Tragically, These Heroines Remain Who They Are

Riffs on Shakespeare: Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
Canadian Stage
The National Post

Recently, while reviewing an abortion of a Shakespeare romp at the Young People's Theatre, I commented on how few writers have ever managed to produce a passable pastiche of Shakespearean dramatic style. All credit, then, to Ann-Marie MacDonald, who in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) does it very well. Unfortunately, though, that's all she does.

The good news first: Most of the play is, as you would expect, a spoof of Romeo and Juliet and Othello, and when listening to it I could hardly believe my ears. Here were newly-invented iambic pentameters that actually possessed the correct number of syllables and in which all the stresses fell in the right conversational places. More than that, there is a genuine feeling for Shakespearean wordplay, which also extends to a few passages of comic prose; and though MacDonald doesn't go in much for rhyme, I am sure that if she did she would get that right as well. Best of all, the piece is of a piece; it figure-skates with elan between passages of the original texts and the author's own new inventions.

It's a great bag of tricks, but what can you do with it? Not, it turns out, much. The play has been around since 1988, a Canadian standby if not a Canadian classic, but this is its first outing on a main Toronto stage. Its heroine is Constance Ledbelly, an untenured assistant professor of English who ghost-writes essays and lectures for her adored male superior, and then has to watch while he swans off to Oxford, new girlfriend in tow, to assume a post that should have been hers.

All that keeps Constance going is her pet theory about those two Shakespearean tragedies. She thinks they should have been comedies. What's more, she thinks they once were; she believes in early, lost versions that included a clown figure who tipped Othello off to Iago's duplicity and had Romeo confess to having married Juliet, thereby bringing the Montague-Capulet feud to an end halfway through Act Three Scene One.

What, Constance wonders, would Desdemona have been like if Othello had not been duped into smothering her, or Juliet if she had not stabbed herself on her husband's corpse? The real answer to that is that they wouldn't have been Juliet and Desdemona, because those characters only exist within the dramatic structures set down for them. (Yes, there are sources, but the only currency they have is due to the plays they inspired. And anyway, the heroines meet bad ends in the sources as well, so killing them off was not just some misogynistic whim of the playwright.)

Admittedly, Constance is not the first critic to notice that the first half of Romeo unfolds like a comedy, or to doubt that the lovers' passion would have withstood the strains of marriage. It seems doubtful, though, that Romeo would have got very far telling Tybalt to put up his sword because late last night they had become cousins; being the type he was, Tybalt would have taken this as an additional affront to the family honour and run him through on the spot. Indeed, one of MacDonald's best lines, given to a ghost, is "beware of Tybalt; he hath not a sense of humour." It's even less likely that Iago's anti-Othello campaign could have been derailed by a passing jester. After all, King Lear had a fool, a very vocal one, but that didn't stop him disinheriting Cordelia and unleashing a whole chain of disasters.

Anyway, Constance, dejected and frustrated, has a dream in which she is plunged successively into the action of the two plays. In her waking life, she has worn a red hat that looks like a fool's cap, which, given her preoccupation with lost manuscripts, translates easily into "foolscap," a neat visual pun. Now she finds herself playing the fool's part.

It works, too. She saves Desdemona who, reprieved from her death sentence, turns out a tougher warrior than Othello. (Perhaps this is why in the current production she is black while he is white. Or maybe it's colour-blind casting for its own sake. One never knows.)

Constance then proceeds from Cyprus to Verona, where things are more complicated. Romeo shacks legally up with Juliet and is tired of her the morning after. He prefers Constance, whom he thinks is a boy. Juliet also prefers Constance, whom she thinks is a boy, but is quite prepared to settle when she discovers that she's a girl. Constance, protesting that she's from Academe and not from Lesbos, first demurs, then consents. So they all go chasing, quite vigorously, through the streets, the graveyards and the bedchambers, and it starts resembling another play Shakespeare wrote, though with the homosexuality under wraps, called Twelfth Night. It's also highly unsatisfactory, like watching a couple of greatly extended revue sketches. I know that's what critics always say when satire goes wrong, but it's usually true.

The tone is too jokey for what the author is apparently trying to do. It may seem at times that she is mocking the fashionable "what if" varieties of Shakespearean scholarship, those that concentrate on describing not the plays we have but the plays the critics would like us to have. It turns out, though, that she is endorsing them.

Constance is empowered by her imaginary experiences, and presumably goes back to Academe sane as hell and not about to take it any more. This kind of fantasy may get by as a brief essay in a learned journal, but it does not stand up in the theatre, where words have to take on the weight of flesh. And no intelligent person has ever thought of Juliet or of Desdemona as passive victims anyway; Juliet, for God's sake, kills herself.

It isn't helped by having its author in the leading role. I say this with surprise as well as regret, since I have previously found MacDonald a very appealing performer. Actually, I still do; she has an eager-to-please spirit and excellent timing. But a performer is not necessarily an actress, and her range, both vocal and emotional, turns out to be limited; everything comes out as an optimistic squeak.

Her two role models are wearying company as well: Alison Sealy- Smith's Desdemona relentlessly bossy, Cara Pifko's Juliet relentlessly pert. In fact the best work in a female role comes from Juan Chioran in a brief butch turn as Juliet's nurse; elsewhere, he parodies his own Stratford past with a booming Othello and a hissing Tybalt.

Alisa Palmer's production, too, is at its best as enjoyably busy Stratford send-up, though it, too, satirizes a received idea of Shakespearean production rather than the thing itself. The opening here-and-now scenes are painfully thin in acting, writing and direction. There could be some mutual disservice going on here. On the one hand, the play is not worth Canadian Stage's time and resources; on the other, this high-profile airing may even harm its continued prospects on the fringe and college circuits.