Riffs on shakespeare: elizabeth rex
the stratford festival
the national post

Timothy Findley's Elizabeth Rex, staged at the Tom Patterson Theatre in the summer of 2001, was probably the most electric opening of a new Canadian play in the Stratford Festival's half- century of existence.

It generated its own sense of occasion: Here was a modern Shakespearean company performing a play about their equivalents on the other side of the world, 400 years ago. The play shows Shakespeare's own troupe summoned to entertain Elizabeth I and finding themselves locked in mortal debate with her on questions of vital interest to both parties: love, gender, politics -- all kinds of role-playing.

Offstage, the Earl of Essex, the players' patron and the Queen's lover, awaited the executioner's block; onstage, both parties tried to make sense of their lives

Set in a barn and staged in a converted sports club down by the Avon, play and production had tremendous atmosphere. This was a play that actors could latch on to and that exerted a corresponding grip on the audience.

But what really made it exhilarating was its architecture. It was written in two unbroken, richly peopled acts, each a great soaring arc of dialogue and action. Most current plays don't flow, they twitch; composed in short disjointed scenes, they behave like television scripts and often seem to wish they were. This one was bred of the theatre and belonged there.

Of course, Mr. Findley himself had been an actor. He claimed the experience had helped him as a novelist to tell stories and explore characters. And though his novels are what made him famous, his career both began and ended in the theatre.

Especially, it began and ended in Stratford. He was in the first company there in 1953. Alec Guinness, to whose Richard III he had played Catesby, thought well enough of him to take him back to London and pay for his further training. He worked there for a few years. He played Osric to Paul Scofield's prince in the first Hamlet I ever saw. And I wish, since I may be the only person now in Canada who saw the performance, I could remember more about it. As it is, I can only record the opinion of the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who thought it fell flat, but blamed this on the director (Peter Brook) not having a sense of humour.

In some respects, Mr. Findley's career parallels that of the English novelist Margaret Drabble. She, too, began as an actor -- at the English Stratford, indeed -- and she has continued to draw on the experience in her novels. Unlike Mr. Findley, though, she has shown no serious signs of becoming a playwright. He, however, came full circle: In the last seven years, he was close to being Stratford's resident playwright. He lived there and was very much part of the life of the town.

By sad coincidence, his reminiscent foreword to my own book on the Festival was the last piece of his writing to be published in his lifetime.

There is more to come, of course. By the end of this 50th Stratford season, four new Findley plays -- more than by any other contemporary playwright -- will have been presented there in seven years. Apart from Elizabeth Rex, there have been The Stillborn Lover (1995), about a gay diplomat, and The Trials of Ezra Pound (2001), a semi-documentary, both of them exploring his favourite themes of personal and political loyalty.

This year, as part of the inaugural season in the new Studio (which I would not be surprised to find renamed the Timothy Findley Studio some fine morning), there will be Shadows, a one-act-play in which seven people confront their pasts at a spookily interrupted dinner party -- a situation that sounds quintessentially Findleyan.

Because both his energy and his reputation were so bound up in his novels, he seldom makes the lists of prominent Canadian playwrights and indeed the patrician tone of his plays sets them apart from those of his contemporaries and successors.

As a man, he remained very much part of the theatre. I have the impression -- I never met him -- he was someone whose taste and opinion counted. He was, almost independently of his plays, a theatrical icon as well as a literary one and is likely to remain so.

Elizabeth Rex towers over the others of his plays that we have seen so far (including adaptations of his novels, such as Not Wanted on the Voyage) and it is both satisfying and frustrating that it came so late. It was a wonderful way to end, but it might also have marked a new beginning.