The name Tennyson evokes for me my grandmother’s leatherbound book of his collected poems with the name stamped on the front in gold, its thin pages heavy with columns of florid verse: an object more admirable than beloved. There are wonderful things in it, but a little goes a long way. My philistine sense of Tennyson as slightly dated and uneven in quality was only reinforced by “Maud — the Madness,” a one-man staging of his famous and very long poem “Maud” presented by the Phoenix Theater Ensemble. The actor Jonathan Tindle and the director Niegel Smith have made a prodigious effort to lift Lord Alfred’s words off the page. Isolated in a white room with two birch trunks, strewn with piles of paper (Clint Ramos designed the set), the character is Victorian and quite mad, ticking and grinning and ranting and struggling to maintain composure. Tennyson called “Maud” his “little Hamlet,” and his nameless protagonist has certainly, like Hamlet, been pushed by events (including the death of parents) to the brink of sanity. Like Hamlet, too, he speaks in verse, which Mr. Tindle plays down, like any good actor, but which he also seeks to contravene by often lapsing into a kind of overwrought legato; it smooths down the jingle of the rhymes but can itself become self-conscious. He is less appealing than Hamlet, though, particularly as scruffy and mad as Mr. Tindle makes him here (though Mr. Tindle deserves credit for the attempt) Tennyson called his piece a monodrama, but it is an uncertain vehicle for a dramatic evening. Studded with familiar gems (echoed in subsequent texts from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” to T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”), it goes on and on, and its aesthetic is definitely a relic of another time. Mr. Ramos’s set ends up mirroring the effect of the performance: a figure adrift in a sea of written words who without the anchor of his verses becomes merely an unpleasant character narrating a Gothic story. “Maud - The Madness” continues through June 9 at the June Havoc Theater, 312 West 36th Street; (212) 352-3101.
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