Stratford's Year of Living Adventurously
Thoughts on Shakespeare
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
Five Shakespeares, a Greek element and two musicals.
You never know till you get there. But at least on paper, the lineup for this year's Stratford Festival is one of the most adventurous there has ever been.
Start, as is proper, with the Shakespeares. The safest bet, though I'm probably jinxing it by saying so, looks to be The Taming of the Shrew, at the Festival Theatre, the opening show of opening week, and the only one of the canon's proven crowd-pleasers to occupy the flagship stage. It has other things going for it as well. It's directed by Miles Potter, whose Romeo and Juliet was last year's best all-round Shakespeare, crowning a steady Festival ascent that had previously taken in a fine grapple with Greek tragedy (Medea) and a decent new play (Good Mother). He'd already covered himself with glory by directing The Drawer Boy in Toronto, not to mention being the namesake of and inspiration for one of its characters. It would be tempting to say that no one is hotter than Potter; actually he's not that kind of fire-breathing director, but he's better than some who are.
His Kate, formerly his Medea and his Good Mother, is his good wife, Seana McKenna. McKenna was recently hailed in a Toronto Life profile as the first lady of Canadian theatre; I can think of a few contenders, but I don't think anyone could doubt her present pre- eminence among Stratford actresses.
An ungallant but unavoidable observation; McKenna is playing opposite a Petruchio (Graham Abbey, the Festival's current young lion) from the generation below her own; it will be interesting to see if the production wants to make anything of it. It's been done before (a 20ish Peter O'Toole once tamed a 50ish Peggy Ashcroft at the English Stratford) but then what hasn't?
There have also been productions, both in and out of Stratford, that have dressed the actors in cowboy hats and boots, which this production has been advertised as doing. It's one way of taking the well-known chauvinist curse off the play, though how far that curse actually exists where audiences are concerned is open to doubt.
One has almost to apologize for pointing it out, but the Shrew has an unusually consistent history of being damnably entertaining.
The season's only other brand-name Shakespeare is Antony and Cleopatra, a play sublime but booby-trapped. It's at the intimate Tom Patterson, a move that may deflect some of the Burton-Taylorish assumptions that persist in clinging to it.
It's directed by Martha Henry, whose track-record in this space (Richard II, Elizabeth Rex) is outstanding but who is still, as a director, somewhat underrated. Her leads are Peter Donaldson and Diane D'Aquila, Stratford trusties branching out. I anticipate a grizzled, bitter-sweet approach, but it's only a guess.
Meanwhile, the other two main-stage Shakespeares are plays that people, including me, have been saying would never again be risked there. Antoni Cimolino directs Love's Labour's Lost, his first production since his admirable Twelfth Night two years ago. This, for all its apparent obscurity, is an enchanting play and one with an especially glorious Stratford record. (Some people still have dreams about Michael Langham's 1950s production.)
Pericles, seen here only twice before, is directed by Leon Rubin; he works a lot in the east, which sounds right for this magical mystery tour of a play, and was also in charge of last year's invigorating Henry VI plays in which Jonathan Goad, now cast as Pericles, gave a breakthrough performance.
This year's sheer volume of Shakespeare -- five plays -- is encouraging, given what the festival is supposed to be about. Some of it may be attributed to Richard Monette's declared determination to mount the complete works in the course of his regime, though now his contract has been extended he may relax the pace somewhat. (If he doesn't, Timon of Athens, Henry VIII and Cymbeline will all take their bows in 2004.) Monette's own production of Troilus and Cressida -- one of the greatest plays but, again, seen at Stratford only twice before -- connects with what may prove to be this season's most memorable feature, and certainly looks like its bravest: its Greek component.
This, a long-gestated Monette project, looks remarkably wide- ranging. It's one thing to put on Greek tragedy; Stratford's record here, though not exactly abundant, goes back to Oedipus in the second season. Greek comedy, we hardly ever see; the cynic in me murmurs there may be a reason for this but I'm prepared to put him on hold while I await Aristophanes' The Birds, directed at the Patterson by an actual Greek with the almost too-perfect name of Nikos Dionysios.
Meanwhile, Stratford's new Studio theatre gives us an intriguing variation on Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy: that is, it begins with Aeschylus' own first part, Agamemnon, and then proceeds to two 20th- century French plays that roughly parallel his second and third: Jean Giraudoux' Electra and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies.
It sounds stimulating and -- for the actors, who will have to play the same characters in very different plays -- a challenge. And to cap all that, we'll get a second dose of Sartre, a production (postponed from last year, when 9/11 prompted a wholesale drawing in of horns) of his elegant vision of hell, No Exit, a play far more often discussed than staged -- at least I've never seen it. All right then: Even I have never seen it. Nor have I seen The Birds or this particular Electra or The Flies, so I have much to look forward to; criticism has been described as conducting one's education in public, and mine has been much neglected.
There's more. Last year's studio season, the first, was wholly devoted to new Canadian plays. This year, there's only one: The Acts of Venus, being the second part of Peter Hinton's The Swanne: Princess Charlotte, another trilogy, whose first installment was delivered last year.
Those of us who were both bemused and fascinated by it back then will welcome another chance to figure out what it's supposed to be about. In the Tom Patterson there's a new-old Canadian play: Anne Chislett's Quiet in the Land, winner of the 1983 Governor General's Award and set, like so much else, in the First World War.
That's not mentioning the musicals. The King and I is the big one, the only non-Shakespeare on the Festival stage, with Victor Talmadge as the King and Lucy Peacock as I. (This will be nostalgic for me: I first saw Peacock as Eliza in My Fair Lady. I thought musicals were what she did.) At the Avon, there's Gigi, which was the first-ever stage version of a classic screen musical, and thus the first step on the road to the Disneyfication of Broadway; aren't you glad you're not young any more? This will be the third Lerner- and-Loewe show that Monette has directed. Can Brigadoon be far behind?
The Avon, which may fairly be described this year as Stratford's haven from experiment (well, it has a proscenium arch), is also home to "the family experience": a somewhat unfortunate label, I feel. This year it's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which at least stands a fair chance of being better than last year's Scarlet Pimpernel. Chef d'oeuvre time: Brian Bedford directs and stars in Coward's Present Laughter, which sounds ideal.
Some of this has to work.