Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
Where can one go for a decent family vacation? If your family is sizable, flying may not be an option. We number six – which means that flying almost anywhere would cost us ca. $3,000 before we entered a single restaurant, theater, or museum. So, like my parents in days gone by, we drive. And, of course, we do not want to spend all of our time on the road, so we drive to places nearby.
When we lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we went to Santa Fe nearly every year, attended the opera, and roamed about – to Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, the Painted Desert, Estes Park, Taos, the Ghost Ranch. Not all of these places in any given year. But we had a good time.
Now that we live in Michigan, it has become our practice to jump in the car and drive to Stratford, Ontario (260 miles away) for the Shakespeare Festival. It takes us about six hours each way (including the wait at the border), and we have found that the children are quiet and even rapt if we throw into the CD-player in the car a book on disk. Our favorite is The Lord of the Rings on thirty-six disks in the version narrated by Rob Inglis. One summer, after a trip to Maine in which we listened to The Fellowship of the Ring while traveling, our children demanded that we listen to the rest – and every evening from 8:30-9:30 we gathered in the living room and did just that. It was enchanting and, I believe, morally informative.
In any case, we are just now back from Stratford. We listened to part of The Two Towers on the journey each way, and we saw four plays by Shakespeare – The Merry Wives of Windsor, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and Twelfth Night – along with Molière’s Misanthrope. There are four theaters in Stratford – the Festival Theater, which is gigantic and makes use of every species of technology known to man; the Tom Patterson, an old warehouse converted for theater-in-the-round, which is exceedingly intimate; the Avon, an old theater of the sort still found in London, where they seem to specialize in musicals; and the Studio Theatre, about which I know nothing.
One of the virtues of the Stratford Festival is that the plays they do are nearly always well read. What I mean is that the actors do not chew the scenery and scream and yell in such a manner as to be incomprehensible. With rare exceptions – this year, Bethany Jillard playing Lady Ann in Richard III – those in the plays speak their lines in such a fashion that one understands what they are saying. This is especially important in the case of Shakespeare, whose vocabulary is immense and whose syntax is often complex.
The Molière was exceedingly well done. The play depicts a man, who demands more sincerity than social intercourse in any time and place could ever provide, attempting to court a wealthy, socially ambitious young widow in the Paris of Louis XIV – that is to say, in a society as full of artifice and back-biting as any in human history. It nicely skewers the salon while calling into question at the same time the cult of sincerity that emerged in reaction to the world of the salon. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau recognized a century after the play was first put on, Molière anticipated and debunked much of what he stood for. There was nothing revolutionary about the production at Stratford. It was blessedly free of post-modern pretension, and the acting was a delight. My wife loved it. So did our young daughters. And so, for that matter, did I.
Titus Andronicus was also a wonder. This is a play rarely put on. I saw it once, long ago, at Stratford in England. It was composed in the wake of the appearance of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy – a revenge tragedy inspired by the Roman playwright Seneca. There is so much blood and maiming in the play that audiences are either driven to titter or to walk out in disgust. It is representative of a genre not suited to a skeptical age, but it was quite popular in the 1590s. The production I saw in England years ago did not work. One simply could not lose oneself in the play. This time, to my surprise and delight, the production was fabulous. The choice of Peter Donaldson to play the title role was an act of genius. With the help of intelligent staging (a feature of the Tom Patterson), he managed to make plausible what has always seemed to me as a reader preposterous, and it caused me to think that there was more to the play than I ever imagined – that it was a meditation on the survival of imperial Rome, on its capacity to elicit from its soldiers something akin to Republican virtue, and on the propensity to corruption that was its Achilles’ heel. My opinion of the Bard is that his worst plays are always worthy of attention. If we are uncomprehending, the fault may lie more in us than in him.
Richard III – well what can I say? The director, Miles Potter, cast a woman named Seana McKenna in the title role. She did as good a job playing an ugly man gifted with irresistible charm and an insuperable capacity for sexual entrapment as a woman could do – which is to say: she was awful. This is a powerful play that is often badly staged. This particular production carried the defects typical of most productions to an extreme. It is the norm to play Richard as a weakling, as someone effeminate. What is, in fact, required in the title role is an actor, like Peter Donaldson, with stage presence – someone you can dress up as a hunchback and make ugly who nonetheless has the capacity to command your attention and leave you fascinated. Early in the play, when he courts Lady Ann, whose husband and father-in-law he has quite recently killed, those in the audience must be able to understand why she cannot resist the advances of this monster. They must feel, if only for a moment, as she feels when she succumbs.
Twelfth Night – oh, my! This is a wonderful play – replete with roles of the sort that actors love. It is hilarious throughout, and, when properly acted, it can be moving. Two years ago, I saw a group of undergraduates at Hillsdale put on a glorious performance. At Stratford, the director (Des McAnuff – let his name live on in infamy!) ruined it. Apart from Brian Dennehy, who played Sir Toby Belch and managed to deny the role its comic potential, the actors were fine. But McAnuff turned it into a musical replete with bad music, and the musicians and songs he added proved a distraction throughout. This was the worst production of the play I have ever seen. No one should ever let McAnuff near Shakespeare again. Maybe, he can manage Jesus Christ Superstar, which he also directed. But not the Bard.
