The Tempest
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

William Hutt talks Shakespeare like a native. He is pushing 80 and for what may possibly be his farewell performance he has the greatest of all valedictory roles, Prospero in The Tempest.

As the opening production of the Stratford season, it's delightfully ambiguous, hail as well as farewell. Or as Groucho put it, "Hello, I must be going."

Hutt is a superlative verse-speaker -- maybe the best there now is -- on at least four counts.

First, most obvious though least important, there is the actual timbre of his voice, a taut, flexible viola.

Second, there is his phrasing, a matter of timing and control. When Prospero's daughter Miranda asks him, "Sir, are not you my father?" the reply is "Thy mother was a piece of virtue and/She said thou wast my daughter"; Hutt takes this line-and-a-half of blank verse fast and light on a single breath, making it wonderfully witty and affectionate, the aural equivalent of a quizzically raised eyebrow.

Third is his prowess as an architect, shaping the phrases into speeches, each an ongoing wave of sense and sound.

Fourth, subsuming all the rest, is the creation through language of a whole character: in this case a troubled, benevolent and uniquely powerful, intelligence facing the limits of its own achievement.

In fact the highest moment of this vocal virtuoso performance is one of silence. Prospero, the exiled magician on his desert island, has at his mercy the shipwrecked politicians who once drove him from his dukedom; he is also engineering a love match between his own daughter and the son of one of his enemies.

If we think of Prospero as a dramatist, a possible surrogate for his author (the line taken by Harold Bloom in his inspiring and infuriating Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) then he is trying to write two plays at once: a marriage comedy and a revenge tragedy.

Naturally, something has to give and the crunch comes when Ariel, his attendant spirit, suggests he take pity on his extremely bedraggled foes. Hutt now takes a pause of quite extraordinary length, while the theatre holds its breath. He finally bows to the inevitable, which for once means accepting the best, in one of the two great moments of forgiveness in Shakespeare (the other is in Measure for Measure), and the acceptance energizes him for the great speech in which he reviews his magical achievements and then renounces them: a speech in which Hutt is magnificent.

He balances the light and the dark in Prospero without quite fusing them; the same is true of Richard Monette's production, which meets the play's daunting technical demands proficiently enough, and otherwise is carefully built around its star.

The lovers (Claire Jullien and Graham Abbey) are unusually charming and adroit, if overly given to giggles; whatever you may think of Prospero's obsession with Miranda's chastity, I doubt if it was meant to raise the laughs it does here.

The first long expository scene between father and daughter, though, is beautifully done; she seeing herself both as the audience for a fairy tale and as its heroine, he tenderly proud of his achievements in home- schooling.

Ariel (Michael Therriault) is, apart from his one moment of rebellion, a conscientious and thoroughly cheerful servant -- which is absolutely true to the text -- and his songs are excellently sung.

Prospero's bitterness breaks through most strongly, as it should, on the breathtaking "our revels now are ended": a speech which, despite its sentimental reputation, is a despairing vision of universal dissolution. It heralds Prospero's encounter with his other attendant, the savage Caliban from whom he took the island, shown here as a hairy monster with protuberant, if passive, sex organs, and played by Peter Hutt as a comic villain, almost a comic drunk, whose suffering and whose menace are both muted. It makes internal sense but something disturbing has gone out of the play.

Caliban's co-conspirators are contrasting types of English regional clown: Trinculo (Tim MacDonald), north- country camp with feathers on his head looking like TV antennae; Stephano (the splendid Brian Tree), a cockney thug sounding, as this actor often does, like a popular British comic of the '50s known as Cheerful Charlie Chester.

The deadlier villains of the court party are rendered (by Robert Benson and Ian Deakin) with unusual force but as invariably happens they fade out as the play proceeds; the director tries hard to keep them in the picture in the last scene but it looks like a pious gesture. The virtuous Gonzalo (Bernard Hopkins) is allowed for once to be suspicious of them; when he talks about "the beasts of the island" he means two-legged ones.

Another unaccustomed is the delight of the Boatswain (Bradford Farwell) at being reunited with king and company: a neglected but vital part of the finale.

Which brings me to the Epilogue, unique in Elizabethan drama. As often, the leading actor begs the audience for applause, but this time he stays in character to do it, speaking still as Prospero.

But of course, with Hutt doing it now, there are other dimensions. This is an actor who has been at Stratford since the first festival in 1953, and who has come to symbolize all that is best about this theatre and its tradition. He confronts us now on a stage remodelled to its original state: a simple platform with only a slim, sturdy arrangement of steps and balcony for scenery.

When he speaks of quitting "this bare island" it's his kingdom in more senses than one. Of course he gets what he asks for, and more: a thunderous and authentic standing ovation.

We weren't just cheering for him, we were just cheering for history, and we felt, justifiably, part of it. Of course, he doesn't have to retire.