The Tempest, Twelfth Night
Theatre at the Lake: Festival of Classic, Canadian Stage: Shakespeare in High Park
The National Post

I wondered, while travelling to the Theatre at the Lake, if the shipwreck that begins The Tempest was going to be staged on the lake or even, when the passengers quit the vessel, in it. That really would be worth the drive to Oakville.

It doesn't happen. The scene is presented right down front in the main acting area, on a large wooden structure with deck-like qualities. As it's still daylight, with no chance of fancy effects, we get to see who the characters are and can make out what they're talking about. This lucidity turns out to be a constant feature of Miles Potter's production, and it's most welcome.

It comes, though, at a price. The set has to remain in place for the rest of the show, thereby blotting out most of the view. The stage's famous oak tree, which here seems to be growing through the middle of the ship, remains unused. The lake itself, this theatre's primary source of enchantment, is barely visible, and the attendant wide open spaces have to remain unused, though they would seem ideally suited to showing us the various groups of castaways groping their way around Prospero's island.

As Prospero himself, David Ferry seemed on the first night to be suffering recurrent crises of memory quite distinct from the character's. Telling Miranda about their expulsion from Milan, he informed her it was old Gonzalo who was "given this job," not a turn of phrase you'll find in the First Folio or any edition since. There were several of these impromptu substitutions; and they had an impressive habit, not only of making narrative sense, but of scanning as well.

Ferry is a very intelligent actor with an impressive technique. He can, for example, take a complicated subordinate clause and relate it back to the sentence he first thought of, all on a single breath. In a character as complexly articulate as Prospero, this is a great asset. He is firmly in control of the marathon expositions of his first scene, properly angry at "our revels now are ended," and stirring, in a subdued way, for the great renunciation. But he cannot fill the great gap in the play's structure -- the fact that though Prospero completely controls the play's front and back ends, he is largely absent from its middle, merely dropping in from time to time to see how his magic is going. In these incursions, Ferry suggests a friendly conjuror putting in appearances at a children's party, rather than a dedicated avenger calculating just how far he can go.

He is, on the whole, an amiable Prospero; and this creates problems. Prospero's obsession with his daughter's virginity may be warped prurience, or it may be passionate concern. But it really doesn't make sense as daddy's little joke. Caliban, meanwhile, is even more sympathetically played by Oliver Dennis, especially fine when getting helplessly drunk on the sailors' liquor and singing his doomed song of freedom. When we're told he tried to rape Miranda, we frankly don't believe it. Prospero keeps him in leg irons, which he can loose with a wave of his wand (an effect I've never seen before) whenever he needs his slave to do some log-hauling. The relationship could hardly be more graphically exploitative, so one expects something more explosive at its resolution than this Prospero's expression of mild regret. Nor does his relation with Ariel (played, in a mystic monotone, by Deborah Pollitt) really go anywhere, though it's nicely set up, with Prospero scrupulously adjusting the remaining length of service in the spirit's contract.

The clues here are in the text, and Potter's attention to its details is his defining mark as a director of Shakespeare. It isn't enough to carry him through the sweeping reunions of the last scene, which pretty much falls apart, but it illuminates many of the earlier ones. The courtly conspirators (Patrick Garrow and Patric Masurkevitch) are unusually compelling; in a Napoleonic costume scheme, these two wear tricorne hats as a badge of villainy. The clowns (Larry Yachimec and Andy Pogson) not only get their full complement of laughs but get them on the lines. Tova Smith very nearly balances the innocence and eagerness in Miranda, though her Ferdinand (Jonathan Geenen) plays ardour mainly in terms of a toothy grin. There are four attendant spirits who play the goddesses in the masque and -- in the production's most imaginative moment -- end up bearing away the relics of Prospero's art: his books and the pieces of his broken staff. Their greatest service, though, is to help out with the songs: "Come unto these yellow sands" is authentically enchanting.

- - -

There is nothing of this quality in High Park's Twelfth Night, but it's lively, the best thing here in several summers. Once again the stage is a built-up area: There's a triple-tiered set, whose upper levels are frustratingly under-used, all done up in various shades of blue. Olivia's taste in garden furniture is bizarre, but it has its uses: I've seen the plotters in the letter scene hide in many places in my time, but never behind turquoise obelisks.

The best feature of David Storch's production is its briskness. I've grown up on autumnal melancholy Twelfth Nights, and I like them, but my favourite character, Fabian, refers to the action as "matter for a May morning" (Twelfth Night itself, of course, is in January, but we won't get into that), and Harold Bloom has written that he's never seen a production that was mad enough. He might have liked this one.

One reason for its speed is the director has cut all the more obscure jokes. You would not believe what this does for the running time. He's also reversed the order of the first two scenes. This is now common practice, though why any director should want to begin with "What country, friends, is this?" rather than "If music be the food of love, play on," beats me. (First, the magic; then the exposition. Please.) Anyway, when we do get to David Collins's Orsino, making his musical requests, he turns out to be passionate, edgy and neurotically intense. ("Enough, no more" must make the minstrels quake behind their lutes.)

Genevieve Steele's Olivia is a bubbling flirt, who can't wait to get out of mourning. Zainab Musa is ill-prepared for Viola's lyrical flights, but, by accident or design, casts a refreshingly unsentimental light on her "patience on a monument" speeches. She and her twin, Sebastian, are both black. (They all look the same to Illyrians? Surely not.)

The multicultural casting even admits an American Sir Toby (Bruce Gooch), a vigorous country rake. Sanjay Talwar's lanky Sir Andrew is conventional but very appealing when he proudly acknowledges that many do call him fool. Chapelle Jaffe is a good, managing Maria, and Michael Spence a Feste with a rough sense of humour and a gimpy leg; I apologize in advance if it's the actor's own. But the most accomplished performance is Michael Spencer-Davis's Malvolio, whose mandarin repression is explosively released when he goes into yellow stockings and cross-garters, topped off on this occasion by a jockstrap. Definitely a creature of extremes, he still does not merit the shock ending his director has devised for him. I said this was a lively production. It's even, line-by-line, intelligent. But I wouldn't claim it was thoughtful.