And the Allusions Just Keep on Coming: Shakespeare Makes for Some Compelling Television
Riffs on Shakespeare: Slings and Arrows
Rhombus Media
The National Post
A couple of weeks ago Bravo! aired a TV profile of Richard Monette, the artistic director of the Stratford Festival. Despite its lurid title, The Madness of King Richard, it was remarkably tame. It started well, with its subject's revelations about an unhappy childhood that caused him to seek an escape route onto the stage, but these hints of a divided nature were never followed up. Amazingly, there was no reference to, let alone exploration of, what Monette has elsewhere identified as the great crisis of his professional life: the onset of the paralyzing stage fright that ended his successful career as an actor and caused him to take up directing instead. There were tantalizing glimpses of his breakthrough performance as the drag queen in Michel Tremblay's Hosanna, but those of us who know his acting mainly by report would like to have seen more.
One thing the show demonstrated is that there are a lot of people who can do impersonations of Richard Monette. It ended with a whole montage of them, the best one coming from actor Dan Chameroy. All the same, the most devastating Monette impression is probably done by Monette himself, who can take a sly delight in playing up to his own perceived role of the outsize actor-manager, rolling out the syllables and savouring the vowels. He is, paradoxically, an actor- manager who these days hardly ever acts, but who remains very much an actor's director.
Meanwhile, in the miniseries Slings and Arrows, Stephen Ouimette is playing Oliver Welles, artistic director of the New Burbage Theatre Festival. New Burbage is a big-time small-town operation that bears a strong resemblance to Stratford. It specializes in Shakespeare, swans swan about in its neighbouring river, and its flagship stage, from what we can see of it, is similar to the Stratford platform, though its lobby, with its huge sweeping staircase, is that of the Canon Theatre in Toronto. (And it's impossible to believe that the one could lead to the other.)
Ouimette is also giving his Monette. It's a wicked assumption, especially when he's handing out first-night benedictions in the dressing rooms, but presumably an affectionate one; Ouimette is a pillar of the Stratford company and will be both acting and directing there in the coming season.
The play that's about to go into rehearsal as the story begins is Hamlet, and the new text runs in parallel with the old one. Oliver gets killed off (by a truck labelled "ham") at the end of the first instalment. He hangs around in subsequent weeks as a ghost, and this, plus the appearance in one episode of a pair of argumentative undertakers, is certainly meant to remind us of Hamlet -- though, as this is television it's likelier to make us think of Six Feet Under. Also, Oliver dead and devoid of Monette mannerisms is a lot less entertaining than Oliver alive and loaded with them.
This is partly because Oliver's spectral function is to illuminate things that happened years ago, and that we don't care about. He was in a three-cornered relationship with Ellen Fanshaw, the festival's past and present leading lady (she's aged from Ophelia into Gertrude), and Geoffrey Tennant, a former enfant terrible of an actor who went mental in the middle of playing the Prince, walked off, and was never seen again, at least not on that stage. Now he's Oliver's successor, trying to breathe life into what he has accused of being a moribund, commercialized organization. However, where The Madness of King Richard could have used more facts about the past and less gush about the present, Slings and Arrows lives only in the present. It's six hours of onstage drama and backstage gossip.
On that basis, I've been enjoying it a lot, though I'm not sure how much of my pleasure derives from knowing the territory. The cast is crammed with Toronto theatre favourites doing cameos. Julian Richings and Robert Persichini, for examples, are delightfully Dickensian as the modern gravediggers. The script is the work of three actor-writers -- comedians Mark McKinney and Bob Martin and the very legit Susan Coyne -- all of whom are, admirably, in it; Coyne's nervous, harried secretary is an especial treat. They have wound the allusions very tight. Geoffrey has taken over not only Oliver's theatre but his new production of Hamlet, and the more the series zeroes in on the play, the more absorbing, entertaining, and even moving it becomes: The closer the focus, the bigger the picture.
Geoffrey and Ellen, past lovers, are played by Paul Gross and Martha Burns, real life husband and wife, and they make -- I'm talking about their acting -- a terrific team. But the reverberations go deeper; the Hamlet Geoffrey has to direct is a movie hunk (Luke Kirby) whom nobody thinks can do it. Gross himself, fresh from his TV success in Due South, played Hamlet at Stratford four years ago and, though he wasn't treated with that degree of contempt, he got some patronizing notices, my own probably among them. But as Geoffrey, he has all the glamour, the wit, the intelligence and the bravura of a heroic actor, a breed that can take on comedy as well as tragedy. The festival -- the real one -- should re-engage him.
At times he seems to be playing Albert Schultz (who, just to confuse us some more, makes a fleeting appearance at Oliver's funeral, playing heaven-knows whom). But at a deeper level, Gross too is playing Monette -- not the personality but the history. His Geoffrey is an actor who has grappled with personal and professional trauma by redirecting his energies. The authors, intentionally or not, have taken the two public sides of Stratford's director -- the populist and the idealist -- and divided them between their two male principals.
The result doesn't offer much ammunition either to those who believe that Stratford has sold its soul or to those, like me, who think it's doing all right but sometimes sails a lot too close to the wind. In fact the show ducks the question by making its villain an outsider: an American sponsor -- a sort of Wicked Witch of the South -- who wants to give the main stage over entirely to musicals, throwing on some Shakespeare in the two smaller houses "for those who like that sort of thing" while plastering the Bard's face all over town, just like it's done in the English Stratford. (I once swore a mighty oath that I would never use the phrase "the Bard" but in this context it seems appropriate.) Her cat's-paw in all this is New Burbage's nervously ambitious general manager (the McKinney role), but he is saved by actually witnessing a performance of Hamlet: Rather like the Puritan in Shakespeare in Love who's swept protesting into Romeo and Juliet and stays to cheer with everybody else.
Well, it was his first time; and the manager, too, acts like it's the first Shakespeare he's ever seen. How long has he been in the job?
There's also an oleaginous critic called Basil (Sean Cullen) whose role is less important than the advance publicity led some of us to believe. Are they trying to tell us something? Now, Basil can't be me; I'm thin. All the same, the only paper anyone is seen reading the morning after the Hamlet premiere is the National Post. What did I think?
Probably not the same as the New Burbage people themselves; our perspectives would be irreparably different. Still, Geoffrey, when things look desperate, reassures his cast that they have one thing working for them -- the greatest play written in 400 years. I prefer Lear, but I see his point; there's no play as malleable, as pregnant with associations, as Hamlet.
Slings and Arrows, a confessedly incestuous exercise, a mixture of in-joke and love letter, is at its best when feasting off the allusions, and they keep coming. Some people believe that bits of Hamlet, served up in other contexts, are more stimulating now than the play itself can ever hope to be. It's a heresy I would like to reject but suspect may well be true. The irony, a cheering one, is that the snippets of Hamlet always make you want to see the play again, hoping that the next time will be the one. That does unite us.