There must be at least half as many ways to play Shylock as to play Hamlet, and most of them have been tried. Max Adrian gave us an unsympathetic Shylock--bitter, gloating, sadistic. Adrian is constitutionally incapable of doing a slipshod job; and this was a notable performance. Morris Carnovsky's unsurpassable portrayal last summer was an extraordinarily complex one; and it was no reflection on Adrian if he could not match it. Adrian's Shylock was simpler and more straightforward, and wholly consistent. And he adopted a faster tempo than most actors, avoiding exaggeration and the temptation to make every word a crucial one.

The scene between Launcelot and Old Gobbo, is, on the printed page, one of Shakespeare's weakest comic passages; and, on the stage, it usually proves to be an embarrassing interlude. For the first time in my experience, thanks to Frederic Warriner's Launcelot and Stanley Jay's Gobbo, the scene came out satisfactorily; their combined antics were most hilarious.

The casket-choosing scenes can be a bore, too. But Jay, doubling as the Prince of Arragon, emerged as a delightful fop. Robert Evans made the Prince of Morocco a glum, dead-pan character, with unfortunate results; the only way to save him is to play him for comedy, as Earle Hyman did so tellingly last year.

Laurinda Barrett was an admirable Portia, and Robert Blackburn a forceful Bassanio. But Basil Langton failed to give much color to the title role of Antonio.

Kilty always likes to include crowds of colorful townspeople where appropriate. Here some two dozen persons appeared from time to time--throwing dice, playing ring-toss, pitching apples, turning cartwheels, washing laundry and running about with flambeaux.

The performers on the whole came through clearly; though one was frequently aware of their striving for clarity, which they must eventually overcome. Clarity should seem effortless.

The Group 20 Players wound up their season with Shaw's Pygmalion. This represented a real coup. The professional rights to the play have been frozen since My Fair Lady opened and will remain so as long as the musical runs. Somehow Kilty managed to persuade Shaw's agents to make one exception; those who missed this production will just have to wait years to see it.

Shaw's masterful satire on social distinctions and middle-class morality enjoyed a stunning production under the direction of Laurier Lister.

Rosemary Harris came over all the way from London to play the role of Eliza; and she was certainly worth importing. She negotiated all the phonetic difficulties impeccably as she underwent the transformation from a cockney flower-girl to a lady who could pass for a well-bred duchess.

Max Adrian wrung every drop out of the part of 'Liza's father. Kilty was a model Professor Higgins, and Cavada Humphrey was properly reginal as the professor's Victorian mother.

A noteworthy touch of authenticity was provided by a vintage London taxi especially imported for the show from England, which drove on and off the outdoor set as called for in the script.

This summer marked the thirteenth season of the Boston Summer Theatre. In its first eleven years, it averaged one or two works of top quality each season amidst a mass of mediocrity. Last summer producer Lee Falk offered nothing but plays of high quality--Jonson's Volpone, Anouilh's Thieves' Carnival, Fry's Venus Observed, Shaw's Back to Methuselah, Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, and Graham Greene's The Potting Shed. The 1958 season of eight plays constituted a letdown from last year, but it was far better than all the pre-1957 seasons.

One of the most gifted of our young men of letters is Gore Vidal. Having attained high esteem through his novels, TV dramas, movie scripts, short stories and literary criticisms, he has now successfully taken the legitimate stage into his domain with his comedy Visit to a Small Planet, which recently finished a Broadway run of almost 400 performances.

Visit satirizes in very funny fashion a good many things, such as man's penchant for war, the Pentagon bureaucracy, the self-inflated news analyst, free love, the power of mind over matter, and the flying saucer furore.

Among the many virtues of the play--as of most of Vidal's writing--is the freshness of the dialogue. He avoids dull or hackneyed speech; his lines are original and unpredictable, and be-speak an uncommonly imaginative creative mind.