By Any Other Name?: How Much Can You Bend Shakespeare Before It Breaks?

Much Ado About Nothing
Resurgence Theatre Company
The National Post

This year, I paid my first visit to the Resurgence Theatre Company in Newmarket, and was enchanted. This summer Shakespeare troupe operates in a vernal setting whose charms are enough to shake my previous allegiance to the Festival of Classics' lakeside auditorium in Oakville.

The shows are staged in a tent, pitched right at the edge of Fairy Lake, a stretch of which is visible behind the stage It's a smaller patch of water than you get to see while watching a play in Oakville's Coronation Park, but having it framed by the theatre itself makes it seem even more magical; it's a part of the show, even if it isn't being explicitly used. It's the kind of best-of- both-worlds effect -- natural and sheltered -- that ShakespeareWorks must have been aiming for with their Home Depot Theatre in Toronto, but Resurgence has been cannier in its structure and luckier in its view.

It helps, of course, if the stage setting harmonizes with the natural one; Resurgence's Much Ado About Nothing (which closed on Saturday) was greatly enhanced by a simple, elegant design from Glenn Davidson, a compact interior that gave naturally on to the vistas beyond. You don't get this any more in Oakville, where built- up sets have recently been obscuring the landscape, or at the Dream in High Park, which admittedly has no lake to call its own but where even the surrounding trees tend to be obscured by elaborate facades. I have some quarrels with David Ferry's production of Much Ado but, taken all around, it was the second most enjoyable Shakespeare so far this year, bettered only by Stratford's Timon of Athens.

My reservations have to do with the question of how many liberties it's permissible to take with Shakespeare. Actually, "permissible" is the wrong word, because nobody is in a position to issue the permits; "sensible" would do better. The great French director Louis Jouvet is said to have replied to a correspondent who had accused him of betraying Moliere's intentions, "Tu lui as telephone?" In the words of an English critic, to whom I owe that anecdote, Shakespeare's number doesn't answer either, and I am constantly surprised at the confidence of reviewers who write as if they had some personal hotline to him.

I have, for example, seen a notable Edmund in a Stratford King Lear accused of not seeming villainous enough (he should have worn a hump?) though, since Edmund scores with two out of the three women in the play, which is no bad average, it seems reasonable enough to me to play him with a certain charm. This year, some of my colleagues have arraigned Ron Kennell, a brilliant Cloten in Cymbeline, for being "grotesquely comic." From my reading of the text, I would say that was precisely what he was intended to be.

And there I go, talking about intentions; I'm not immune. Let me put it this way: An author, especially a dead one, may not have provable intentions, but a text does have an identity, which can be tested in performance. If what an actor says or does is in plain contradiction of what the story is telling us, and especially if he seems visibly embarrassed about it, then we can be fairly sure that something has gone wrong.

I find that I can take almost any amount of re-locating Shakespeare, in time or space; the plays themselves are full of anachronisms (the classic example is the clocks in Julius Caesar) and the original actors probably wore Elizabethan gear, with a few trimmings. That doesn't mean our players should go into doublet-and- hose, since what was a neutral convention to Shakespeare's audience would have specific (and possibly unhelpful) connotations to us.

I do rebel, though, when a director persuades himself that changing the scene necessitates changing the words. This isn't because re-writing Shakespeare is morally wrong; it's because the results always sound silly. One of the minor villains in Ferry's Much Ado announced that he would have his lady love "call me her sexy Borachio as she is wont." Both halves of that line are newly made up, but the first does not belong to the same world as the second. As a rule of tongue: If you're going to put new words into the characters' mouths, keep to words that would have been current when the originals were written.

Ferry's chosen time frame was the tail end of the Spanish Civil War. His Arragonian soldiers came not to Italy but to the Basque region of France. They were all Republicans -- an International Brigade, in fact -- which made it a bit ticklish that their leader, Don Pedro, is a prince and is constantly addressed as such. In this production they called him either "major" or "commondante," and there was no way it ever sounded natural. (Cf. the lengths to which people go in Stratford's Midsummer Night's Dream to avoid mentioning Athens, or a recent Macbeth in which they got very coy over the word "Scotland.")

Other characters became "monsieur" or "citizen" or "comrade." The play's other minor villain was called Comrade Conrade, which was funny, but not funny enough to justify the concept. Don Pedro's bastard brother, the malcontent Don John, turned into his sister Dona Juanita, motivated by unrequited love for Claudio, the juvenile lead.

It's seldom wise to pronounce a Shakespearean performance definitive; a better one is always liable to charge around the corner and flatten you. But I feel fairly safe in asserting that Irene Poole was the best (because the only) Dona Juanita I shall ever see. (She was very striking to begin with, especially in her brooding silences, but vocally she ran out of steam. Don John is a one-note role; Dona Juanita turned out to be a two-note one.)

She returned at the end to throw a damper on the play's merry- making. This balanced the opening, which changed the announcement that Don Pedro's men had suffered few casualties to the news that they had suffered a whole heap of them. So all the fun and games were overshadowed by the reality of war. This is in flat contradiction of the text, which disposes of the war in the first half-dozen lines and never mentions it again. It's a post-war play. It doesn't seem credible that people with a bloody conflict still on their hands would devote themselves so whole-heartedly to amorous intrigue.

(Another rule: If you're going to update the plays, don't fix on a specific historical event. The parts won't match up. And if you get in an argument with Shakespeare, you are not going to be fighting from strength. He got there first.)

A frame, however, is less important than what you put inside it. The individual scenes and relationships in Ferry's staging were lively, detailed, intelligent and inventive. I liked the ongoing sense of a household, and I especially liked the head of it, Don Allison's subtly comic Leonato.

Only the constabulary scenes misfired, with gendarme Dogberry (Stephen Guy-McGrath) underlining his malapropisms as if he were aware of them, and Verges (Brendan Gall) played, for laughs, as a half-wit. This, apart from being in terrible taste, misses the point, which is that Dogberry patronizes the colleague who is marginally more capable than he is.

Paul Eves' Benedick, once he had shaved off his Hitler moustache and combed back his Hitler forelock (strange adornments for a man of his politics) emerged as a crisp and worthy Benedick, though Camilla Scott played his Beatrice not just as possessed of a fury but as unable to exorcize it. She sang beautifully, though "sigh no more, ladies," passed in various moods around the cast, became the play's theme song.

For once, the witty lovers yielded in interest to the sober ones. Christopher Morris, immeasurably improved since his Florizel in Soulpepper's Winter's Tale, played Claudio, with great resource, as a passionate cad, a heartfelt opportunist. Carly Street turned Hero from an ingenue to a buxom defender of her own rights and other people's, wounded and forgiving. This Hero was the heroine, with a new closing speech to clinch the point, and though this may have been a distortion of the original, it was also -- consistency be damned -- an improvement.