Flying the Flag

Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, All’s Well That Ends Well, Romeo and Juliet
The Stratford Festival
The Observer

Whenever I see the stage of the Stratford, Ontario, Festival Theatre I want to pack it up and bring it home. It is the most exciting Shakespearean platform in the world: designed 25 years ago by Tyrone Guthrie and Tanya Moiseiwitsch, and still unmatched. (Chichester, in particular, looks like its deformed child.) Broad shallow steps approaching the stage, a pillared balcony at the back, the audience in an embracing arc, and a polished floor from which the plays rise up and hit you. 

Stratford is now two theatres: the other is a refurbished proscenium house, the Avon. Together they accommodate 10 plays this year, among them Richard III  and All’s Well That Ends Well, the two with which Guthrie commenced operations in 1953. (This is Stratford’s means of celebrating its—what’s the word—Jubilee.) Ever since Guthrie it has attracted—to an extent relied on—British talent. This year sees Robin Phillips in his third season as director and Brian Bedford, Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack heading his company. 

Seven plays were unveiled in the opening week. Mr. Phillips has flowered majestically at Stratford, and his production of Richard III ranks with the finest Shakespeare I have seen. Richly spectacular (gorgeous Plantagenet, costumes, caparisoned horses, flights of arrows in a battle fought not faked), it is never overblown. The text is taken literally, both as ritual—with Miss Tyzack a fearsomely crazed choric Margaret still roaming around in battledress as she mentally relives the Wars of the Roses—and as psychology. 

Mr. Bedford’s opening soliloquy is full not of actors glee, but, as the lines suggest, of corroding resentment. He enters through the audience and, with his hump to us, surveys the set: one man against the world. It is this solitariness—which rises to a dapper tense eroticism in the seductions of Anne and Elizabeth—that wins attention and even, though the production is unsparing and exact, in its depiction of tyranny, respect. It seems fitting that he should impale himself on Richard’s sword having whispered ‘My kingdom for a horse’ in agonised wonder: all that for this. 

Maybe this production had a concept, but I saw only the play. The idea of Mr. Phillips’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream was more obtrusive (though not necessarily comprehensible unless you read the programme): the play dreamed by Elizabeth I, who sees herself as Titania, Hippolyta and Helena, the first two roles are assumed by Miss Smith, very white and still (a great surprise to critics who seem to have forgotten her best work at the National): the third, hilariously, by Martha Henry. Within the frame and mostly independent of it, the play pursues a two-thirds magical course, the clowns being below snuff. The human and fairy courts are huge (weight of numbers is something else this Stratford may be envied) and Mr. Phillips marshals his troops with greater flair than any director since Guthrie. 

The remaining Shakespeare on the festival stage was All’s Well That Ends Well, given an intelligent if rather featureless production by the RSC's David Jones, with Miss Tyzack a lovely Countess and Miss Moiseiwitsch returned to clothe the play in the finest fashions of Charles I. 

Shakespeare was also to be seen at the Avon: Romeo and Juliet, again with a British director, David William, whose journey seemed hardly necessary, especially as his starting-point seemed to be the Old Vic of the fifties at its fussiest and most pedestrian. Canadian directors were confined to the Avon, where they served us smorgasbord: a forgettable Miss Julie and a Ghosts rendered memorable by the clinching demonstration of Miss Tyzack’s tragic powers. Finally Mr. Phillips directed Molnar’s The Guardsman, eagerly anticipated as a bonne bouche at the end of a hard week, but in the event unduly heavy. 

Mr. Philips has, by almost universal consent (there are nationalist snipers), restored to Stratford an excitement missing for close on 20 years, but there are doubts as to how long his regime will last or what it can bequeath. He has yet to uncover any exciting native directors or, in my judgement, actors: Martha Henry has equalled the guest stars in impact and she is a Stratford regular: she is also American. There are Canadian actors of world class, but they all seem to be working outside Canada.

Were I a Canadian, I would have some worries about this: not to be assuaged by a visit to the bewitching town of Niagara-on-the-Lake (half an hour from the Falls) which houses a Shaw Festival that looks exceedingly like an outpost of the empire. Perhaps the Edwardian repertoire (Shaw’s contemporaries are allowed in, though only one at a time) dictates it: again Shaw is neither great enough nor far enough away in time to qualify for universally. As it happens, he was thinly represented on my visit, Ian Richardson having gone down with gastro-enteritis and taken Man and Superman with him. 

The patron was represented only by an atrocious production of Widowers’ Houses. The director of this (and the festival), Paxton Whitehead, redeemed himself by playing the Ralph Lynn role in Ben Travers’s Thark, and striking an exquisite balance between the cad and the ass. This amazingly funny play was given by Michael Meacham a production to match; Britons all.