thoughts on shakespeare: richard iii, all’s well that ends well
the stratford festival
the national post

At the risk of giving away the ending: the last line of my book Fifty Seasons at Stratford is "For what it has achieved, for what it has engendered, and for what it has provoked, the Stratford Festival is the best thing ever to have happened to the Canadian theatre."

That does not mean its productions have always been the best to be seen in Canada, though they often have been: equal to the best at any rate. It does mean that when Stratford commenced operations in 1953, there was very little English-speaking professional theatre in Canada, and that once Stratford had started, theatre started blooming all over the country. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but it happened this way. As it became an institution it attracted hostility, but even companies, classical or modern, that defined themselves in opposition to Stratford needed, for that very reason, to have it around.

As a classical and more especially a Shakespearean theatre, Stratford has access to the greatest source of energy available on any stage. Tapping it is always a challenge, but at least Stratford has the ideal platform -- literally -- from which to do it. That stage is one of the things that has made it, from the outset, the leading classical theatre in North America. The other is the enthusiasm and commitment of its actors and audiences, both remarkable for their long-term fidelity.

I knew some of these things before I started writing, but I became overwhelmingly convinced of them as I ploughed through 49 years' worth of reviews and articles made available to me by the staff and volunteers of the festival's extraordinary archive. (Was this a hard book to research? No. But it sure was time-consuming. And I can say, objectively and gratefully, that it is one of the most beautifully produced books I have ever held in my hands.)

My own interest in the festival arose, while I was growing up in England, from my enthusiasm for the work of its first director, Tyrone Guthrie, whose last great productions in London I was old and lucky enough to see. I wanted to celebrate Stratford but also put it in a critical perspective and, as far as I could, in an international context. It tickles me that, though Stratford is so very Canadian, it was an Irishman, grounded in the English theatre, who kicked it off, and that it owes its signature stage to the lucky coincidence of his convictions about producing Shakespeare.

What follows, taken from the book's first chapter, is about Guthrie and that extraordinary first season -- mounted under canvas, because nobody knew if the venture would survive. And about two plays that are in the season again this 50th year, as are two of those original actors.

On July 13, 1953, the curtain rose on Richard III, the first production of the first Stratford Festival. Only it didn't. There was no curtain, and that is perhaps the single most important fact about the festival. From that, sometimes in reaction to that, everything else has followed.

Today it's the rule rather than the exception for an audience to enter a theatre -- certainly a theatre with any artistic pretensions -- to find the set for the play all ready and staring at them. It happens even in proscenium theatres, which do have curtains to raise. A thrust or platform stage of course cannot have one, and it was a thrust or platform stage that was built for the Shakespeare festival at Stratford, Ont. This was revolutionary. The idea had long been talked about, dreamed about, but never before put so publicly and aggressively into practice.

Of the theatres erected in the English-speaking world since 1953 only a few have been designed in direct imitation of the Stratford Festival, but all -- certainly if they were intended to house a classical repertoire -- have had to take notice of its existence. It would be foolish to claim that the Shakespeare productions mounted on the Festival stage have been consistently more authentic or exciting than those staged anywhere else, but something about the place always suggests the possibility. And when it becomes a reality, a bond is created between the actors and audience, a bond that has kept the festival alive and loved for 50 years.

It might not have happened. It is doubtful that Tom Patterson, the trade-magazine journalist whose brainchild the festival was, had any idea of revolutionizing the staging of Shakespeare. Indeed, it's doubtful he had much interest in Shakespeare at all. Stratford was his hometown, and his main concern was to put it more firmly on the social and economic map. Like some other pioneers -- Lilian Baylis, for example, the Edwardian philanthropist who founded the Old Vic -- he fell in love with theatre only after he had started one of his own. But the man to whom he turned to realize his dream was a confirmed open-stager who had been yearning for the chance to create just such a theatre. He was also attracted to the idea of helping shape Canada's still-unformed cultural identity.

The man was Tyrone Guthrie, at that time probably the foremost director of Shakespeare in the world. He had been artistic director (though the term itself was not yet in use) of the Old Vic for most of the 1930s and the Second World War years, returning often thereafter; he had also directed at the English Stratford. All the theatrical knights and dames who dominated the English theatre of the mid-20th century had worked with him; Guthrie's actors, it was said, inevitably felt they were making history.

The critics did not always agree: Some of them found him lacking in high seriousness. Guthrie was constitutionally mischievous and irreverent, and he could never resist a joke. (Maybe it was the Irish in him.) He was also reputed to shy away from scenes of intimate emotion. (This was probably not the Irish in him.) The two essential qualities of a great director are intelligence and showmanship. Guthrie was a virtuoso of stagecraft, especially when great massed scenes were involved, and he had a knife-edged mind. Physically, as well as imaginatively and intellectually, he was eternally restless. Since the end of the war he had been a theatrical nomad: He lived in Ireland but rarely worked there. For three years, Stratford would provide him with something like a home.

Playing in tandem with the established stage favourite Richard III was the far chancier All's Well that Ends Well. Both, in their different ways, proved to be classic Guthrie productions.

