Showing Up the Americans

Coriolanus, The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Royal Shakespeare Company
The National Post

The Royal Shakespeare Company's performances in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Harlem have given our festival something to compete with. In the first two weeks of March the Royal Shakespeare Company brought three productions from England to the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. For two of them, Coriolanus and The Merry Wives of Windsor, this college date was originally meant to be the end of the road. However, after being enthusiastically greeted on both sides of the Atlantic, they will now be playing at the Old Vic, the historic London theatre that used to be run by Ed Mirvish and will soon be run by Kevin Spacey. The third RSC show, an adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, has already moved to an equally historic theatre, the Apollo in Harlem. It closed there this weekend.

When Midnight's Children opened in London in February, British critics rated it as a brave try at the impossible, and this has been the general American reaction as well. Rushdie's novel, which rhymes the post-war history of India with the personal history of a child born on the precise dot of independence, is a long and crowded work that tries hard to be a masterpiece and has the impertinence to succeed. The theatrical version apparently derives from an aborted TV serial, and in that form it might have stood a chance. But when reduced to 3 1/2 hours of stage time, epic novels invariably come out scrambled -- both too long and too short.

Midnight's Children plays New York under the auspices of Columbia University, which had also been co- sponsors of the run at Ann Arbor. The two Shakespeares were solely the responsibility of the University of Michigan itself, and in particular of its Music Society, which every two years hosts a campus residency by the RSC, discussions, tutorials, and lectures as well as performances. Ann Arbor is one of the American towns closest to Canada, and not just geographically. Very much dominated by its university, it feels like a lived-in place, rather than a collection of strip malls. It is also practically a dormitory town for our own Stratford Festival. One wishes that there were a Canadian university as enterprising, as well-equipped (Ann Arbor's Power Center for the Performing Arts, where the shows were housed, is of amphitheatre proportions) and -- most of all -- as richly endowed. Failing that, it would have been nice if one of our other theatre organizations could have picked up on the RSC's presence in the neighbourhood and whisked them over the border. In fact, Don Shipley, the artistic director of Toronto's WorldStage, which starts its 2003 season next week, had entertained hopes of doing just that. But the dates didn't match, and as Shipley himself says, discussion for future seasons is -- in the non- university sense -- academic; with du Maurier's name-sponsorship forcibly withdrawn, it seems certain this year's WorldStage will be the last.

Friends of mine at Ann Arbor, enthusing over Coriolanus and The Merry Wives, and especially over the clarity and vitality with which the actors delivered the texts, said, "but of course, you take that for granted." I think they were being kind: not in regard to these two shows but to the RSC's work in general. There was a time in the 1960s, and another time in the '70s, when the RSC set the standard for Shakespearean production around the world. The record since has been erratic. One can't get over-confident on the strength of a couple of shows, but these two were very encouraging -- much superior, in terms of acting consistency and overall liveliness, to the company's London season of rare Renaissance plays, which was certainly adventurous but in which the enterprise outstripped the execution.

It may be wrong to speak of the RSC as a company; at any given moment it is likely to be several companies, and even in Ann Arbor there were two entirely separate groups of actors -- one for Shakespeare and one for Rushdie. This diversity, as I've complained before, can breed confusion, both artistic and logistic; but it also gives the chance for a particular team to strike out excitingly on its own. There are times when it can be a positive advantage for the left hand not to know what the right hand is doing.

