Shakespeare, Chekhov & Co.

By T.E. Kalem

Silver anniversary at Ontario's Stratford Festival

Two salvos of cannon fire traditionally open the Stratford Festival in Ontario. From now to Oct. 18, salvos will follow in the form of productions mounted by the festival's indefatigable artistic director, Robin Phillips. Herewith, a trio of openers.

UNCLE VANYA

by Anton Chekhov

Chekhov had a matchless co-author --the audience. That is what makes him actor-proof. Any of his plays may be somewhat miscast, or slightly askew in performance, as this Stratford production of Uncle Vanya is, yet the audience customarily leaves the theater in a state of emotional agitation, if only by what it has itself contributed.

Some of this is happenstance and some of it is genius. To begin with, the essential mood of a Chekhov play is autumnal, even when it is populated by the young. The typical theater audience is, in the main, middleaged. There is scarcely a middle-aged man or woman who does not ask himself or herself in the course of a day or a week, "Why am I doing this? Why am I living like this? If only ..."

No action occurs in Chekhov's plays, only this haunting "if only" of decisions not made, options not taken. Chekhov speaks about people whose lives are past retrieving. He conveys a pressing sense Of loss--lost dreams, lost opportunities, lost hopes, lost loves, lost lives. At one point, a character says to Uncle Vanya: "You've been drinking all day. Why?" And he answers: "It helps me forget that I'm not alive."

Chekhov's tactic is the intercepted monologue. Occasionally one character overhears another character telling the world how sorry he is for himself. The world turns out to be the audience. Self-pity is one of the most powerful weapons in Chekhov's dramatic arsenal, but it only elicits sympathy for his characters because he engages the audience in personal self-pity. The playgoer is not necessarily devastated when the cherry orchard is sold at the auction block or by news that the three sisters never get to Moscow. But it is a rare playgoer who has no nagging, nettling memory of property or money lost, or of a move not made.

The other master stroke by which Chekhov gets the audience to be his collaborator lies in his intuitive understanding that the only undying love is unrequited love. In Uncle Vanya, Vanya (William Hutt) is desperately smitten with Elena (Martha Henry), wife of the crabbed Professor Serebriakov (Max Helpmann), who is many years her senior. Not out of any binding moral scruples, Elena treats Vanya's advances with lacerating indifference. Sonya (Marti Maraden), Vanya's niece, has adored Dr. Astrov (Brian Bedford) for six years, and he has never been aware of it for six seconds. Astrov in turn lusts for Elena, and lust is within commuting distance of love, but again it is in vain.

Out of the simmering minihell of incessantly frustrated emotions in a barren provincial outpost of non-civilization, this particular cast stirs up only a tempest in a samovar. Vanya should be compacted of anguish; Hutt is merely consumed by pique. When he shoots at Serebriakov and misses him twice, one hears only the toy pistol retort of a toyed-with emotion.

When Dr. Astrov speaks of the ravaged soil of Russia, he means his ravaged soul as well, but Bedford delivers the lines like an ad campaigner against environmental pollution. Henry's Elena is a femme fatale of provocative dimensions, but she moves with a languor that confuses sensuality with sedation. If purity of spirit can burn away the dross of circumstance, then Maraden's Sonya is a quenchless flame, albeit a small one.

But never fear. Chekhov will always be in the best of hands: his own and those of audiences who can never resist his appeal for co-authorship or deny the stinging reproof of their own desolated lives.

THE DEVILS

by John Whiting

Witch hunts never cease; only the witches change. Early 17th century France was rife with witch trials. Aldous Huxley chose to write about one that occurred in 1634. His book The Devils of Loudun provided the material for this raw adaptation. Since British Playwright John Whiting's early death in 1963, the play has acquired something of a cult following. Cult plays rarely improve on revival, and The Devils is no exception, but they do often contain scenes or ideas of piquant interest.

