Le Bon Stratford

"Something extraordinarily promising has happened to the theater in Canada," wrote Critic Walter Kerr in New York's Herald Tribune. What particularly excited the admiration of Critic Kerr and the audiences was the adroit use of both French and English-speaking actors in this year's Shakespearean Festival at Stratford, Ont. Players drawn from bilingual Canada's two major language groups, acting in the plays of Shakespeare and Moliere, are onstage together for the first time in a unique theatrical bill that reflects the nation's dual cultural origins.

In its fourth season the Stratford Festival has a new director, Michael Langham, 36, of London's Old Vic, who took over early this year from Director Tyrone Guthrie. Guthrie and other founders of the festival, fearing that Canadian cultural development was being overwhelmed by U.S. influences,* hoped to make Stratford a distinctively Canadian theater. But new Director Langham detected a flaw in their approach: How could Canada claim Stratford as a national theater unless the country's French-speaking population was represented?

Henry V, the main Shakespeare work on this year's program, afforded an opportunity to experiment. Canadian-born Actor Christopher Plummer, who had a Broadway triumph as the Earl of Warwick in The Lark (TIME, Nov. 28, 1955), was cast in the title role. Opposite him, as the French King Charles VI, Langham put Gratien Gelinas, the ranking clown of French-Canadian musical revues. Members of Montreal's theatrical corps, schooled in the French acting tradition, were brought to Stratford to people the French scenes. The play was a solid hit, with Shakespeare's French and English contrasts made twice as vivid as a one-language company could play them. The effect in the battle scenes, one critic noted, "was of whole armies feeling their way toward battle with radically different sets of nerves."

Last week, it was the French Canadians' turn to take top billing. Twelve players from Montreal's Theatre du Nouveau Monde turned in crackling, rapid-fire performances of three Moliere one-act plays. Most of their audience was English-speaking, but the French actors' skilled miming as they romped through the Moliere farces got the meaning across. The addition of the French plays and French style to the Stratford program was hailed not only as a theatrical coup, but also as a rare illustration of Canada's dual culture.

"A fresh festival hit," cheered the Montreal Star, "and, probably more important, a significant step forward in intercultural understanding."

*Such fears are not widely shared in Canada. A Gallup poll last week showed that only 27% of Canadian adults believe that U.S. cultural influence is too strong in Canada.

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