The Merry Wives of Windsor I had never before seen. Nor do I remember having read it earlier. Like The Misanthrope and Twelfth Night, it was performed at the Festival Theater (the other two plays were at the Tom Patterson). It was better than the latter but not as good as the former – entertaining but not especially instructive. Some say that it was written in short order on command of Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see Falstaff in love. It is a bit of a romp, and I would like to know whether more could be made of it. At Stratford, it seemed like a bit of fluff.
In general, what I can say of the Stratford Festival is that the performances at the Tom Patterson are nearly always more interesting than those in the Festival Theater, and they can be brilliant. Last year, the actors at the Tom Patterson made A Winter’s Tale come alive for me for the first time. This year they did the same for Titus Andronicus. The Festival Theater offers directors temptations of the sort that they are prone to fall prey to. That theater has every piece of equipment that one can imagine. When a director ignores this fact, as Brian Bedford did in staging The Misanthrope, the result can be wondrous. When a director succumbs to the technological temptation and allows spectacle to trump the drama, as McAnuff did, the result can be excruciating.
I cannot recommend any restaurants in Stratford – apart from an Indian establishment called Raja. The food in the town is not awful, but it is boring. One can eat well in Quebec, in Toronto, and, I presume, in Vancouver. English Canadians would appear to like their food bland.
Let me add that there was something ominous in the air. Next year, the festival is doing only three Shakespeare plays (out of thirteen productions): Cymbeline at the Tom Patterson and Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V at the Festival Theatre. A Canadian friend tells me that Shakespeare is no longer being taught in the schools. In Quebec, he says, the great French classics have also been dropped. The audience I saw at these plays was – if not exactly elderly – certainly not young. The reduction in the number of plays by the Bard produced (not to mention the attempt to make of Twelfth Night a musical) may be a sign that the organizers of the festival are having trouble attracting an audience. If so, this is, alas, a sign of the times.
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Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
By the way, I did not take any of my children to Titus Andronicus.
Jul '11
Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
I go to the 'summer Shakespeare' Festival at the Old Globe in San Diego every summer. I love how universal and timely the Bards plays remain.
May '10
Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
You've convinced me.
Shakespeare Festival in 2012!
Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
katievs: You've convinced me.
Shakespeare Festival in 2012! · Aug 8 at 2:07pm
Do not miss Cymbeline. Like A Winter's Tale, it is hard to bring it off. But if anyone can do it, the folks at the Tom Patterson can.
Also, if you need babysitting, I know a bed-and-breakfast that does the job. Just get in touch.
Jan '11
Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
Each of the previous 10 years I have spent a week at Stratford, ON. I have stayed in town at a B&B or a hotel and not used my car for 5 days. The Studio Theater is a miniature version of the Festival Theater. In the winter the Tom Patterson Theater is the town's indoor badminton court. Seanna McKenna is widely regarded as the troupe's best actress. She was brilliant as Medea. I strongly suspect she cast her husband Miles Potter as the director rather than vice versa.
May '10
Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
I still think Boito and Verdi produced the finest version of "Merry Wives" (and the Karajan recording with Tito Gobbi is the best recording of Falstaff).
The RSC at the other Stratford produced a creditable musical version (Shakespeare plus songs) a couple of Christmases ago with Simon Callow as Falstaff, Judi Dench as Mistress Quickly, Alistair McGowan as Ford, and Alexandra Gilbreath and Haydn Gwynne as the Alice and Meg. It was enormous fun, which is essential.
Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
Very interesting. I can imagine an actress wanting to try the experiment. A blunder, alas.
Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
Robert Dammers: I still think Boito and Verdi produced the finest version of "Merry Wives" (and the Karajan recording with Tito Gobbi is the best recording of Falstaff).
The RSC at the other Stratford produced a creditable musical version (Shakespeare plus songs) a couple of Christmases ago with Simon Callow as Falstaff, Judi Dench as Mistress Quickly, Alistair McGowan as Ford, and Alexandra Gilbreath and Haydn Gwynne as the Alice and Meg. It was enormous fun, which is essential. · Aug 8 at 4:42pm
Thank you. I am -- or was before I migrated to Hillsdale -- an avid opera-goer and a Verdi enthusiast. I have never, alas, seen his Falstaff.
Apr '11
Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
In the early '80s, recently married and taking evening classes at the University of Pittsburgh, I was always on the look-out for a cheap date. The University's summer Shakespeare festival fit the bill. One year, we saw a delightful production of Merry Wives, mostly performed by students.
As you say, the play is so-so, but the staging was a wonder, especially the stage business. The director, a grad student, I believe, wrung from the interactions created by the dialogue--or injected into them--every drop of comedy possible. An example that can be imagined from a written description was to give Pistol, one of Falstaff's disaffected followers, a little bird that he carried on his finger at all times.
Pistol speaks not above a dozen words, but he had several amusing bits petting and playing with his bird. Some of them amounted to interludes of puppetry during scenes changes. When everyone dressed as ghosts to frighten Falstaff in the forest, the bird too had its own little draped sheet disguise.
Oh, and it was done in Elizabethan costume with sets appropriate for the Globe.
Jul '10
Re: Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario
Greetings from a fellow Pitt grad (Class of 19mumble mumble). Even was married in Heinz Chapel (with the church I grew up in about 2 blocks away). Twas a while ago. All this is totally off subject, but do they still hold classes in the Nationality Rooms? Back in the day, the students treated them with true respect - which they certainly deserve.