Riffs on Shakespeare: Taking Shakespeare
the Stratford Festival
The National Post

John Murrell's Taking Shakespeare is a modest but charming play with some stings and barbs to it. A young man named Murph, an undergraduate faced with flunking, is sent for special coaching in Shakespeare from an elderly female professor, known to us only as Prof. Murph is a mature student by undergrad standards, having dropped out for a few years. He never took to the Bard in high school, where they tried unsuccessfully to make him read Hamlet; now he is even more flummoxed by a volume of four comedies whose titles he thinks are too long. The anthology in question begins with The Comedy of Errors and ends with The Tempest: a selection that provokes shudders of disapproval from Prof herself. However, when she learns that the Dean of Humanities, who also happens to be Murph's mother, has suggested he study Othello, she perks up.

Murph's own tastes run to video games and Game of Thrones. (Prof might have pointed out that the latter is just as long a title as The Tempest, but she doesn't.) Prof 's own feelings about Othello are deep and complex, though not very deeply explored. It seems she herself was turned on to Shakespeare by a professor who inspired her and who happened to be teaching that play. Maybe she saw herself as Desdemona to his Moor, enthralled by his wonderful tale-telling, but we have to guess that for ourselves. Maybe it would have been all the same if he'd been teaching Macbeth.

Still, Othello it is, and after initial hesitation, Murph really takes to it. This is not exactly a surprise, and there's probably an element of wish fulfilment to it; it's what we'd all like to see happen. Still, as Murrell has written it, it's a delight to see Murph progress from the mechanics of the iambic pentameter (conscientiously counting feminine endings) to creative involvement. Prof takes him through the text at the rate of an act a week, giving Murrell's play its own miniature (and satisfying) five-act structure. Murph gets painstakingly but with inspired leaps into the character of Othello, comes up with a vision of Iago as nihilist that surprises even Prof and, under her goading guidance, arrives at an interpretation of Emilia that surprised even me. Meanwhile - also predictably but also touchingly - teacher and student develop a protective affection for one another.

Casting and acting are the main event here. The role of Prof was transparently written for Martha Henry who, as well as being the doyenne of Canadian Shakespeare or indeed of Canadian acting, is the head of Stratford's actors' conservatory; Luke Humphrey, who plays Murph, is a recent conservatory graduate and a rising festival star with a great oxymoronic talent for dogged impetuosity. (He's d'Artagnan in this season's Three Musketeers). In Diana Leblanc's production, a mutual respect and admiration, not to mention a shared pride, ring round the theatre. A great actor is a kind of teacher anyway; Henry obviously relishes the chance to speak Shakespearean verse assigned to characters who would never have been on her resume; she also joyfully points up Prof 's asperities and eccentricities. Also her pain and an underlying golden-heartedness. Prof hasn't, we gather, had an easy life. She lives alone, and never seems quite certain which day it is; she has an uneasy relationship with the faculty that employs her (she speaks witheringly of the lack of humanity in the Humanities), a conflict that comes to a head as the play progresses. Humphrey is matchingly perfect. It's a joy to hear the two of them speak the Othello extracts in different but complementary styles; they make a great trailer for Stratford's upcoming production of the tragedy itself. It's another joy, if a less refined one, to hear them trade nonsense syllables as characters from Murph's favourite game “Bandwitch” (which obviously should exist even if it doesn't). Michael Gianfrancesco supplies a wonderfully cluttered set, all overflowing bookshelves and frowsty rugs, for the sitting-room where Prof reads and dozes and teaches and has her being.