Richard III thrust Stratford -- thrust Canada -- directly into the mainstream of 1950s Shakespearean staging. Herbert Whittaker of The Globe and Mail, the leading Canadian critic, said that it was such a production as nobody in Canada had ever seen before. It showed the director alternately -- sometimes simultaneously -- in his swirling and sardonic modes. He was equally adept at creating grandeur and at deflating it. This being a chronicle play, featuring a coronation and a battle, Guthrie and Tanya Moiseiwitsch (and Douglas Campbell, as arranger of the fights) filled the stage with bodies, richly costumed and intricately manoeuvred. The production was in a processional style to which the stage seemed ideally suited; it was the first of many great evenings for the flourishing of banners.

Richard III is also a study of a mass murderer, and Guthrie happily exposed its cruelty. Three of Richard's victims, condemned to execution on trumped-up charges, were dragged on stage having clearly been tortured, and then dropped to their fate through trapdoors. When the ghosts of those Richard had murdered appeared to him before the Battle of Bosworth, the last of them -- the decapitated Duke of Buckingham -- was holding on his own severed head. Alec Guinness as Richard presided gleefully over the bloodshed, literally over it: He delivered the opening soliloquy sitting cheerfully astride the balcony, thus allowing the architecture of the Festival stage to declare its crucial importance from the very first moment of the very first show.

Many found Guinness's performance brilliant but lightweight. Olivier's film performance, which was to fix the popular image of the role for the rest of the century and beyond, was still two years in the future, and though more majestically satanic than Guinness's imp-with-a-limp, it was to prove equally comedic. Most later productions have veered even more emphatically toward dark laughter, though few have had Guthrie's and Guinness's genuine sense of humour: They were almost certainly ahead of their time.

The Canadian response was bemused -- but ecstatic. A first-night standing ovation (not the automatic event it is now) lasted five minutes: an eternity in theatre time. Everybody knew that history had been made.

The second production proved equally important, but in a wider context. In a sense it may be the most important production Stratford has ever done, since it rediscovered -- no, discovered -- a Shakespeare play. All's Well that Ends Well was at that time rarely produced and even more rarely liked. It was one of the few remaining plays that literary critics felt safe in dismissing, while theatre critics seldom had a chance to say anything about it at all: Even The Two Gentlemen of Verona has a more illustrious stage history.

A poor French doctor's daughter wins the hand of a disdainful young nobleman by performing a miracle cure on the sick king, then has to follow her reluctant prize to the Italian wars and win him, through love and trickery, all over again; Guthrie put this Renaissance story into modern dress and made it both hilarious and enchanting.

There was plenty of broad clowning in his treatment of the play's subplot, but the predominant mood was bittersweet, a delicate side of Guthrie's talent (and of Moiseiwitsch's) that critics often overlooked. The play emerged not as a dark comedy -- its traditional classification -- but as an honest, unillusioned one. The term "magic realism" had not then been coined, and when it was it signified something else, but it would have fitted the production perfectly.

In 1959 Guthrie was to recreate it at the British Stratford, and though he himself dismissed this revival as "cold pudding hotted up," he was in a minority: The critics mostly raved, and both actors and audience loved the show. A string of other notable productions of All's Well that Ends Well followed, and by the century's end the play was firmly established in the repertoire, a favourite of scholars and a magnet to directors; it had even played on Broadway. But Guthrie's 1953 Stratford production began it all, and has probably never been surpassed.

From the festival's more immediate point of view, it was the perfect complement to Richard III, an ensemble piece to balance that essentially one-man play. Helena, the heroine, certainly dominates, and she was dazzlingly played by Irene Worth (on alternating nights, she was the harridan Queen Margaret of the history play), but there are half a dozen other key roles.

Guinness played the ailing French king and Michael Bates was Lafew, the sharp-tongued lord. Douglas Campbell inaugurated a long string of comic successes at Stratford as the braggart Parolles. They were the visitors, and expected to be good, but at least two of the Canadians were equally impressive: the veteran Eleanor Stuart as the Countess and the young Donald Harron as her son Bertram, the play's cub of a hero. It looked as if the festival company might actually be a company.

The names from that 1953 program that now resonate most sonorously are those of three younger players who half a century later are essentially still there. Two of them, William Hutt and William Needles, are still on the Stratford bill in 2002; the third, Douglas Rain, is not, but he has returned often in the intervening years.

Hutt and Rain in particular were to become known as the Stratford actors par excellence, and Hutt is the company's undisputed leader. All three had significant small roles in Richard III as pawns of the hero-villain: Hutt was Brakenbury, the conscience-troubled Lieutenant of the Tower; Needles played the businesslike First Murderer; and Rain appeared as Tyrrel. These are roles that can go for nothing but that can also make their presence felt; the same goes for the Steward in All's Well, played by Needles. (In this production Hutt and Rain were walk-ons.)

All three actors were singled out in reviews: a cheering and accurate forecast for their subsequent careers and the identity of the company as a whole. Guthrie had predicted that it would grow its own lead actors, and it did so even more quickly than he might have envisaged.

People tended to patronize Guthrie after his death: Peter Hall in his published Diaries called him "that sad, mad Don Quixote of the theatre." But then people had patronized him in his lifetime as well, and many simply never knew what to make of him.

"I am an unashamed advocate," he once wrote, "of what dry-as- dust pedagogues call 'the play way' "; and in fact, no modern director has had a firmer grasp, theoretical and practical, of what the theatre is about. He may have been both too late and too early for the National Theatre of Great Britain, but he was absolutely on time for the national theatre of Canada. They may have named a theatre after him in Minnesota (they never did in Britain), but the Stratford Festival -- not just the stage, not just the theatre, but the whole buzzing organization -- is his real monument.