Leafy Highs Lows: Shakespeare in High Park Offers the Bard's Most Contemplative Comedy and his Goriest Tragedy With As You Like It and Titus Andronicus
As You Like It, Titus Andronicus
Canadian Stage: Shakespeare in High Park
The National Post
Shakespeare in High Park, formerly The Dream in High Park, took a notable step forward last year with its production of Macbeth, which was less concerned than its predecessors with playing games and more with playing the play. The welcome trend is continued this summer with alternating performances of Shakespeare's most contemplative comedy and his goriest tragedy.
Nigel Shawn Williams' production of As You Like It is an especially pleasing case in point. Modern-dressed, but hardly so you'd notice, it possesses the cardinal virtues of any successful Shakespeare: Its actors speak the lines as if they mean something and as if they have an immediate connection to what the speaker before them has just said. You'd be surprised how many Shakespeare productions fail the test of basic conversational lucidity, and in doing so fail to tell the play's story. This one gets it right from the very beginning, with Alexander Plouffe's Orlando lamenting his plight as persecuted youngest son with exceptional point and gusto. It carries over into his confrontation with bad brother Oliver, played with silky venom by James Graham. Their physical confrontation, which Orlando naturally wins, is practically a dress rehearsal for the professional wrestling bout in the next scene (a good and detailed one, incidentally).
Both brothers fulfil their promise in the remainder of the play. Graham is as full-blooded in his repentance as in his villainy (it's probably a compliment to him that the two stages seem more than usually incompatible), while Plouffe finds the folly, the passion and the residual good sense in the lovesick Orlando, alternately comforted and tormented by having to make pretend-love to the supposed young man whom he has to call his Rosalind and who actually is. Amy Rutherford is a heroine of wit and charm, with a keen sense of her situation's ironies, ambiguities and heartaches, both suffered and inflicted. If she never takes full command of the play as great Rosalinds do, this may be partly due to the cuts inflicted on her role in the cause of getting the running-time down to the park's statutory 90 minutes. "Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love"; a Rosalind who doesn't get to say that is operating under a heavy handicap. When Rutherford does get to take possession of an extended speech - the play's epilogue, in fact - she comes through very nicely.
The outstanding female performance, though, is given in a role written as male: the misanthropic Jaques, played by Jan Alexandra Smith as an acerbic bluestocking. Gender-changing can play havoc with a play's relationships, but in this case, Jaques having no relationships to speak of, it hardly matters. Smith is in fact the prime example of paying attention to what others are saying and taking off from it; her "all the world's a stage" is not a set-piece but an appreciative response to the Duke's preceding remark about a "universal theatre." Acting this intelligent is heartwarming in itself (though the casting does make it seem odd that Jaques' "seven ages of man" are indeed all about Man, with Woman unrepresented). Smith could be one of our major Shakespearean actresses, a possible fine Rosalind herself, or better yet a Beatrice. Among what Jaques calls the country copulatives, Gwenlyn Cumyn makes an arrestingly caustic Phebe and Omar Alex Khan a Silvius whose lovesickness is both silly and touching; he doubles as usurping Duke Frederick and gets away with it.
Keira Loughran's Titus production has fewer acting treats and less sensitivity to text, but a more distinct visual identity, the play's ancient Rome being decked out as legendary Japan. This really neither helps nor hinders; stylizing the play's horrors, with red ribbons denoting bloodshed, guards against unwelcome laughs; having the army of the Goths crawl on hands and knees toward Rome made me think of Napoleon's army marching on its stomach, though Nap only meant it as a metaphor. The action is distanced too much to be really affecting.
I can never think of the title character, the stoic Roman general whose family is decimated by war and intrigue, without remembering Ken Tynan channelling Lady Bracknell: "To lose one son may be accounted a misfortune; to lose twenty-four, as Titus does, looks like carelessness." Sean Dixon's finest moment in the role is the one where words almost fail him; "When will this fearful slumber have an end?" he asks in hushed tones, and in vain since his nightmare continues. He doesn't exactly plumb its depths, but he does suggest the crazed logic of the man, if not his crazed humour. Comedy, to judge from his Touchstone in As You Like It, is not his strongest suit.
The laughs, and the human interest, go as usual to Aaron the happily psychopathic Moor, Beau Dixon's performance being both gleeful and, when he defends his black baby's life against the sons of his white mistress the Empress, rather moving, at least as moving goes in this play. His rhythmic delivery of his first speech had the first-night audience clapping along, past the point where he probably wished they would stop, and where I certainly did. (By the way, though the play is hardly toddler-appropriate, there were several present). It's a shame that Aaron's last defiance, repenting any good deed he might inadvertently have done, has been brought forward from its proper position at the end of the play, robbing both him and us of the limelight he deserves.
The brothers Plouffe and Graham play another fraternal pair, the former as one of the more agreeable characters (and hence one of the first to perish), the latter as a prototypical Roman emperor, writhingly degenerate. Of the two major survivors, Emilio Vieira has spark as the Andronicus son who gets to pick up the pieces; Jan Alexandra Smith again plays a male-written role, and again very well. This time it's Marcus, now Marcas, Titus's brother who comes upon his niece in the woods, after she's been raped and mutilated, and makes a long speech at her: one that at first seems impossibly artificial and then, by sticking to its own terms, becomes very affecting. It's the play's own way of keeping atrocity at a distance and thereby making it horribly real.