riffs on shakespeare: tempest-tost
the stratford festival
the national post

Since the action of Tempest-Tost centres around the rehearsals for a production of The Tempest, it might conceivably have made sense for Stratford to program it alongside the Shakespeare play itself. But the similarity in titles might have confused the public, with people turning up for the wrong play on the wrong night, causing discord and confusion.

In the event, Tempest-Tost ends up in harmony and reconciliation, with some unresolved chords still thumping away underneath, which is a very Shakespearean effect. Richard Rose, who also directs, has adapted it, very closely and ingeniously, from Robertson Davies' first novel. This, published in 1951, concerns the amateur players of the Salterton Little Theatre (Salterton is an Ontario town not unlike Kingston), who are presenting both their first Shakespeare and their first-ever performance in the open air; their moving spirit, a Mrs. Forrester, insists on calling it "a pastoral." This in turn enables the Stratford designer, Graeme S. Thomson, to cover his roofed-in stage with greensward, which has the soothing and suggestive effect happily characteristic of pastorals.

There is a generosity of texture in Rose's play, a sense of life going on beyond what the stage has time to show us, that can only derive from its being based on a novel. However, unlike many dramatizations, it is not a bloodless canter through a series of predetermined events; leaving a lot of the book out, it allows us to savour what has been left in. It doesn't play like an adaptation, which is the highest possible compliment. This is despite the fact that most of its dialogue has been taken directly from the page, and that even some of the author's commentary has been cleverly incorporated into the spoken text. This actually improves on the original, since it neutralizes some of the more cloying notes in Davies' narrative voice: those in which the author seems to know everything and tells us what to think of it.

That said, a novel and a play are two different things, and Rose's production cannot always keep them in perfect balance. This is especially the case with the vital character of Hector Mackilwraith, the buttoned-up math teacher who gets himself cast as the virtuous Gonzalo and who, in virginal middle age, falls heavily for Griselda, who is 18 and beautiful. Griselda's rich family have lent their garden for the performance, and she, partly in acknowledgement of this favour, has been given the role of Ariel. Hector's passion drives him, touchingly and comically, to desperation. As a character in the modestly panoramic novel, he is first among equals. So he is in the play, at least in theory, but both the dramatic form and his own trajectory force him into the position of protagonist, without giving him the single-minded attention that would justify it.

Shakespeare's tempest and his own - - McMillan plays with a chastened grace that is beyond praise.

Davies originally intended to build his story not around The Tempest but Twelfth Night, and in many ways that play -- which is in the current Stratford bill -- provides a better parallel. Hector, with his built-in rigidity and his painful endeavours to lighten up for love, is Malvolio to the unheeding Griselda's Olivia; and both ladies, as it happens, are being played this season by the same actress, Michelle Giroux. She has some difficulty locating the heart of Griselda (a problem shared by her authors), but she rises most sympathetically to her last scene with Hector, in which both have learned something and tacitly acknowledge it.

Around them swirl any number of subordinate conflicts. There is that, gradually simmering, between Mrs. Forrester, little-theatre politician and aspiring social butterfly, and the old friend, now a successful actress, on whom she has prevailed to direct the play. Lucy Peacock plays this visiting professional with great charm in her earlier sequences as silent, amused observer, and in her later as merciful goddess, but she can be unduly pushy in between; the text doesn't need as much help as she seems intent on giving it, and neither does the character, who is supposed to get her way through tactful forbearance. It doesn't help that her reason for being in town -- to dispose of her dead father's effects -- is the one important element that has been short-changed in the adaptation. Kate Trotter alternately flutters and bashes as Mrs. Forrester without ever getting her into focus. (Though the two women are contemporaries, Mrs F. is meant to appear older; in this production, partly through costuming, they come off as twins.)

Most of the actors, in fact, try too hard at the start; the production gets notably more relaxed, more humane and funnier as the evening progresses. Brian Tree exactly captures the pedantic pomposity of the professor playing Prospero; he ends praying for the advent of a university drama department staffed by people like himself, a prospect that Davies -- a former actor -- seems to regard with strictly muted enthusiasm.

Tara Rosling is almost uninterruptedly wonderful -- perhaps, indeed, the truest person on stage -- as the professor's shy daughter, cast in The Tempest as his shy daughter. Jonathan Goad is persuasively brash as the army officer cast as her Ferdinand and with eyes for every girl in the cast except her. And Michael Schultz promising, and sometimes much more, as his opposite number, a clever but unformed young man, recalled from university in England to minister to a sick offstage mother and to fall serially and helplessly in love.

Benedict Campbell is the music director whose sensual philosophisings we are not, I trust, meant to take as the last word in worldly wisdom. Two more authentic minor deities impose themselves toward the end: Les Carlson as the gardener whose concern for his lawn finally reaches real pride and passion, and Araby Lockhart as an elderly makeup artist, not much good at the work, but attaining fierce dignity as a defender of the emotionally downtrodden. There is something queasy about watching professional actors impersonating amateurs, unless the play is A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the sight of this troupe sitting in a long line on a bench, awaiting their first-night appointment with destiny, is enough to still any qualms. It becomes a rich, delightful evening.