Riffs on Shakespeare: Elizabeth Rex
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

There is a quiet but pulsating energy in Elizabeth Rex. The web of tension that it weaves holds everyone in the cast and—at least on the first night—everyone in the audience. It's magic, of a potency rare at Stratford or anywhere else.

The title character is, unsurprisingly, Elizabeth I of England, Shakespeare's queen, who famously said that she had the heart of a king in the body of a woman. Shakespeare himself has a leading role, as do two invented figures, members of his company: an Irishman, sexually and politically aggressive, named Jack Edmund; and Ned Lowenscroft, a 30-year-old actor of female roles. These two, when we first meet them, have just come offstage from playing Benedick and Beatrice in a royal command performance of Much Ado About Nothing.

We meet several of their fellow actors, too: supporting players both in Shakespeare's play and this one. They spend a lot of time sitting or lying at the edges of the Tom Patterson's narrow promontory stage, listening. They do this with a remarkable, relaxed intentness, as if knowing themselves to be an integral part of something special.

It certainly helps, though, that it is at Stratford, especially concluding a week of premieres at the Patterson that has gone from good to better to best. There's a special kick in seeing a current Shakespearean troupe impersonate their ancestors; that's over and above the usual enjoyment that actors get from playing actors, and audiences from watching them do it. In that sense, Timothy Findley's new play is an indulgence for all parties, but it is no sentimental "celebration of theatre."

It takes place on the Shrove Tuesday night and Ash Wednesday morning of 1601: the hours leading up to the execution of Elizabeth's former favourite and supposed lover, the Earl of Essex. To take her mind off things, she has called for a play; after it's over, the actors, confined by curfew, take refuge in the royal barn. Here the queen herself joins them, seeking further distraction. The play becomes a debate, on how far her royal role has impaired her womanhood, and even her humanity.

Her main antagonist is Ned, the man who spends his professional life as a woman, and who is dying of syphilis and mourning the lover who gave it to him: a soldier killed in the Irish wars. Elizabeth hides her love; Ned flaunts his. The culminating point of their duel comes when each forces the other to reveal the pet name bestowed on their respective lovers at the height of passion.

Shakespeare, too, is involved; the Earl of Southampton, his former patron and the possible inspiration of his sonnets, is Essex's fellow prisoner, though unlike Essex he has the chance of a reprieve. Meanwhile, he is at work on Antony and Cleopatra, with Ned to play the Egyptian queen (if he survives), but he cannot hope to see it staged until after the English queen is dead; the historical parallels would be all too obvious.

I don't believe any of this. I found it hard to credit that actors or anybody else—even the reckless, death-marked Ned—would speak as freely as these do to an absolute monarch of uncertain temper. I doubt that Elizabeth actually went to bed with Essex; it wasn't her style and she wouldn't have risked it.

The parallels between those two and Antony and Cleopatra don't strike me as overwhelming, and the Roman play's style is wrong for that moment of Shakespeare's career; as Findley himself has pointed out, he would actually at this point have been writing Hamlet; he had to get through the jagged tragedies before he could write the suave one.

Finally, I am unconvinced by the author's pet theory that men, rather than boys, would have played the more demanding women's parts in the Elizabethan theatre. There is no evidence for it, and the assumption that boys would be incapable of doing justice to these roles is rather patronizing. There were Elizabethan companies composed entirely of choirboys, playing all the roles, male and female, in complex texts by Ben Jonson and others. Audiences, as they always do, would have adjusted their expectations to the prevailing conventions.

Antony and Cleopatra itself offers further proof; the captive Cleopatra's fear of seeing "some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness" lose most of its point and all of its audacity if the line itself is not spoken by a boy. (That's not to say that a grown-up male actor couldn't play Cleopatra splendidly; Mark Rylance did just that at London's new Globe theatre last summer.)

So much for pedantry. Findley's play is a splendid piece of dramatic architecture. The action unfolds in two long, unbroken acts with a sweep and fluency that, in these days of short, pinched scenes, seems miraculous.

Themes and characters, exits and entrances, interlock flawlessly, and the Shakespearean inserts—from Much Ado or Antony or the Sonnets—fit powerfully into place.

Visually, the piece is a treat, superbly directed by Martha Henry on a set by Allan Wilbee that manages to be both spare and cluttered, and with exquisite smoky lighting by Louise Guinand. There is much play with costume and other trappings, culminating in the queen's grim removal of her red wig to reveal the baldness beneath.

Ned has a tame bear (gallantly inhabited by Aaron Franks) whose heavy caperings punctuate the play, up to an extraordinary lurch of sympathy when the bells peal the news of Essex's death. All this is in the text; Findley was an actor before he was a novelist, and he writes actions as well as words.

He may even write actions better than words. "If you will teach me how to be a woman" says Elizabeth to Ned, "I will teach you how to be a man." The play's real flaw is the bloodlessness of its language, incorporating a portentous signposting of issues, and a literary manner that I associate with the weightier drama of the 1950s. Findley can juxtapose Shakespeare's words with his own without making us cringe. (Is Elizabeth quoting Shakespeare or inspiring him when she says, "Oh fool, I shall go mad"?) But you do notice the difference.

But he has certainly inspired his actors. Brent Carver as Ned adds a new strain of stricken anger to his customary amazing grace (if the amazing can be customary) and aching tenderness; any play that begins and ends with Carver singing "fear no more the heat o' the sun" both starts and finishes ahead. Diane D'Aquila has at the outset some trouble with Elizabeth's imperiousness, but grows into it, and especially into her loneliness. (Though her love for Essex, unlike Ned's for his captain, seems more of a debating position than an emotion.) Peter Hutt as Shakespeare is hobbled at the start by a scene- setting retrospective monologue (writing soliloquies for Shakespeare seems a risky exercise) but is superb in the main action: a watchful, secretive man whom nobody quite likes. And Scott Wentworth completes a week's trio of fine performances as the sullen, blazing Irish Edmund.

There is especially fine lesser work from Paul Dunn as a boy player and from Florence MacGregor as a generally silent and generally frightened lady-in-waiting. But everybody counts; and the image of the company huddled in a doorway at the end of the platform is going to be a keeper.