Riffs on Shakespeare: Shakespearean Gala
World Stage
The National Post

Last spring Don Shipley, director of the du Maurier World Stage, was watching Simon Callow, the rolling-toned and rubicund British actor, giving a benefit performance at Harbourfront of his personal program of Shakespeare sonnets.

Listening to Callow's lucid account of these difficult poems gave him the idea of presenting a whole evening of Shakespearean verse, done by some of its best international practitioners. It also struck him that Shakespeare's birthday - April 23 - was going to fall smack in the middle of the 2000 World Stage season.

So tonight - actually one night early, but the exact birthdate is in dispute anyway, though we know he died on the 23rd - Shipley mounts his Shakespearean Gala at the Elgin. It's the apex of a weekend of Bardic celebrations, and, says Shipley, "a chance to look at Shakespeare for the first time as we usher in the new millennium."

Shipley may be over-pessimistic in his belief that the speaking of Shakespeare is "a lost art - a dying art" (theatres across the English-speaking world have training schemes in operation to preserve it).

However, we can agree that at the highest level it's rare, or imperilled, or anyway a treat to hear done well. As well as being a celebration of the man himself, Shipley sees the occasion as "a tribute to Shakespeare's actors. He was an actor, and he wrote for actors; and these are the thoroughbreds."

The actual line-up of thoroughbreds is governed, as always, by availability. A lot of people who hoped to be free weren't. Shipley's been trying to sign them up for nearly a year. It looked, for a long and exciting time, as if he might secure the ultimate prize and get Judi Dench, who among other things is probably the best speaker of Shakespeare active today, but a film finally got in the way.

Ian McKellen, perhaps the nearest thing to her male equivalent, expressed great eagerness to appear and was similarly prevented (he's in Australia, shooting Lord of the Rings) but he has filmed an opening tribute to his colleagues.

The colleagues make an impressive list. Claire Bloom will host the evening, and will also figure in a couple of appetizing duets. In the '50s, at the Old Vic in London, Bloom was the Juliet of her generation; now she'll be performing the Balcony Scene, opposite John Neville, who in 1956 was her Romeo in a North American tour that included the Royal Alex in Toronto. (Well, John Gielgud gave thrilling renditions of Hamlet's soliloquies when he was in his '70s.)

Neville, who long before he came to Canada was Britain's reigning Shakespearean juvenile, will reprise his chorus from Henry V, and will end the revels as Prospero.

Bloom will also play Kate from The Taming of the Shrew, opposite the Petruchio of Christopher Plummer: Not roles with which either of them are associated.

Plummer might be called the senior member of the evening's Stratford, Ontario contingent; his juniors include Colm Feore and Brent Carver, described by Shipley as the best classical actors of their generation ("It doesn't get better than those two"). Carver will actually be singing a setting of a Shakespeare lyric; Shipley wanted a balance of spoken verse and song, and his other vocalists range from Melanie Doane to the operatic soprano Measha Brueggergosman, performing one of Desdemona's arias from Verdi's Otello.

I rather wish Simon Russell Beale were doing a song, since he has the voice of a trained chorister. He's a youngish English actor who's little-known over here (unless you caught his brilliant Widmerpool in the TV serial of A Dance to the Music of Time) but has already had a remarkable classical career. It's remarkable in that he's the kind of stocky unglamorous actor who doesn't usually get cast in the heroic roles. (He says himself that, though he always wanted to be a star, he wasn't sure whether it was going to be as Gielgud or as Zero Mostel.) But he has now played Richard III for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Iago for the National Theatre, both to great acclaim, and later this year he'll be doing Hamlet, also for the National and with an out-of-town date at the castle of Elsinore itself.

At the Elgin he'll be giving bits of his Richard and Iago: "I'm well known for playing bastards -- if I'm well known for anything. I'm fascinated by characters who live in hell -- by Shakespeare's picture of people at the limits of their behaviour. Iago really is a psychopath: a case study for a modern audience. Richard III just wants to be king; he has motives -- I understand them even if I don't understand his methods."

And, most encouragingly in this context, he's "very optimistic" about the future of Shakespearean acting. "There are different ways of doing it. There are no rules -- just as long as you make people understand the meaning. There's the language and the emotion -- and they're identical.

"But you start with the language." Which is where we came in.