The Theater: New Recital on Broadway, Jan. 12, 1959

Ages of Man is a dinner-jacketed Sir John Gielgud standing on an unadorned stage reciting Shakespeare. If such an all-Shakespeare recital must differ from an all-Beethoven program by offering excerpts rather than whole works, it yet resembles it in one important way. It communicates the range and richness, above all the uniqueness of its subject. That it manages to do so, that it seems no mere Victorian display of The Beauties of Shakespeare, is tribute to the range and richness of the interpreter.

Interpreting an equally great dramatist and poet requires someone equally good at acting and speaking words. It is Shakespeare the magician with language who bulks largest in the recital, and Gielgud has his own touch of magic, not from any magnificence of voice or roll of theatrical thunder, but from a projection of feeling, a rush of psychological light. Moving from Youth through Manhood to Old Age, he plays many parts. Few will complain that he includes a host of warhorses—Hamlet’s best soliloquies, Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, an abdicating Richard II, a sleepless Henry IV, a dying Lear and John of Gaunt. A few may wonder why Gielgud includes numerous sonnets and not a single lyric, only to decide that he prefers his Shakespeare, even when most poetic, in a personalized context.

What stands out along with Gielgud’s mastery of his material is his absorption in his subject—the sense, toward Shakespeare, of something loved and lifelong. The effect that such a recital seems to promise most, a flashing virtuosity, is what matters least. The essence of the evening is not glitter but glow.