Love On the Run: Shakespeare in the Ruff remixes the Bard with Two Gents

Two Gents
Shakespeare in the Ruff
The National Post

What used to be Shakespeare in the Rough is now Shakespeare in the Ruff. What used to be The Two Gentlemen of Verona is now just Two Gents. The company that, after a lapse of a few years, has restored open-air Shakespeare to Withrow Park commences operations with a show that signifies, by its change of title, that it has radical designs on its author's possibly first, and probably worst, comedy. Actually they turn out not to be as radical as all that. Which doesn't stop the show from being enthusiastic and enjoyable.

A refresher course: The two gents are Valentine and Proteus, and they both leave their Verona home for the bright lights of Milan. Valentine, carefree and heartfree, goes first; Proteus is paternally pressured into following him, though he'd rather stay home and court his beloved Julia, who fancies him right back. In this production, set fairly unobtrusively in the late 19th century, Verona is located in Ontario and Milan in Manitoba. No harm done, but who would have thought that in them there days Milan, Man., was ruled over by a Duke - or, in this dispensation, a Duchess - with absolute powers?

Anyway, it's unsurprisingly ironic that Valentine, the scoffer at love, should immediately fall for the Duchess' daughter Silvia. Proteus, on arrival, falls for her too, and forgets Julia, which is tough, seeing as she's just decided to follow him to Milan. (In male disguise, natch.) Proteus, setting some kind of record for betraying best friend and best girl at the same time, informs the Duchess of Valentine's and Silvia's plans to elope. The Duchess, who has earmarked her daughter for someone wealthier and stupider, tells Valentine to get out of town. And he doesn't even have frequent train-travel points; he seems to be making his way home on foot when he's captured by outlaws who make him an offer he can't refuse - be our captain or we'll kill you. (They're impressed by his book learnin'. No kidding. It's in Shakespeare.)

Proteus, who doesn't seem to understand the precise ways in which absence makes the heart grow fonder, is miffed that his double-double-crossing does not endear him to Silvia. She runs away, and is captured by the very brigands who have adopted Valentine. She's rescued by Proteus who, when she still rebuffs him, threatens to rape her. At which point Valentine steps out from behind a tree and disarms Proteus - both literally and figuratively. So impressive is Proteus's repentance that Valentine makes him a present of Silvia. "All that was mine in Silvia I give thee," is the line; and though there have been attempts to prove that it doesn't mean what it appears to mean, or that it's a satire on exaggerated Renaissance ideals of friendship, it's very hard to make them stick. It certainly appalls Julia, who is still in disguise and, fearing that she may be about to lose her man again, faints dead away. This is the most notorious crux in the play and I wondered, given all the publicity, how Shakespeare in the Ruff were going to confront it.

They don't. They simply cut the line; and the play goes merrily on without it. Having skirted the big problem, the Shakespeare-in-the-Ruffians (their coinage, and I like it) set about solving a less obvious one. Julia, they reason, can't possibly take Proteus back without a murmur, not after all he's put her through. Throughout the evening, they've been buffing up an admittedly slender script by throwing in lines from elsewhere in the complete works; passages have been lifted from As You Like It, Measure for Measure and even Othello. Now, at the close, they borrow the bittersweet finale of another early but far wiser comedy, Love's Labour's Lost. As it's not every week that I get to withhold the ending of a Shakespeare play, I won't say precisely how this works. But work it does. And since the show is frankly advertised as an adaptation, with an abbreviated title, there's no call to get purist about it.

In fact, I could wish they'd gone further. In their version Valentine still pairs off with Silvia, with the production's full approval. But they might have made something of the fact that, in the last two pages of the text as written, neither lady gets to say a word. This isn't unusual in a Shakespeare comedy; even the most spirited and loquacious heroines tend to go very quiet at the end, probably because that's when the plot lines have to be tied up and it falls to someone in authority, in those days invariably a man, to sort them out. (The only exception is Portia, who's still in charge at the end of The Merchant of Venice by virtue of being the richest and therefore most powerful person on the scene, which happens to be her own house.) Still, it would be perfectly possible to suggest that Julia and Silvia are silently protesting the ways in which their destinies are being decided. I doubt if that crossed Shakespeare's mind, but he isn't around to tell us.

Brendan McMurtry-Howlett's production, though, has merrier and mellower ends in view. Among a hardworking and multi-tasking cast, there are especially alert performances from Lesley Robertson as Julia, and from Adrian Morningstar as a fresh-faced Proteus in whose mouth butter would not stand the slightest chance of melting and who really does seem capable of persuading himself that every lie he tells is justified. For his most villainous soliloquy the director has him cunningly flanked by the two people he's about to ruin. Trudy Weiss, who though Canadian was last seen by me at the National Theatre in London, shows what an advantage experience and authority can be when you have a Duchy to run. The clown scenes, often this play's salvation, are here subdued; even the dog, for whom the company may partly have been named, fails to take full advantage of what has been called the best canine role ever written. David Patrick Flemming, playing three parts, is best as the rejected suitor Thurio, a rich rube from Tennessee, or somewhere deeply Southern, whose departure with a line that couldn't be found in any Shakespeare play was, I confess, my favourite moment. I feel less tolerant about the substitution of a country ballad for the justifiably famous Who Is Silvia? Update the tune, by all means, but the words, the reiteration of her rival's name, have to be kept intact if they are to have their proper painful effect on the eavesdropping Julia.