THEATER

Sisters, Wives and Daughters: New Portraits of Shakespeare's Women

performed by Claire Bloom

at the Hasty Pudding Theater

Claire Bloom returned to the Hasty Pudding Theatre last weekend, performing her new series of Shakespeare monologues, "Sisters, Wives and Daughters: New Portraits of Shakespeare's Women. The acclaimed English actress presented living portraits of three famous characters: Lady Macbeth, Isabella (Measure for Measure) and Rosalind (As You Like It).

From her Stratford-upon-Avon debut as Ophelia to her award-winning Blanche DuBois to her performance opposite Laurence Olivier in Brideshead Revisited, Bloom has exhibited incredible range on stage and screen. In her return to Shakespeare, Bloom treats familiar material with nostalgia and affection.

Isabella is perhaps one of the least liked characters in Shakespeare. A cold self-disciplined maiden schooled in a nunnery, she sees the world in absolute terms: virgin honor is worth preserving even at the cost of her brother's life. Yet Bloom breathes life and warmth into Isabella . We see her fear when pleading with the governor for mercy for her brother, her fury when the governor proposes sex in exchange for her brother's freedom, her anguish when she perceives her brother to have compromised his honor: "yet hath he in him such a mind of honor/ That had he 20 heads to tender down/ On 20 bloody blocks, he'ld yield them up,/ Before his sister should her body stoop/To such abhorred pollution."

Bloom captures convincingly the evolution of Isabella's moral universe; the oncerigid Isabella has accepted human imperfection by the final act. The ending--the Duke marries Isabella--feels perfunctory in both the play and in Bloom's piece but detracts only slightly from the rest of the portrait.

Lady Macbeth is easily the most gripping portrait of the evening. Bloom takes us through the stages of her disintegration. She sinks to the floor, wanders the stage, pulls at her hair, wrings her hands, looks wild, childish, ravaged, lost. Her soliloquoy "Come you spirits / That tend on mortal thought, unsex me here" is viscerally delivered, its cruel fervor made apparent. Bloom's composite of Macbeth is unusually harsh. In leaving out the "tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquoy--cutting right after "she should have died hereafter;/ There would have been a time for such a word"--Bloom's Macbeth appears less than devastated by the death of his wife.

Lastly, Bloom offers us Rosalind and the lyrical forest of Arden. While she touches on some serious moments (i.e. the orphaned Rosalind dismissed at whim from the protection of the court), Bloom concentrates most of the portrait on the game-playing and love-playing in the forest.

With a playful delivery of Rosalind's epilogue, Bloom ends the evening in perfect form. "My way is to conjure you," she declares as Rosalind; Claire Bloom's way leaves us magically enchanted.