Goes Down Smooth

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Shakespeare in the Rough
The National Post

Shakespeare in the Rough is, as its name proclaims, the poor relation among the summer classic festivals. I'm not referring to its standards, which can be high, but to its setting. It's in the middle of the city, just off the Danforth, without a scenic waterway in sight. The setting has no natural line of demarcation; it simply stretches away in all directions. These spaces can provide extra-long exits and entrances, and sometimes they can even be used to fill in an entire back story to the main action; Measure for Measure a few years ago did this very strikingly.

This year's production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a play not too rich in subtext or plot complications, confines its extra-mural activities to having a few characters trot off to catch the boat from Verona to Milan, while a steam whistle sounds offstage. Mostly they go to the port on foot though one, who's always late, uses a bike. As it happens, both Verona and Milan are land-locked cities, but The Two Gentlemen isn't very strong on geographical substance, either.

It's one of Shakespeare's earliest comedies, mostly notable for the way in which it forecasts the mature ones. Here, in sketchy form, we find fickle, featherbrained young men wooing witty, steadfast young women whom they don't deserve but whom they nonetheless get. The text is a riot of puns and of images pursued more for their own lyrical sake than for anything they might tell us about the characters.

Dean Gabourie has given it a pleasing, light-hearted production in costumes whose main reference point seems to be the 1930s, and with music to match. At one point, a scratchy vocal performance of “Who Is Silvia?”, surely the best-known passage in the play, is brushed aside in favour of a far jauntier rendition of “It's Only a Paper Moon”, to ukulele accompaniment. This jovial piece of sacrilege is the only outright violence done to the text in the entire evening, unless you account the moments of torture, swift but recurrent, occasioned by the refusal of all concerned to pronounce "Milan" with the accent on the first syllable. It may not be modern but it's metrical. There are a few other additions. Shakespeare in the Rough prides itself on making the plays accessible, and it likes to ease its audiences into them. This means putting off for as long as possible the dread moment at which a line of actual script has to be uttered. This time a vaudeville stage has been erected, on which appears a performer announced as Sir John Eglamour to declaim a soliloquy composed of fragments from King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. He's the kind of 19th-century barnstormer whom Mark Twain immortalized in the characters of the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn, and the idea here seems to be to have us laugh at his hamming so that we will better appreciate the more informal style that lies in wait for us. It's an unworthy tactic, mocking the old to make the young look good.

Later on, members of the company burst into more or less appropriate snatches of Cole Porter (“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”) and Noel Coward (“Why Must the Show Go On?”) accompanied by other members of the company on accordion, trombone, drum and washboard. The effectiveness of these depends on who happens to be doing them. Some of the actors can sing, some can't; just as some of them are good at cross-talk routines and some aren't.

It's brave and sporting of the production, though, to keep so many of the jokes in, however hopeless, and most of the actors play up gamely. Sanjay Talwar, an actor not previously at his best in Shakespeare, presents Valentine, the more ostensibly heroic of the two gents, as a floppy poseur, unable to resist striking attitudes whether mocking at love or falling headlong into it. Proteus (Adrian Griffin), his opposite number, is less amusing, but then his is an ungrateful role, a cad (especially in this production's choice of fashions) who never achieves the dignity and glamour of outright villainy. The two heroines have far better chances and they are far better taken: Pip Dwyer languishes loyally, with some nice fits of anger, as Julia, and Gina Clayton plays a clever Silvia, alternately swooning over her swain and running exasperated rings around him.

The blazer-and-boater style could as easily come from the late- Victorian period as from the decade between the wars. It suggests Jerome K. Jerome's humorous classic Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), especially as this play does have the best role ever written for a dog, that of Crab, the obdurate cur owned by the servant Launce, whose devotion to him may be the sincerest emotion in the play.

Crab is here played by a rotating team of canines, perhaps as a safeguard against the dreadful things that befell their species in this park last year. The one I saw (and presumably the others as well) wore a little white ruff, which could be either the production's sole jokey gesture to Elizabethan costume, or a homage to that most literate of television hounds, Wishbone, the thinking dog's Snoopy.

With all their advantages, though, none of these pets are likely to steal any scenes from Jameson Kraemer's Launce, a solid clown (doubling on trombone) who gets all of his laughs without ever pushing for them; he does have the best material. His rival comic, Speed (Jane Miller, playing as a man, or perhaps a boy), has to work harder for fewer results. Since he/she is the company biker, you might say that the role -- all wordplay, no character -- is tough peddling.

The supporting cast includes a Hispanic Thurio (Carlos Diaz), who contemptuously addresses his rival as "Sir Walentine"; a Duke who looks like John Gielgud but does not, unfortunately, sound like him; and two outlaws, one of whom seems to have stepped out of Robin Hood while the other might be a deserter from The Pirates of Penzance.