a revised standard version. "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt," for example, has become "Why doesn't this flesh, this heavy carcass of meat, dissolve?" The play is done in Italian in an almost corner-of-the-mouth modern idiom, with the gravediggers speaking in hoodsy Neapolitan accents and Hamlet's pentametric arias flatted with words like "procrastination" and "bureaucracy."

Two Ghosts. Shakespeare, had he attended the Roman opening, might well have attributed the play to Francis Bacon. But Zeffirelli unashamedly claims that he has "found a vivid portrait acceptable to the layman, to the nonintellectual, to workmen, to taxi drivers. Our Hamlet can be identified by contemporary humanity."

Not in language alone. As played by a blond and wild-eyed Giorgio Albertazzi (who was the mysterious lover in Last Year at Marienbad), Rome's Hamlet looks strikingly like the late James Dean. He wears tight slacks and a turtleneck sweater, while the women wear vague gowns of no particular century in an attempt to universalize the audience's sense of time. King Hamlet's ghost is merely an offstage voice from the collective unconscious, but Freud's ghost has the free run of Elsinore: whenever Hamlet delivers a soliloquy, he takes refuge in a large hole in the center of the stage, getting in up to his knees, waist or neck, depending on the psychographic depth of the moment. "Nobody loves me or wants me to make a decent career in this lousy court," he whines.

S`i, S`i. Ophelia has men in her madness. In her last scene, she flings her dress up over her head with sexual ardor before a group of soldiers. "This vivid contrast to her initial purity," says Zeffirelli, "shows that in the mind of every middle-class well-bred girl the thought of sex exists in its wildest form."

Italian reaction was a resounding s`i, s`i to this, and indeed all of Zeffirelli's innovations. On a wind of high critical praise, the production settled down for a run of several months in a country where few plays ever last more than two weeks.

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