The two Shakespeares, like the Jacobean quintet, had started their lives at the intimate Swan Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, but they were far more successfully blown up for a larger space. This was especially true of Coriolanus, a magnificent play set early in the history of Republican Rome, which here looked panoramic. The play depicts an aristocratic caste bred in a cult of war, of which the central character, trained by a bellicose mother, is the most enthusiastic adherent. Searching for a recognizable equivalent, David Farr, the director, came up with Japanese samurai. I don't know that it helps either the audience or the play to substitute one remote culture for another; one female character tip-toed daintily about like a minor figure from The Mikado, and even in the battle scenes -- the most detailed and elaborate in Shakespeare -- the stylization got in the way; it was hard to follow what was going on. Much of the time, though, the trappings could be tuned out. My own hunch is that Shakespeare and company, taking the verse form for granted, thought that they were writing realistically. Certainly this is true of Coriolanus, in which the language is extraordinarily supple and forceful; colloquial humanity asserts itself through an apparently formal, structured medium, and the thrill lies in the tension between the two. The central scenes, in which a newly emergent populace asserts its will against the hero, and succeeds in getting him banished, convey a sense of a society on the move, history in motion, that's almost unmatched in drama. It's hard to realize that potential on stage (if only because, in these straitened times, there never seem to be enough bodies available) but this production, after some faltering, brought it off. Greg Hicks, who plays the title role, is pretty much unknown outside the English theatre, but is a star within it. He has been with the RSC, on and off, since the 1970s and apparently was greatly surprised to be asked, at his time of life, to play a hero whose arch-enemy describes him as a "boy of tears." Hicks, though, is one of those ageless actors, graceful and with a steel-tipped, light- baritone voice in superb control of the play's tirades.

When Coriolanus, whose shyness matches his arrogance, is obliged to put on the robe of humility and beg the people's votes for the consulship, he finds the process impossible to take seriously; but he cannot laugh it off, and Hicks shows us exactly how his incredulity hardens into rage, and why that should lead him to march on Rome at the head of an alien army. He has a core almost of steel; not quite though and, when his mother, wife and son come to plead with him to spare the city, he is unable to refuse them.

This is the only production I have seen in which his boy (who has only three grudging lines in which to show himself a chip off the old block) makes the first visible dent in his father's armour. It is left to the matriarch Volumnia to drive the blade home, and drive it she does. Alison Fiske, who makes her a wonderfully unyielding Tory matron, is an actress I have admired since the '60s, when I saw her at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, playing Jessica in The Merchant of Venice with a burnished warmth that practically jerked me out of my deck chair. Fiske is one performer here who, at the very end, benefits from the kabuki treatment. She returns to Rome, knowing that in saving her city she has sacrificed her son. She has no lines, but the production permits her a tremendous silent scream.

The Merry Wives of Windsor, at the other end of Shakespeare's range and his only play set firmly in his own time, is also transplanted: to the late 1940s, with small-town post-war England beginning tentatively to feel its oats. This very relaxed production, directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, is not the most hilarious Merry Wives I have seen, but its laughs are warm and honest, and leave you feeling good. The end-of-play reconciliation is a small epiphany. Ford (Tom Mannion), the cuckold in his own imagination, misses out on the virtuoso displays of farcical self-torment with which most actors of the role bring down the house; but I did believe, more firmly than I usually do, that he was jealous and that it hurt.

There is a genial, gentlemanly Falstaff by Richard Cordery, who had shone in Coriolanus as a dangerously suave Menenius, the glad- handing patrician posing as the people's friend; as Sir John his enforced indignities are accentuated by his being as tall by nature as he is round by padding. His followers, too, usually nonentities, become recognisable saloon-bar types -- "spivs," people have called them in those dear old black-market days - and the lovesick Master Slender comes similarly to life as a tongue-tied county booby. The wives themselves (Lucy Tregear and Claire Carrie) are very pleasant plotters, with enough contrast to keep us interested. Hicks turns up as a firebrand French spluttering with a bloodlust (not all that unlike Coriolanus, really) and Fiske is his housekeeper -- or, in this dispensation, his charlady -- Mistress Quickly; this character's running joke is her unstoppable garrulity, and she finds a rhythm for it that seems absolutely right for both periods.

For the first time in years I felt, not that British Shakespeare productions had things to teach the Canadian models, but that they were giving us, as they should, something to compete with. Both these shows have young directors. One hopes that they will be an integral part of the RSC's new regime, and that a once-great company will be great again.