The spark that ignites this particular witch trial lies in the perfervid erotic imagination of Sister Jeanne (Martha Henry), prioress of St. Ursula's Convent in the town of Loudun. She tells her confessor that in tormented night hours, she is forced to utter obscene words and participate in obscene acts. The nuns in her charge are similarly afflicted. In a fit of possession, with her strangulated sepulchral voice suggesting The Exorcist, Sister Jeanne reveals the devil inside --Grandier--a neighboring vicar whom she has never actually seen.

Grandier (Nicholas Pennell) is the sexiest of priests and the soul of romantic ardor, whether consoling widows or initiating virgins. He is also witty, proud and urbanely condescending, almost courting enemies low and high. The highest, Cardinal Richelieu, has him brought to trial, at which he is condemned and burned at the stake.

The play is rather like one of those examination tests against the clock in which the student is urged not to linger unduly over the puzzlers but to try to complete as many questions as possible. Whiting gets through a lot of questions, but the answers are in invisible ink.

Among his more provocative propositions: that man created God in his own image; that a man cannot comprehend God's transcendent love unless he has fully experienced the carnal love of a woman; that God is a cosmic jokester, with man as his butt and the earth as his torture chamber; that nothingness is the bedrock meaning of existence.

In the final agony of Grandier's death throes, the most frustrating question of all arises: was he all along a male Saint Joan, a martyr not so much to God but to mankind's inability to receive and for give its authentic saints? Nicholas Pennell's Grandier makes the transition from seductive charmer to skeptic to nail-pierced witness of faith with ever mounting authority. Martha Henry is not as lucky with her Sister Jeanne. She seems more like a closet loony than a woman overwhelmed by a powerful but long-suppressed sexuality.

Elevation of spirit is the obvious in tent of Whiting's language, but an afflatus of rhetoric is what we often get. With the play running a ponderous three hours, a pace-and-scissors job might be a distinct blessing.

MACBETH

by William Shakespeare

Part of the awe Macbeth inspires in a playgoer is that of watching a voracious bird of prey. Sworn in honor to be a trusted host to Duncan, the King, Macbeth swoops on his sleeping sovereign and murders him. As the new King, he wheels on his best friend, Banquo. When a mettlesome foe, Macduff, threatens him, Macbeth's talons are unsheathed to mortally savage Macduff s wife and her entire brood. Finally, all Scotland falls bleeding prey to his gashing beak.

A figure of terror Macbeth surely is, but a figure of pity never. On or off the stage, worldly men of vaulting ambition rarely evoke pity. And Macbeth is the worldliest of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. He is too much the pragmatist ever to have divided up his kingdom as Lear does, or fall prey to jealousy or doubt as do Othello and Hamlet. While Fate does bring him low, Macbeth's power ploys are realistic assessments of how to seize and hold the crown. But he is afflicted by conscience of a kind. Just prior to killing the gentle Duncan, Macbeth ponders how the horror of it will be perceived in the minds of others:

... his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

The deep damnation of his taking-off;

And pity, like a naked newborn babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every

eye,

That tears shall drown the wind...

Lady Macbeth sees that such thoughts will sap her husband's resolution. Maggie Smith is as cool as a cobra and just as wily in the role. She drips venom on his slumbering courage but only to rouse his unsleeping lust for power. It is a masterly performance of unswerving precision. Her sleepwalking scene is chillingly cataleptic. It is a performance that will be treasured by audiences long after the Festival is dismantled.

Initially, Douglas Rain's Macbeth lacks something of the seasoned field soldier's habit of command. When he looks down at his bloodied hands, he resembles an apprehensive boy caught with spilled jam. However, he grows in authority as his kingship dwindles and seems most regal when his deeds are most evil. The cast does good ensemble work, and in the role of Macduff, Stephen Russell displays a riveting stillness of presence and a limpid delivery of the Shakespearean line that mark him for further distinction.

The double imagery of blackness and blood that dominates the play is projected with cinematic dexterity by Co-Directors Robin Phillips and Eric Steiner. The same cannot be said for the treatment of the text, laboriously articulated as if for slow listeners. This seriously hampers the tempo of a play that should speed an audience headlong toward the hero's fierce doom.

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