Mum's the Word at Dream in High Park; This Tempest Twists Gender Roles, but the Magic Still Works

the tempest
canadian stage: shakespeare in high park
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Shipwrecks are not the easiest things to stage in open-air theatres, especially when the night is still young and lighting effects are minimal, so it's understandable that this year's Dream in High Park offers us The Tempest without the tempest. Well, not absolutely without. What happens at the beginning of Sue Miner's production is this: The spirit Ariel arrives, does some arm-waving and a storm starts. There's no distinguishable dialogue, but we see a couple of actors tumbling acrobatically and aristocratically down the auditorium steps.

Then Ariel produces a model ship, which is passed among the audience, who handle it gingerly before it ends up onstage and is brusquely dispatched down a trap door. Actors appear onstage, waving blue cloths as it disappears. If we can't have the scene the author wrote, this is an effective and imaginative substitute.

Meanwhile, the storm's sound-track issues with fearful effect from both sides of the theatre's sound system. Amplification in Shakespeare is an abomination, but at this point the speakers earn their keep. They will do so again later when the castaway Ferdinand has his senses further confused by hearing Ariel's song relayed in stereo on alternating channels. This softens him up for falling in love with Miranda, to the well-concealed glee of her mother, Prospera.

You read that right. Prospero in this production is a woman. It doesn't work out too badly: certainly better than the similar sex-change performed on Shylock in Merchant of Venice a few years back. That play pretended a Jewish mother is identical to a Jewish father, an unwise assumption. But perhaps magicians can be unisex; Karen Robinson's Prospera is, within certain limits, a fine performance, rising to compelling heights of anger and disillusion in the revels-ending speech, and sounding a distinctive note of wistful renunciation when she surrenders her supernatural powers. In more personal relationships, she seems a very nice woman. Even before the storm breaks, we're treated to a glimpse of her and Miranda at peace on their island. There's fondness in her description of the infant Miranda as "a cherubim"; and if the child, in Taylor Trowbridge's performance, hasn't quite grown up angelic, she's certainly a fresh and captivating young woman, matched with an eager Ferdinand (Patrick Kwok-Choon), who charmingly says his first words to her ve-ry slow-ly, on the reasonable assumption that they're unlikely to speak the same language.

All the same, something is missing, something best described as iron. In the end, the mother-daughter dynamic isn't the same as father-daughter, and there are tensions in the play that go by the board. The production seems committed to an all-girls-together aesthetic that ends up sentimentalizing it. Miranda is allowed to join Prospera for the epilogue, a solitary speech if ever there was one, and Audrey Dwyer's Ariel shows less resentment of her captivity and less fear of its renewal than any other on record. Her one gesture of defiance gets from Prospera an arch "how now, moody?" in tones that seem borrowed from Maggie Smith. Even Caliban seems affected by the good humour; Ron Kennell gives a skilled performance, but one that's low on malice.

This is strange because you'd think that Caliban, deprived of his own mother, would feel more oppressed by a female conqueror than by a male one. The production proceeds on the assumption that you can alter one part of a play's chemistry—gender, race, time frame—and carry on with the rest as if nothing had happened.

This doesn't affect the clown scenes, which are unusually good, with Mark Crawford's Trinculo dignified as well as craven and Jason Gray's Stephano growing in self-importance by the moment. They're a very believable pair of drunks, while Caliban and Trinculo, sharing a cloak, make a great pantomime horse. The cutting of the first scene makes the courtiers' roles seem thinner than ever, but the actors fight back with Robert Dodds' king as credibly conscious-stricken as any I've seen. There's some gender-alteration here, too, and it works well with Liz Gordon's Gonzala. The supposed ace, though, is that Prospera's usurping sibling is also a woman: a juicy idea, except that the two never meet till the last scene, during which the evil Antonia is almost silent. The sisters are reduced to throwing glances at one another, and in fact Tracy Ferencz's Antonia does project a powerful image of unredemption. In the earlier scene in which she tempts Sebastian (Karl Ang) to regicide, the production underplays its hand; the two are shown as already being lovers, though it would be more effective to have the sexual and political seductions play out simultaneously. Economics mean that most of the spirits' masque has to go, but that's hardly a loss; what magic we do see is inventive. This is a lightweight production but it isn't dumb. It's the best Dream anyone has had in High Park in years.