Love in the Time of Victrola and Silent Film; Stratford Fest's Two Gentlemen of Verona Meant to be Good Fun

Two gentlemen of verona
the Stratford festival
the national post

A quick rundown on the plot of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, possibly Shakespeare's earliest comedy and almost certainly his weakest: The two gents are Valentine, who laughs at love, and Proteus, who sighs about it, and sighs especially for Julia, who sighs and loves right back. Valentine goes off to Milan, where he promptly falls for Silvia, the Duke's daughter, who reciprocates. Proteus joins him there and also falls for Silvia, so heavily that he forgets Julia and gets Valentine exiled, which doesn't do him any good with Silvia. Valentine is waylaid by outlaws, who make him their captain. Julia follows Proteus to Milan, disguised as a page. It all comes right in the end, sort of.

Some years ago there was a celebrated production by the Royal Shakespeare Company that set the play in the 1930s and broke it up with songs by Gershwin and Porter. It was, by all accounts, delightful. Dean Gabourie's new production, the first (and overdue) Shakespeare in the Stratford Studio, is set some 20 years earlier, in the Victrola age when pop songs, though rousing, were less sophisticated; it's also the age of silent movies, disjointed clips from which are projected before the action gets started. When it does, we find that both Julia in Verona and Silvia in Milan are actresses, and that Valentine and Proteus are stage-door johnnies, though when they first appear it seems that they too may be in the business, as they look and behave like a couple of off-duty song-and-dance men. It seems likelier, though, that they're just two guys who like to dress in matching blazers and boaters. Thurio, Silvia's hopeless and hapless suitor, is also an actor; he plays Othello to her Desdemona on variety bills, leaving her as unimpressed with his performance onstage as off. It's all very confusing, especially socially. I suppose it isn't impossible for a duke to have an actress for a daughter, but it seems odd that nobody remarks on it. You get the impression that they would like to have made him a theatre manager, but couldn't square it with the text. Nor does the theatricality, which includes a mirthless Keystone Kops chase, work on its own account. It's meant to be jolly good fun, but it obstinately refuses to take off.

Within this misshapen frame are a couple of good scenes and one interesting performance. The scenes include one in which Proteus finds the banished Valentine moping on top of a flight of library steps (the high-point of Lorenzo Savoini's design) and is visibly torn between triumph and conscience; and one in which the disguised Julia is forced to bear a love-letter to her rival Silvia. Both these encounters involve mixed feelings, and they bear out the production's declared intent (if you believe what you read in program notes) to bring out the comedy's darker or ironic side. All the more amazing, then, that it should shy away when it reaches the most notorious, and most troubling, crux in the play. Get this: Silvia is captured by the outlaws, Proteus rescues her and then threatens to rape her, Valentine steps in, Proteus says sorry, and Valentine, much moved, hands over his love: "All that was mine in Silvia I give thee." Now this might be a satire on Renaissance ideals of male friendship; it might be a seriously intended example of it. Either way, it's a problem, especially in a quasi- modern setting. At Stratford, the line is spoken but the production shuffles by the moment as if it didn't exist.

The notable performance is Gareth Potter's baby-faced Proteus, who passes with seeming ingenuousness from one deceit to the next, sincere in the belief that far more things are fair in love than anyone would dare to try in war. Of the others in the central quartet, Dion Johnstone's Valentine is cheery; Sophia Walker does her most flexible work yet as Julia, especially in her boy's get-up; and Claire Lautier's Silvia plays the prima donna well but without ever unbending. All three, in a commendable endeavour to get their meaning across, tend to italicize every other word.

There are pleasing cameos from Andrew Gillies as a painstakingly proper English manservant, Wayne Best as his huffy employer, and Stephen Russell as an elderly knight vowed to chastity with, his eyebrows tell us, occasional lapses. This leaves the play's two clowns. Speed, Valentine's servant, is a wisecracker whose jokes Bruce Dow, perhaps forgivably, fails to resuscitate. Launce, Proteus's fellow, is a far richer role, and traditionally the play's salvation. He speaks droll, earthy prose, and he has a dog. Robert Persichini is the victim both of a partner who's a scene-stealer even by canine standards and of a concept that presents his monologues as conscious vaudeville routines, rather than as human outpourings that happen to be addressed to an audience. Also, he is in himself a dour comedian, which in theory should help with Launce's tales of woe but in practice cancels them out. He's very good, though, at registering silent disgust with his master. The production's ultimate message is that Launce's love for his four-footed friend surpasses anything felt, in love or friendship, by his supposed betters. It's a reasonable point, nicely made at first, but it then gets overstressed with Launce giving the finger to the happy-enders while they give out with A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Talking of interpolations: one of Launce's speeches has been lifted wholesale from The Comedy of Errors, making this the first Shakespeare production I remember to include lengthy passages from two of its author's other works. At least Errors, unlike Othello, is another early play. It still seems like a gesture of defeat.