julius caesar, the comedy of errors
Canadian Stage: Shakespeare in High Park
the national post

When in Rome, dress as if you're somewhere else. This year's season at Shakespeare in High Park has been announced as a Roman one. We have Julius Caesar, the piece most people would think of when they hear the words "Roman play," and The Comedy of Errors, which is Shakespeare's adaptation of an ancient Roman farce but which is actually set in Ephesus. In the Park production, though, Ephesus looks a lot like Venice, with the extras wearing carnival masks, background flats depicting palazzos and canals, and even a toy gondola. Caesar, meanwhile, looks equivocally Roman for its first, civic half, with the male characters (most of the characters in this play are male, though some here are played by women) wearing togas over their trousers; in the second half, however, after the dogs of war have been let slip, they all go into modern battledress. At the end of the play, with the republican conspirators dead and an empire on the horizon, a Canadian flag flutters above the stage. As a political statement, this seems hysterical; as an artistic concept, it's unearned.

Still, anyone can have a concept; what counts is the execution, and some things in Estelle Shook's production are both impressive and illuminating. The dominating figure, for once, is Caesar himself, given a serenely arrogant performance by Allan Louis; his first entrance, wearing a ceremonial golden mask and born on a palanquin down the steps that connect the auditorium to the stage, says everything about him and about the society that both flatters and resents him. Later on, his assassination is staged on those same steps; night has not yet fallen and we get a laser clear view both of the victim and of his assailants, nerving themselves for the kill; it's a drawn-out process and "et tu, Brute" has never seemed more cataclysmic. When we get to the funeral orations, the amphitheatre audience becomes the crowd: an idea that's been rather tentatively broached in the production's opening moments (which somewhat resemble those in Stratford's current Taming of the Shrew) but now pays off excitingly.

The speeches themselves are excellently contrasted: Brutus' dry reasonableness giving way to, and destroyed by, the populist skills of Mark Antony. Dylan Trowbridge's playboy Antony is, after Caesar, the outstanding performance, strutting in a bearskin in the first procession and executing another, more desperate, little routine at the end; outmatched, and knowing it, by the icy young Octavius, he's probably dancing off in the general direction of Cleopatra.

Sean Baek provides an intelligent if hardly charismatic Brutus and Allegra Fulton a passionately bitter Cassius. Their vaunted friendship, though, is hardly in evidence, so their later quarrel doesn't mean much - which is admittedly a perennial problem with the play; the scene, one of the great anthology pieces in Shakespeare (second only to the temptation in Othello as a male duet) has not, in context, been prepared for.

The text has been severely but astutely trimmed (the line about "the unkindest cut of all" is, amusingly enough, among the disappeared), though it's odd that Brutus's scene with his wife has been retained when all subsequent references to her have been eliminated. There is one new character: a composite of the soothsayer who warns Caesar about the ides of March (through a megaphone), the scholar Artemidorus who seconds the motion, and the poet Cinna who gets torn to pieces for being a conspirator's namesake. Nicely and nervously played by Michael McManus, he sticks around even after dismemberment, to usher apocryphal and unfortunately inscrutable commentaries. Still, he looks great as a ghost, as does Caesar; there's quite a visual coup at the end.

If this Caesar strikes interesting but intermittent sparks off the play, The Comedy of Errors is, that rare thing in the park, the complete deal, gondola and all. Matjash Mrozeski's production isn't the most hilarious Errors ever, though it has its fair share of laughs, physical and verbal. The latter aspect is especially striking; for a director whose previous experience has apparently been as a choreographer (both he and Shook are interns in the Canadian Stage/York University directing program), Mrozeski is amazingly sensitive to text, a quality that might pay even bigger dividends in a more sympathetic acoustic. He lets us get inside the characters' heads. The play's setup is simple, though brilliantly spun out; two pairs of long-separated identical twins - one resident in Ephesus, the other visiting - are regularly mistaken for one another, so that they come to believe that all around them are mad and are thought to be mad themselves. The visiting couple (Dylan Trowbridge as Antipholus of Syracuse, Naomi Wright as his servant Dromio) have the richer opportunities for bemusement, and take them; for maybe the first time I found myself not only laughing at their predicament but sympathizing with it; this must be how it feels to be gradually convinced that you're surrounded by sorcerers. Moving through and behind the farce is a thread of incipient tragedy; Aegeon, father of the twin Antipholi, is under sentence of death as an illegal alien, and is saved only when recognition leads to reprieve. Allan Louis, again, makes his opening expository monologue compelling and his penultimate despair very moving (though he really should speak up a bit). So the joy at the close really hits home. It's common knowledge that the family reunions in Shakespeare's last plays can move you to tears. It now appears that this, one of his first, can work the same magic