Small Room, Big Impact; Groundling Theatre Company's Winter's Tale Shows off Shakespeare at Toronto's Finest

the winter’s tale
Groundling Theatre Company
The National post

The new Groundling Theatre Company makes its bow with the best Shakespeare I've seen in Toronto. That isn't quite as bold a statement as it may seem. We mostly see the plays here in open air stagings, where interpretations tend to be half-baked and performances underpowered. Indoors there's Soulpepper, which has the acting strength but whose excursions into Shakespeare have been infrequent and uneven. The Groundlings' production of The Winter's Tale has a cast of Stratford notables, with a sprinkling from the Shaw, all of them in the confined 100-seat space of the Coal Mine Theatre, acting at full exhilarating throttle, It's a pressure-cooker effect; the surroundings are spartan, but the experience is luxurious.

Graham Abbey, company founder and debutant director, though a (youngish) Stratford acting veteran on his own account, has mounted a production that's sensitive and intelligent with a few fascinating flourishes. It proves once again that good acting is contagious. Start, as the production unexpectedly does, with Tom McCamus' Sicilian King Leontes caught, in an unassertively modern-dress staging, watching home movies of the happiest times of his life, the ones spent frolicking with his wife and young son before his jealousy destroyed everything. We then realize that we're seeing him after he's been deprived of both of them, enduring his 16-year penance in what would normally be the last part of the play. So in this production the bulk of the action becomes a flashback. 

The new opening isn't especially deep but it's arresting, and it pays emotional dividends. Seeing the young Prince Mamillius (Callum McAlister, a charming and accomplished 13-year-old) in cinematic close-up makes his eventual fate even more poignant than usual. It also gives McCamus the springboard for an unusually complex performance. When Paulina, his self-appointed guardian angel, reminds him yet again of his guilt, he permits himself a momentary snarl; he knows she's right, but enough already. It's a throwback to his insecurity at the beginning of the story; king he may be but he can never have the ease and grace of his queen Hermione (Michelle Giroux), or of their longtime guest and his fellow monarch Polixenes (Patrick Galligan), and the dormant knowledge eats him up. Watching the two of them bantering together, his resentment gives way to mad suspicion. We can follow all the twists of his mind, and of the dauntingly complicated verse that twists accordingly. In his domestic scenes, he's in shirt and suspenders; when he comes to accuse and arrest his wife, he's in a military jacket with medals, as if to give himself the assurance of rank. McCamus, a sometimes too easygoing actor, plays with bitter, warped lucidity and unfettered passion.

 Giroux's Hermione matches him in power; her pride and hurt when brought to trial are superb. Lucy Peacock's Paulina is a thoroughly human, even humorous, avenging fury; confronting him with his newborn daughter she never gives an inch. When Leontes' resistance finally breaks and he falls in agony to the floor, she joins him there, attacking his grief with her own. On a tiny stage, with the audience surrounding on four sides, these actors aren't playing their emotions any smaller than they would at Stratford, but they never seem exaggerated either. For them and us, the encounter feels liberating.

The play's mood notoriously shifts halfway, when it moves from Sicilia to a pastoral Bohemia; where, however, Galligan's Polixenes proves as apt a tyrant as Leontes, if for a shorter time. The young lovers' roles are tricky for moderns, bred on irony: Charlie Gallant brings unusual freshness and conviction to Florizel; Sarena Parmar is a too-pert Perdita, though she's very good earlier on as the waiting woman Emilia. As Autolycus, the singing con-artist, Brent Carver, looking remarkably like Danny Kaye, gets on shockingly intimate terms with his audience (in this space, it works) but he's actually more interesting as Antigonus, the well-meaning courtier tricked into being Leontes' accomplice. This is the only production in which I've actually believed in his marriage to Paulina, a relationship the play only gets around to mentioning after we've met them both individually. Antigonus' famous "exit, pursued by a bear," has him, as far as I could tell, playing beast and prey simultaneously, one of those ideas that register as ingenious rather than convincing. Paulina's abrupt second marriage to Camillo (a jovial Roy Lewis) is managed with unusual tact. Back among the rustics, Robert Persichini gives a very complete account of the old shepherd, both earthy and poignant; as his son the clown, Mark Crawford is excessively boisterous but still amusing and mostly believable. 

Nearly all the actors double in smaller roles. To accommodate this, the text has been cut, mostly sensibly. I was surprised that a song for Autolycus and two jealous shepherdesses was set up, but not sung. More seriously, Apollo's oracle has disappeared; I'm not sure whether this is for economic or rationalistic reasons, but it removes a final, crucial step in Leontes' downward trajectory. What's important, though, is that the lines that remain are spoken intelligently, intelligibly, and hence excitingly. Training, experience, talent and intimacy pay off, beautifully. The final scene of resurrection and reconciliation works its accustomed magic, but the whole performance had us primed for tears. It isn't all sweetness, even at the end. From where I sat, Hermione's forgiveness of her husband looked far from certain. I'm not sure I approve, but I was certainly intrigued.