The Stratford Festival of Canada, founded a half-century ago on little more than a whim and a prayer, is celebrating its 50th season this summer with a lineup (14 shows in four theaters), a budget ($28 million) and an audience (more than 600,000 tickets sold) befitting its status as the largest, mightiest classical repertory company in North America.
The festival, which originally ran only six summer weeks and now stretches from April through November, regularly presents an array of musicals, contemporary plays, new works and assorted entertainment, with Shakespeare always a core element.
The centerpiece of this season is the newly opened “King Lear,” with Christopher Plummer, directed by Jonathan Miller, but also on the schedule are “Romeo and Juliet,” a two-part “Henry VI” and a production of the rarely seen “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” presented by an eager, unseasoned cast of alumni from the Festival’s Conservatory for Classical Theatre Training.
In addition, as part of its anniversary agenda, the festival has brought back “Richard III” and “All’s Well That Ends Well,” the two Shakespeare plays that inaugurated the Stratford experiment on July 13, 1953, in a tent theater, with Alec Guinness and Irene Worth starring under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie. Back then, nobody, not even Tom Patterson, the Stratford resident who had coaxed the festival into being with faith and a shoestring budget, imagined that it would grow so dramatically; but after four seasons under canvas, the festival opened its permanent theater and it has been expanding ever since.
The first production in the new Festival Theatre in 1957 was “Hamlet,” with Plummer, a native of Canada, in the title role. He has played there several times since, and in this special season, he is, at 72, making Stratford history again with “Lear.”
His portrayal of the aged king, “more sinned against than sinning,” takes its cue from the description that Lear’s two evil daughters give of their father, as a man who “hath ever but slenderly known himself” and whose “rash” behavior is compounded by “the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.”
Plummer’s Lear therefore is a cranky, querulous old codger, one who is used to having his own way and who flies into a rage when he is crossed. “Miscreant!” shouts Lear when his loyal follower Kent tries to reason with him, and, with Plummer’s clarion voice, that cry of petulance is volcanic in volume, audible in every one of the festival theater’s 1,824 seats.
This interpretation takes away some of the majesty of the role, making Lear’s great storm scene (“Blow winds, and crack your cheeks …”) seem more like an irritated bit of argument rather than the towering outcry of a great and tortured soul. Later, however, when he is reduced to a kind of sweet senility, when he unleashes an offstage shout of immeasurable grief and mourns the death of his good daughter Cordelia, Plummer’s Lear is a sad and saintly figure, nearing the end of his painful journey.
Strong supporting cast
James Blendick, a Stratford veteran, gives strong support as Gloucester, the king’s bluff and hearty friend, a father betrayed by his bastard son and his eyes gouged out by his enemies. The final meeting between Lear, broken and wispy, with the blinded, weeping Gloucester is one of the production’s most moving moments.
Miller’s production of the play is surprisingly subdued and severe, considering this director’s reputation for moving classics into bizarre environments. (In opera, he has put “Rigoletto” in a Mafia context, and he once set “The Magic Flute” in the lobby of a Swiss hotel.)
Here, however, he has kept the festival theater’s dark, porticoed thrust stage bare, the color coming only in the lace and brocades of 17th Century court costumes. And, except for transferring the play’s final speech (“We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long”) from the Duke of Albany to Edgar, Gloucester’s good son, Miller has made no radical changes in the text.
His cast produces mostly standard Shakespeare stuff, cultivated but unexciting, and Lear’s Fool, played by Barry McGregor with white clown makeup but with a huge hat that shadows his face, is reduced to a minor character, all his songs deleted and his lines spoken in a cockney accent that’s hard to decipher.
Poetry shines through
Yet the play’s poetry shines through, especially when Plummer is speaking it. No actor can ever give the definitive portrait of Lear; it’s too complex a role. But in his way, as a volatile old monarch who is humbled and brought down to despair by his own flaws and the evil of his enemies, Plummer makes his stab at Lear a memorable one.
(Another reason for celebration this year at Stratford is the renovation of the 1,088-seat Avon Theatre. On its proscenium stage, there is a rousing production of “The Threepenny Opera,” inventively staged by Stephen Ouimette, a festival actor making his directorial debut; and in the new 250-seat Studio Theatre, carved out of the Avon’s old scenery shop, a series of short new works is being presented.)
Shaw marking milestone
Canada’s other major classical repertory theater, the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, is also marking an important milestone, the final season of Christopher Newton, its artistic director since 1979 and the man responsible for bringing this festival, devoted to the works of George Bernard Shaw and the theater produced during his life span (1856-1950), to international prominence.
For his final season, Newton has staged three plays: Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever,” Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” and “The Return of the Prodigal,” a 1905 social comedy/drama by the relatively unheralded St. John Hankin.
“Hay Fever” is smoothly done in the high Coward manner, and “Prodigal,” about an errant son whose happy admission that he is a total failure in business upsets his very proper upper middle-class family, has a welcome wicked streak of comic darkness in its drawing room setting.
At first look, Newton’s treatment of “Caesar and Cleopatra” seems radical. The characters in this Shavian morality tale of ancient Egypt are all costumed in pre-World War I British Empire style. Instead of a toga, Caesar wears breeches and riding boots, and the Egyptian courtiers are dressed in striped pants and fezzes.
The style makes great sense, however, since it emphasizes Shaw’s belief that the follies of empires, Egyptian or English, are eternal; and the cast, led by Jim Mezon’s assured Caesar and Caroline Cave’s kittenish Cleopatra, makes the playwright’s points clearly and urbanely.
Paying attention to detail
Newton’s successor as artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, is represented by two popular shows in the festival’s 11-play, April-through-November season, Shaw’s “Candida” (which I did not see) and a vigorous airing of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”
Among the many other pleasures of this festival are the care it gives to every detail of its operation, from its abundant, excellent program notes to its lunchtime productions of short plays, this year’s example being a sweet revival of James M. Barrie’s sentimental classic, “The Old Lady Shows Her Medals.”
Shakespeare, Shaw and in between, these two Canadian festivals are enjoying a busy season of skilled professionalism.
