Word: ducking
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...WILD DUCK. Although he was dedicated to candor in human relations, Playwright Henrik Ibsen recognized all too clearly that it is kinder to consider what men wish they could be than to deal with them as they are. In its revival of this 1884 play, the APA troupe performs with more precision than passion...
...these actors and actresses look as if they were made in the Max Factory, they manage to seem definitely male and distinctly female. Belmondo, for instance, has a wrinkly-crinkly, all-squeezed-together-in-the-middle sort of face that appears to have just been released from a duck press. Caine has a soft little mouth that seems to be slowly crawling away and a hollow in his chest that a girl could sip champagne from. And Oskar Werner ?well, actually he's as straight as they come, but at first glance people some times wonder...
...photography, Claude Renoir, maintains the splendor. When Miss Fonda and McEnery make love within glass walls, he catches their undulating yellow reflection. When they make love in a grotto, he touches the French greenery with junglelike lushness. He creates out of Vadim's always bizarre locations (waterfall, soccer match, duck pond, crumbling villa, go-go costume party) a continuous paradise. The movie seems all grass and gold...
Apparently he couldn't play the flute. In Ibsen's The Wild Duck, Hjalmar Ekdal renders "with sentimental expression" a brief passage from a Bohemian folk-dance. In the Adams House version he is about to let loose when the door conveniently swings open, and we never hear a note...
Such problems abound in James Burt's production of The Wild Duck. But even if there are faults more glaring than the lack of flute music, they can't cripple a show so liberally marked with hard work and competence. Ibsen is not often staged at Harvard; drama students read him and study him, but rarely see him or perform him. Now Adams House has tackled one of his most difficult plays and come out, if precariously...