Outpost of Habitual Culture

In a bucolic splendor of greenery, the Festival Theater of Stratford, Ont., salutes the eye like the panoplied summer court of a king. The king, of course, is Shakespeare, and the irony is that Stratford serves him rather ill in its current productions of Richard III and The Merry Wives of Windsor. One difficulty with cultural outposts of this sort is that audiences begin to equate their dutifulness with pleasure, and actors and directors tend to become bureaucratic keepers of tinier and tinier dramatic flames. That may be why the Stratford players perform best in a 19th century provincial satire, The Government Inspector, almost as if the bizarre Russian genius Nikolai Gogol had jolted them with a shock of local recognition.

Launched 15 years ago by Tyrone Guthrie as a wild dramatic dare, Stratford has evolved into a slightly smug civic investment. As a festival it has be come a creature of habit which in theater is not always a loss. Habit decrees the invited guest star--but what if the key actor is as singularly miscast as Alan Bates in the title role of Richard III?

Yelping Dogs. Richard is a hunchbacked Renaissance Stalin with a monstrous thirst for power. He terrorizes less by his inveterate plots than by his malignantly charged presence, mesmerizing those whom he would murder. Called "a bottled spider" and a "bunch-backed toad," he is nonetheless poisonously fascinating. Nowhere is this more apparent than when he woos and wins the Lady Anne over the coffin of her husband, whom he has murdered. A scene that seems logically inconceivable becomes psychologically astute as Richard, who has never wept, weeps; who has never knelt, kneels. With the reckless audacity of his passion, he converts Anne's grief and loathing into something like coquetry.

If only to carry off this scene, there must be something in Richard to dominate the play and all its characters. This Alan Bates lacks. Less butcher than ballet master, less Machiavelli than Mack the Knife, Bates prances where Richard pounces, smirks where Richard sneers. While melodrama is often a parody of tragedy, it cannot stand the added parody of kidding itself, which is what Bates does. The kingdom of this play needs a masterful Richard more than Richard needs a horse.

Director John Hirsch, who staged the Lincoln Center production of Galileo (TIME, April 21), has had a few galvanic inspirations. Abandoning the customary fencing-match armies, he fills the stage with metalclad soldiers who move like ponderous impersonal relentless brigades of tanks. On two levels of the stage, Richard and his enemy Richmond exhort their armies in a frenzied propaganda barrage that seems to unkennel all the yelping dogs of war.

If Richard is a fiend, the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor is a fool, the butt of pranksters rather than the erstwhile prince of jesters. As a would-be wife chaser, the fat knight is dumped into the Thames in a basket of dirty laundry and crowned with deer antlers. Tony van Bridge is a physically imposing Sir John, with a mammoth gut, a rolling eye, a growly burp, and a flair for the wheezy epithets that Shakespeare wrote for the part. The problem is not that Van Bridge and Stratford's supporting cast do less than justice to their parts; the play's the thing, and Wives, alas, is one of Shakespeare's least durable--and endurable--comedies.

Chattering Teeth. After a feckless Richard and a fatuous Falstaff, it is a particular delight to find the Stratford stage swarming with the full-bodied comic life of The Government Inspector, even though it is life of a special and disturbing kind. The evening is hilarious, but the final effect of Gogol's anarchic humor is as strangely chilling as if the voice of God consisted only of laughter.

Vladimir Nabokov once said of Gogol's play that it "begins with a blinding flash of lightning and ends in a thunderclap." Everything occurs in the interval, and yet the play is virtually plotless. A friend's letter informs the mayor of a small Russian town that a Czarist inspector is on the way, disguised as an ordinary citizen. Since the mayor (Tony van Bridge), the judge, the welfare commissioner, and every other local functionary are all seasoned bribe takers, their teeth begin chattering. The fun begins after a Tweedledum and Tweedledee pair named Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky claim to have found the government inspector holed up as a virtual recluse in a village inn.

Their discovery is actually a foppish government clerk named Khlestakov, down on his card-playing luck and drowning in debt. When the mayor and his delegates call on him, he fully expects to be carted off to jail. Instead, the mayor insists that he move into his own home, where the town worthies vie with each other to press bribes upon him. In the role of Khlestakov, William Hutt is marvelously amusing in negotiating the transition from a bewildered, featherbrained scamp to a worldly St. Petersburg seigneur. He repays the gullible town fathers with a superswindle of the imagination, a glamorous account of his fictional associations with ambassadors, counts, princes, generals and the literary elite.

Having flushed out the last local ruble, Khlestakov leaves town just before the shattering thunderclap that rings down the curtain: the arrival of the real government inspector. While Michael Langham's direction is impeccable in comic point and pacing, it might have risked bolder forays into sheer surrealism. Gogol's characters were natives of bedlam as well as Russia--and eternally human as citizens of both places.

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