Stormy Soliloquies
The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest
Canadian Stage - Shakespeare in High Park
The National Post
Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's friendly (or so we hope) rival among the great Jacobean playwrights, once wrote disdainfully of authors who "beget Tales, Tempests, and suchlike drolleries" and thereby "make Nature afraid." Both of those unnatural drolleries, the Tale and the Tempest, are here to offset the heat wave with their wintry narrative and stormy weather. The Tempest, a favourite summer play, this time proves the droller of the two, but also the weightier. The Winter's Tale, theoretically the braver choice, is also here the fluffier.
It slides by, as plays have a habit of doing at the Dream in High Park, a space that offers all the scenic and acoustical disadvantages of open-air theatre and none of the attractions. (So it has trees. Nobody ever uses them and there's always a built-up set to obscure them.) Productions there vary from the anonymous to the obstinately wrong-headed.
Estelle Shook's production, which belongs in the first category, does get off to a good start, with the Sicilian family group - King Leontes, Queen Hermione and their young son - happily displayed for the brief moment before their world is destroyed. The instrument of destruction is Leontes's sudden self-generated jealousy, which David Janssen excellently portrays as a gnawing and obstinate sickness, refusing all physic; to himself he sounds reasonable. Kelly McIntosh is an eloquently wronged Hermione; Sicilia's two good counsellors comprise a Camillo (Jovanni Sy) of notable assurance and a Paulina (Nicole Robert) who confuses a moral force with a woman who shouts a lot.
The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's longer plays; indeed one of its scenes, the Bohemian sheep- shearing, is the second longest in the canon. The cuts in this scampering 100-minute production include that scene's debate on nurture and nature; I know that's what the play is supposed to be about, but I can't say that I minded not hearing it this time around. The rural scenes here are most distinguished by George Masswohl's funny and touching Old Shepherd, efficiently seconded by Sean Dixon as his son and by John Blackwood as an unusually downbeat Autolycus. Jasmine Chen plays both Leontes's lost son and his lost-and-found daughter, and she has far more personality as the boy.
The scenes that are really hurt by the general foreshortening are the crowning episodes of forgiveness and reconciliations back in Sicilia. Here they don't seem to be crowning anything. The resurrection of Hermione is extraordinarily perfunctory and unmoving. The famous maneating bear (as in "exit, pursued by") is here a polar one; maybe he's enacting his own revenge play, as one of his deceased relatives has earlier appeared in the shape of a rug.
The Winter's Tale moves back and forth between countries, and has a 16-year time jump in its middle. Shakespeare, experimenting to the last, followed it up with The Tempest, which unfolds in a single location in real time. So we have one play that almost demands an intermission and in High Park doesn't get it, and another that at Barrie's Theatre by the Bay (operating in collegiate premises until its own new home is built) can do without but does get it anyway.
Brett Christopher has placed the break in his production very cunningly, as indeed he has placed nearly everything else. The set, consisting of trailing fronds, is a bit dispiriting, but there are compensatingly splendid costumes of Napoleonic cut. Robert Joy is an unconventional Prospero, a little nervous about his powers, always having to prove himself. I'm not sure how much of this is interpretation, and how much is just the actor's natural manner, but there's a questioning tone to almost everything he says.
When he recalls his past achievements, in his great renunciation speech, he almost can't believe them: to think he did all that. He's a different man when he puts his magic robe on; when he resumes his ducal garments he's amusingly conscious of just how long it's been. That dukedom means more to him than to most Prosperos; he speaks with wounded passion of "the gates of Milan" being breached by his enemies. He could use more iron to balance his charm, but he has a delightfully believable relationship, both playful and wary, with Miranda, who's played by his real-life daughter, Ruby Joy.
She's a determined lass, who not only offers to carry logs for her Ferdinand (Caden Douglas) but actually does so. Their love scene becomes a wood-bearing contest, pushed to the verge of slapstick and then retreating into an enchantment that is itself enchanting. There's the same tact, the same mix of inventiveness and sensitivity, in Ryan Hollyman's thick-voiced Caliban (he seems to share an accent with Dr. Frankenstein's creation), who waits until the very end of his "isle is full of noises" speech to break our hearts. His encounters with Trinculo (Scott Hurst) and Stephano (Kristian Bruun) are the funniest, truest and most volatile in ages.
The courtiers' scenes, too, are unusually compelling; Sheldon Davis' tempter Antonio exerts a palpable hold over Richard Alan Campbell's tempted Sebastian; John Dolan is a beneficent Gonzalo; and Michael Rawley's Alonso sounds more of the king's guilt and remorse than any actor I remember. Even the minor lord Adrian (Alex Dault) has a personality, plus a cushion for his master to sit on and a mobile tree-stump on which to put it. Ariel (Jennifer Toulmin) is, as she herself says, "pertly done," rather like Peter Pan, in the days when Peter was played by a woman, exulting in the cleverness of him/her. The most magical thing about her, though, is her singing, of exquisite new settings by Jonathan Monro.
Both she and Miranda show an unusual compassion for Caliban at the end. The production doesn't downplay the darkness en route but its conclusion is, by current standards, remarkably un-bitter. It makes a nice change.
What this show has in spades that The Winter's Tale lacks is concentration: the sense that every moment counts and that each relates to the next. Even Jonson might have been charmed.