Word: ajax
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...Classical Players wanted the Loeb; now they have it and it is far too large for them. Everything connected with their production of Sophocles' Ajax is too large for them: the play, the Greek language, even the stage itself. Outside the bricks of Brattle Street Ajax might have been a pleasant, chummy social gathering of the Classics Department; inside, the Loeb theatre being what it perhaps unfortunately is, the play is an incredible act of presumption...
...course, the real trouble with this version of the Ajax is not the staging, or the confusion, or the uncomfortable missed entrances; it is that only two members of the cast have sufficient presence to command attention in spite of the Greek they are speaking. One of them, Myra Rubin (who plays both Athena and Tecmessa) even manages to come through because of it, for she has a graceful and compelling sense of metre that in itself expresses the sweet grief that Sophocles wanted to express. Donald Lyons as Menelaus uses a different technique; he swaggers with impressive competence both...
Nearly everyone else is ridiculously ineffectual, most of all Adam Parry's Ajax. Parry looks neither powerful nor noble; his great speech on illimitable time is absurd, and one suspects that intransigeance is the least of his problems. So also with Teucer (James Rooney) and the Messenger (John van Sickle), who is not helped by the mop he wears around his chin; and the wily Odysseus (Ray Sokolov) is no subtle man at all, just a ham. They are all hams when they want to emote something; it is much as if they conceived the play in terms...
...Adams group will also present Ibsen's Peer Gynt in the Loeb Theatre this spring, and the Classics Club is producing Sophocles' Ajax there as well. Since both productions might rival Philoctetes for actors and audiences, observers are therefore watching its success or failure to see how the Loeb affects House drama...
...first issue indicates that The Barber of Seville by Paiasiello, Peer Gynt by Ibson, The Alchemist by Johnson, and Ajax by Sophocles "will grace the main stage next semester...