The Grande Dame of Stratford

Thoughts on Shakespeare: Tanya Moiseiwitsch
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

The person who may be most responsible for giving the Stratford Festival its shape, its identity and even its success has returned this year. When the festival began, in a tent in 1953, both the plays in its repertoire had their sets and costumes designed by a 39- year-old English visitor named Tanya Moiseiwitsch. But she didn't just design for the plays; she designed the stage, a spare and graceful projecting platform, challenging and energizing, that was unique then and is unique now. Richard Monette, Stratford's current director, thinks the stage may be the most important single element in the theatre's history: the one that has kept it alive when so many other classical theatres in North America have foundered.

Moiseiwitsch is now in a wheelchair but ebullient and alert; talking to her, I found, was like talking to a well-loved aunt from North London. She has been back in Stratford this year as a visitor: Fiddler on the Roof, she says, "took my breath away" and she loves the small, intimate Tom Patterson Theatre (where she herself has never worked), though, nice person that she is, she refuses "to see Titus Andronicus. Once was enough. Ugh!"

She is also, however, a participant. She designed the set for Monette's production of Moliere's Tartuffe. Perhaps that isn't strictly accurate. In fact, in a fit of celebratory economy, the new production re-employs the set that Moiseiwitsch designed 17 years ago for a memorable staging by the late John Hirsch of the same play on the same stage (and with the same leading actor, Brian Bedford). It's a tribute by the 48-year-old festival to its doyenne, and it works on all levels. Like all her sets, it looks thoroughly at home in that space.

Obviously she hadn't reckoned, 48 years ago, on becoming part of Canadian theatre history. Her first reaction on being asked to come to Stratford was, she says now, "terror, followed by complete absorption, and then by delight."

Part of her delight came from getting to know and work with the theatre's founder, Tom Patterson, and its architect, Robert Fairfield. Another large part came from forming a closer bond with a man who was already her colleague and mentor, Stratford's first director, Tyrone Guthrie. It was in large part Guthrie's vision that she was realizing -- and went on realizing on that stage: his quest for a Shakespearean playing space that, without slavishly mimicking the Elizabethan theatre, would escape the constrictions of proscenium arches and painted scenery.

She first encountered Guthrie in the '30s when he was director of London's homely classical theatre the Old Vic ("my favourite-ever theatre," she says, "until it got bombed") and she was a lowly painting student. "I would go to work at the dress rehearsal; I was literally painting the stage cloth under his feet. It was a very low- key relationship." It moved into higher gear during the war, when the Old Vic operation was evacuated to Liverpool. By then, Moiseiwitsch was working at a theatre in Oxford, but Guthrie "winkled me out of there."

Among other things, they collaborated on a modern-dress production of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist ("it must have three doors," insisted Guthrie "because it's a farce"), which started with an air-raid siren (to establish that people had left town to escape the blitz rather than, as in the original, the plague) and with the apparition of the prostitute Doll Common emerging in her underwear. The crucial production, though, for the two of them was a more ceremonial piece: Henry VIII, mounted in 1949 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on- Avon.

Architecturally, this big, flat house represented everything Guthrie hated. "He told Anthony Quayle [the theatre's director], that he should push it into the water and build a tin hut instead; Tony said diplomatically that he didn't think the governors would like that."

Moiseiwitsch managed to tame the space with a permanent set that brilliantly reordered the essential Elizabethan elements: the levels and the alcoves.

A couple of years later, she did the whole thing on a larger scale for a whole cycle of the history plays. These designs were heavier on steps and staircases than would be fashionable now but they still look, in photographs, both functional and beautiful. They were the foundations of modern Shakespeare design, and they pointed the way for the Canadian Stratford.

"The great thing about Stratford," says Moiseiwitsch "is that Guthrie got his way. It hadn't happened to him in any other country, except Scotland." (At the Edinburgh Festival he'd transformed the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland into a viable, if drafty, playing space, and immediately thought, "This is the way to do Shakespeare.") "At Stratford the stage came first, and the theatre was built around it." Literally, it was only after four years of playing in the tent that the permanent concrete shell was erected.

In those four years (1953 to 1956), Moiseiwitsch designed every play on the Stratford stage. "I'd thought in my innocence that Stratford would be a one-shot affair -- for me at least -- but they kept asking me back." Her association far outlasted Guthrie's own, though his influence remained permanent.

The first year of the new theatre, 1957, also marked Guthrie's swan song on the festival stage with a production of Twelfth Night, and the first year that another designer -- Desmond Heeley -- got to work there. He designed Hamlet for Guthrie's successor, Michael Langham. "Michael was," says Moiseiwitsch "the ideal person to take over; he didn't have Guthrie's visual sense -- with him it was more hit-and-miss at the beginning. But he has his own ideas."

She is, in fact, a one-woman Stratford history. She's worked happily and memorably with Langham, with Hirsch, with the long-time Stratford actor and director Douglas Campbell ("a very big fact in my life, and a wonderful director") and with Jean Gascon who, she says, "brought Moliere into Stratford's life," where he has remained down to the present season.

Though he staged Oedipus Rex in his second season, Guthrie was skeptical of the stage's suitability for non- Elizabethan plays. "He said, 'You can't do Restoration comedy on that stage; the asides would go for nothing.' Michael Langham proved him wrong."

In fact, the two plays in the very first season showed the different ways Stratford can go. The opening Richard III was a banner-waving show of the kind that still defines most people's image of Stratford. But its companion, an epochal modern-dress All's Well That Ends Well, showed that you could be domestic, intimate and even decorative. "You can put things on that stage. Tartuffe takes place in a room, with doors and windows. They've reconstructed it very well."

The one Stratford director she didn't work with was Robin Phillips: "I liked Robin a lot but I didn't fall into his way of thinking." At the beginning of Phillips' regime the central identifying feature of the Moiseiwitsch set -- the pillared balcony - - was made mobile instead of permanent. The trouble when you move it, says Moiseiwitsch, is you then get "a huge, empty space. It's not good for acoustics, and it's worse for the budget, because now you've got to fill it." With the balcony in place, the stage becomes itself again: cheerfully ascetic, like its designer. "I'm always sorry," she says now, "when they move the column. It's my own personal column."