Stratford's Reunion with the Classics

By T.E. Kalem

The 25th season of the Stratford Festival coincides with the Silver Jubilee of England's Queen Elizabeth II, and Stratford, Ont., is proudly aware of it. The trumpets that herald curtain time at the Festival Theater sound a fanfare of brassy assurance, and the plays follow each other across the stage like a regal pageant. Canada built and has sustained a distinctive national theater, and that is fit cause for pride. Herewith, a sample of this summer's offerings:

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

This play is moonstruck, magical and mythic. This production hints at these qualities but never quite lends them a fairyland shimmer and substance. Shakespeare's rich fund of vernal imagery all but makes up the deficit. If no real bird song lilts in a bosky dell, the playwright's words linger in the air like ineffable music. Shakespeare seems to extol a gentle harmony in nature, which he feels that gods, kings, lovers and men of common clay would do well to emulate. A shrewd judge of audiences, he sows discord to whet the appetite for concord.

It is not so much the errant hand of Puck (Lewis Gordon) who sprinkles the distilled magic flower potion onto the eyelids of the dreamers at the wrong time as it is the master-hand of the Bard. It is he who wakens the star-vexed lovers and sets them in pursuit of those who will scornfully spurn them. It is he who inspires the Queen of the Fairies, Titania (Maggie Smith), to dote in adoration on Bottom (Alan Scarfe) after the head of an ass has been grafted on him.

Only a man steeped in the theater as Shakespeare was could have conjured up a band of rustics bent on drumming up a play to honor their sovereign's wedding. He cast them as journeymen actors arduously bent on not missing a cue while botching up a scene. With their comic earthiness, they very nearly steal the show. As for lofty gravity and the true melodic rendering of the Shakespearean line, Maggie Smith is one of the sweetest singers this side of Avon.

THE GUARDSMAN

by FERENC MOLNAR

Even a festival devotedly committed to the classics can afford a little sophisticated comic relief, and that is what this play provides. The Lunts won vast acclaim with The Guardsman when they opened in it in 1924, though one can scarcely imagine this somewhat fragile comedy holding its own on Broadway now.

Two stylish egocentrics known only as The Actor (Brian Bedford) and The Actress (Maggie Smith) feel that the statute of limitations may be running out on their restively argumentative marriage. They have been married only six months. Apart from being dogged by a creditor (Richard Whelan), the husband has the jitters. He knows that prior to the marriage his wife had had nine liaisons and that each affair lasted exactly six months. Madly in love with her, the husband decides to put his wife's devotion to the test. He will try to seduce her in the guise of a Russian soldier-prince.

Hungarian Playwright Molnar works this all out like a game of chess with delightful ambiguity, some suspense and a saucy wit. Everything depends on the two leads. In his jealous anxiety, Bedford can twitch his nose like a mouse scenting cheese. He affects a synthetic Russian accent that is weirdly comic and as the disguised suitor, he woos his wife with the ardor of a drawing-room Cossack.

A formidable comedienne, Maggie Smith brings her entire arsenal of comic weapons to this role. Her arms and hands move like birds wheeling in opposite directions, and she can count her fingers, which she does, and break up the house. She can say one word--"no" like "gnu"--and be wildly hilarious. The paradox is that women as beautiful as Maggie Smith are rarely funny; she is enchantingly both.

RICHARD III

by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The center of the stage is a frostily lighted O. King Richard stands alone, wreathed in the whirling smoke of combat on Bosworth Field. Moments later, he is to die. In a piping whisper of bewilderment, he says, "A horse. A horse. My kingdom for a horse."

This scene suggests the idiosyncratic approach that Director Robin Phillips takes to the text and the way in which Brian Bedford, as the King, follows it through. Shakespeare speaks of Richard as "hell's black intelligencer," "that bottled spider, this poisonous bunch-back'd toad." The risk one runs in matching this billing is to make archvillainy seem a trifle ludicrous. Yet it can be done, as Olivier showed by making Richard a vaulting devil of ambition.

In Bedford's performance, the impression is more that of a spoiled brat who murders his enemies on whim. Yet there is distinct logic to some aspects of Director Phillips' conception. Rarely has Richard's deformity--or his embittered awareness of it--been so vividly emphasized. His black-gloved left arm hangs in useless rigidity. The heel of his crippled leg never quite touches the stage as his body lopes about in a bobbing crouch.

While it is no snap to sort out the kings in Richard III, the stage is also festooned with ruined queens. As Queen Margaret, widow of Henry VI, murdered in the Tower by Richard's own hand, Margaret Tyzack makes prophecies with the molten passion of a Cassandra. As Queen Elizabeth, whose two young boys are slain in the Tower, Maggie Smith delivers an arresting lament. In a scene of audacious psychological insight, Shakespeare has Richard woo Lady Anne over the coffined body of her father-in-law (Henry VI). Richard has also murdered her husband, but he pleads that he was impelled to it by an all-consuming love for her. The enticing Martha Henry, who plays Anne, begins this scene in a tearful fury and ends it with a tiny purr of awakened sensuality. Out of his unerring intuition, Shakespeare knew that a strong emotion at its peak is volatile and may be swiftly transformed into its opposite.

GHOSTS

by HENRIK IBSEN

Some actors sink their teeth into a role, others into the beating heart of the play. When Margaret Tyzack as Mrs. Alving utters the word ghosts, the inexorable shades of the past slip spectrally between her lips. They are, first of all, haunting family ghosts. But there is an added dimension, the ghosts of shackling conventions, of numbing superstitions. These, Ibsen felt, distort truth and hamper freedom. He saw them as maggots of the mind that festeringly mar human actions just as syphilis is rotting the brain of Mrs. Alving's son.

Young Oswald Alving (Nicholas Pennell) is a painter who has come home to Norway after several years in Paris. He reveals the nature of his mortal illness to his mother, and she finally reveals that he is the hereditary victim of his father's debaucheries. Ironically, his late father is about to be honored by the dedication of a new orphanage in his name. The legal executor of this project is Pastor Manders (William Hutt), and in the early scenes of the play, he duels intellectually with Mrs. Alving.

Manders is the frock-coated pillar of local society. He had once denied the urgings of his own love for Mrs. Alving when she had fled to him from her unbearable husband. He prates of duty and discipline and chides Mrs. Alving on the libertarian tenor of the books she reads.

Hutt captures the self-serving hypocrisy of Manders with photographic precision. Margaret Tyzack gives a per formance of incendiary brilliance. Her Mrs. Alving is tough-minded yet oddly vulnerable. She has fought a lifelong holding action against herself that has ultimately paralyzed her will. In the final scene, where she cannot bring herself to give her son the morphine pills that will end his life but secure his dignity, she becomes, through the sorcery of Margaret Tyzack, a figure of awesome pity.

T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.