Fool's Paradise Not the Soul of Wit

RIFFS ON SHAKESPEARE: Fool’s Paradise
Solar Stage
The Globe and Mail

THIS is a comedy show. Two actors, got up like academics, introduce a third who says he's William Shakespeare, come from the grave to tell us about himself. The three shoot off a quick-fire volley of familiar phrases: "my salad days," "brevity is the soul of wit," "it was Greek to me," and dozens more. They say that every time we repeat one of them, we're quoting Shakespeare.

They're right, of course, though maybe not 100 per cent. Look at their title. They blame it on Romeo and Juliet . The Nurse in that play tells Romeo that if he should lead Juliet "into a fool's paradise, as they say, it were a very gross kind of behaviour." That "as they say" suggests that the phrase was already proverbial and that Shakespeare on this occasion was quoting someone else. For all that, the title is a good one, with far-reaching reverberations. It sums up the show, which exudes witless self-satisfaction.

That hardly makes it unique in the current Toronto theatre, and I confess that I am about to break a butterfly on a wheel. (I'm not quoting Shakespeare.) Fool's Paradise is only a lunch-time production, lasting less than an hour, playing twice daily on a tiny stage in Scotia Plaza to an audience that, at the second house last Friday, numbered about a dozen. Its three performers seem to know what they're doing, though not necessarily why. Mark Ellis, the trim and bearded fellow who plays Shakespeare, also does a very sharp impression of Sean Connery as he might be in Macbeth. His two colleagues -- Gerry Butts, a genial heavy, and Adrian Hough, a querulous zany -- are less good at this routine, and why it should take all three of them is a question. The answer seems to be that Ned Vukovic, the production's director and guiding light, doesn't know when to stop. (This is apart from the times when he shouldn't even start.) You take the famous Scottish play and the famous Scottish actor, put 'em together and what have you got? If you're smart and lucky, a 30-second gag. If you're here, a one-joke comic-strip reduction of the entire play, with all three actors mugging through their burrs, or burring through their mugs.

Well, at least it's not pretentious. Actually, it is, but without the courage of its conceit. It seems to want to say things about Shakespeare, or at least about the way Shakespeare gets done. "Shak" -- that's what they call him in the program though mercifully not on the stage -- gets to tell off Hollywood for adapting his old plays rather than doing originals (which is rich coming from him, the plagiarist's plagiarist) and then rounds on Kenneth Branagh for taking four whole hours over Hamlet . Ellis has a touch of Branagh himself in his voice and bearing, though it isn't exploited. By way of rebuke, he and his guys offer us their four-minute version.

When I was at school we used to do this kind of number in end-of-term revues, and we had the integrity to employ only lines from the original. Once you start paraphrasing ("I was screwed," says the Ghost), you lose the entire point. Lay coarse acting over a coarse script and you get something that seems, no kidding, much longer than the Branagh.

We are then promised some really bad acting. That sounds interesting. Bad acting has been known to happen in Canada, and even to raise cheers from audiences and raves from critics; it would be good to see it skewered. Bad Shakespearean acting, in any country, is an especially juicy target; but the satire here bears no relation to anything. It couldn't, because they're not playing Shakespeare, they're playing the history-play skit from the British revue Beyond the Fringe . (A great, great show, but that was never its finest five minutes.)

Later someone recites the lyric to A Hard Day's Night with the voice and gait of Laurence Olivier's Richard III. This is an old Peter Sellers turn, and even he could only make it funny for a moment. At the other side of the stage someone else does Richard's opening speech in the accents of John Lennon, which I suppose is more original. When he got to the line about the "wanton, ambling nymph," he added brightly "Yoko!" At which dismal moment I realized that the show would do anything for a laugh. In retrospect, I sympathize. By the time it was over I would have done anything for a laugh myself.