Twelfth Night, Richard III, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Taming of The Shrew
Stratford Festival
The Guardian

The best Canadian theatre, rather to my surprise, happens in small venues and is off-the-wall comic. But prestige and expectation still reside, as they must, in the two classical festivals: the flagship Shakespearefest at Stratford, Ontario, and the more gemütlich affair at Niagara-on-the-Lake, where the patron saint is Bernard Shaw. 

Stratford’s current director is John Neville, the Old Vic’s golden juvenile of the 1950s and a buccaneering director of regional theatre—first in England, then in Canada—for the last two decades. This is his penultimate season. 

Official secrecy surrounds the choice of his successor, but most local money is on the return of Robin Phillips, who ran the place dynamically if unevenly for most of the seventies. 

Whether or not Phillips returns, Neville's regimes has had an inescapable feeling of interregnum. 

He has restored the theatre’s financial fortunes and recaptured some of its departed talents. One of them is Phillips himself, who has been running a training battalion, known as the Young Company. This is housed in the Third Stage, smallest of Stratford’s trio of theatres. 

Its inaugural production this year is Twelfth Night, staged with the emphasis on romantic self-deception—but treated sympathetically rather than satirically for once. True, Orsino (Kevin Gulahi) begins the play on a masseur’s table but this may suggest virility as well as languor, and he balances these qualities beautifully. 

Olivia is a similarly full-blooded conception; at the height of her passion for Viola/Cesario, this lady lies down and offers herself to him/her. This is startling, but we do need to be reminded that there is actual sex behind this play’s formality. 

The contrast is accentuated by Phillip’s choice of an 18th century setting: a mixture of the mellow and the sedate, with Malvolio played as a majordomo imported from Japan. 

Oriental impassivity unfortunately spills over into uninflected dullness. There is, though, a sardonically vigorous Toby Belch and a very funny duel scene: an episode scorned by a recent generation of puritan directors. 

It is heartening that a director who might have overdosed on Shakespearian comedies still has things to say about them. 

This Twelfth Night is ahead of recent RSC attempts but behind Cheek by Jowl’s. 

The two plays with which Tyrone Guthrie inaugurated the theatre in 1953 have been revived this year, in unluckily tame productions. 

Richard III is a stolidly archaeological affair, incongruously framing a super-cool Crookback by the current white hope, a slim and dapper actor called Colm Feore. He has too little weight, the production too much. 

It keeps tumbling into hearty conventionality, ending with the virtuous faction shouting, uncanonically:  “Long live Richmond, King of England”—a solecism on any number of levels. 

All’s Well That Ends Well, directed by Peter Moss on the proscenium Avon stage, is given (as Guthrie’s and Trevor Nunn’s productions) an American Civil War setting, though it was not until Confederate uniforms started swaggering through the tuscan wars that I got the reference. The stepped classical facade that dominated the stage was meant to be the Tara of Scarlett O’Hara; I had taken it for the British Museum. I had also taken Helena (Lucy Peacock) for a Charlotte Brontë governess. 

Bertram’s apparent seduction of Diana was played in her bedroom: fine—we appreciated the psychological reality that underpins the Elizabethan bed-trick. 

But the scene was prolonged so that we saw Helena creep in to take Diana’s place. Fatal: theatrical convention cannot bear that much reality (and besides, it’s supposed to take place in the pitch darkness).

There was a time—Guthrie’s time—when fluidity was the watchword of Shakespearian production. These days we pause to change scene as frequently as did the Victorians. 

The Stratford first-night audience is very occasion-conscious and it loves to applaud. So it clapped at the end of each scene. 

That, when the show is going less than wonderfully, can begin to seem ghoulish. Fortunately, the remaining Shakespeare opening gave cause for applause. 

Richard Monette, a noted Canadian actor, made an auspicious directing debut on the festival stage with The Taming of The Shrew. He peopled the stage with irresistible bravura, pitching his tent in the Italy of the 1950s. This was evoked with a mixture of Zeffirelli carnival, Bogdanov brutalism, and the kind of ice-cream extravagance that I recall from Frank Dunlop’s production of Scapino: a super-jape under Martini parasoles. Some comment on machismo is plainly intended but the main business is pleasure. 

It doesn’t quite fit, however, with the director’s unusually lyrical view of the two central characters. Colm Feore’s Petruchio, though a dab hand at the beating up servants, is an introspective sex-warrior genuinely uncertain of the best way to tame a shrew, and in love to boot. Goldie Semple’s Kate does a brisk about-turn half-way through the play, so as to match him in warmth; earlier on, however, she has been a strident virago. Hints in the text that Kate’s home-life fully justified her tantrums are inflated literally beyond beliefs. Bianca, the spoiled and subtly exploitative younger sister, is here a vulgar dumb blonde who would not fool the most credulous parent or suitor. But the show does buzz.