Mary Jolliffe, the Stratford Festival's first publicist, tells the story about a farmer who came up to the box office one hot July afternoon to purchase tickets and was asked which play he wanted to see. "Don't really care," he said, "just as long it comes between hayin' and harvestin'."
On the box office side of the artistic ledger, The 50th anniversary celebration of the Stratford Festival delivered everything that it promised and more. With a dazzling season of programming that included twenty productions, the opening of a long dreamed of fourth venue - the 250 seat Studio Theatre - and a benchmark staging of "King Lear" starring Christopher Plummer (directed by Jonathan Miller), the Festival closes out its season on November 24 with a final, extended run performance of "My Fair Lady" starring Colm Feore and Cynthia Dale.
Fifty years on and 2,469 actors later, we tend to view this remarkable yearly achievement as something to be expected - almost routine. But if anything, an anniversary celebration is a good way to remember the way things were at the beginning and how much the Festival has meant to the development of the arts in Canada - especially the notion that important theatre can happen outside of the great metropolitan areas.
On the critical side, as with any undertaking this size, the reviews would have to be mixed with kudos and reservations - acclamations and some disappointments.
Since the namesake of the festival is the playwright William Shakespeare, it's my personal belief that the highlight of the season for him would have been the opening of the new Studio Theatre that will emphasize new work by contemporary playwrights on a small stage that echoes the radical thrust of Tanya Moiseiwitsch's design for the Festival's main stage.
The two one-act plays that I saw, both commissioned and workshopped by the Festival, were worthy inaugurations of the space. High-Gravel-Blind by Paull Dunn, explores the nature of relationships both by way of family and extended family. Lance (Damien Atkins) is young man who is trying to realize himself with a new job as a personal assistant in a film production company and is experiencing all of the disappointments and setbacks found in the real world of work. His youth was a difficult one and now he and his roommate/soulmate Jessica (Kimwun Perehinec) receive an unannounced and unwanted visit from Lance's father, who, as a former alcoholic, abandoned the family during Lance's childhood. Stephen Ouimette as Gord, the father, with Chick Reid as Margery, his new, born-again Christian wife, never find what they are looking for but discover much by way of the search.
"Eternal Hydra", by Anton Piatigorsky, is the more intellectually engaging of the two but doesn't work quite as well dramatically. Vivian Ezra, (Chick Reid), is a literary scholar who is in possession of a long lost manuscript by the Irish writer, Gordian Carbuncle (Stephen Ouimette) - a kind of Samuel Beckett type. Paul Soles plays the publisher and Karen Robinson is the writer who has written a novel about Selma Thomas, the African-American poet who may or may not have had an affair with Carbuncle who in turn may or may not have appropriated her work. What was interesting and encouraging about this play was to see a young playwright unafraid to take a stab at the controversial subject of voice appropriation by modernist white writers in the use of the black idiom. But although Piatigorsky went for the jugular, the target remained illusive.
Literary scholarship was also at play on the other side of town in the Tom Patterson Theatre which was the venue for Henry VI (Revenge in France) and Henry VI (Revolt in England). Traditionally, scholars have dismissed these earliest plays by Shakespeare (they are listed in the complete works in three parts and seldom performed), as the undistinguished work of a young and emerging playwright. Closer examination reveals an amazing explosion of creative energy that encompassed relatively recent history for the playwright as the War of the Roses ended within the living memory of many in Shakespeare's audience.
By condensing the plays, director Leon Rubin's dramaturgy heightened the action and accessibility of the script by elevating two of the most compelling characters in each: Joan la Pucelle (Michelle Giroux) - aka Joan of Arc - and the revolutionary leader Jack Cade (Jonathan Goad). Strong casting and fast paced direction made this day of Henry's well worth watching. Additionally noteworthy performances came from Michael Therriault as King Henry VI, Seanna McKenna as Queen Margaret, Thom Marriott as Richard, Duke of York, and Haysam Kadri as Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Rubin chose to end the second play with a brilliant bit of portent by having Richard, Duke of Gloucester, left alone on the cold, barren stage giving the speech "Now is the winter of our discontent..." - which brings us to -
Richard III (Reign of Terror) directed by Martha Henry and featuring Tom McCamus as the duplicitous Duke who never lets a physical challenge get in the way of ambition or his quest for the top job. Although most critics didn't agree with Henry's slapstick style of a Richard who takes a pratfall at his own coronation, once my partner pointed out to me that it was sort of like watching Jerry Seinfeld's friend Kramer coming into a position of way more power and responsibility than he could handle, I began to see where she was going and I don't think that it was at all inconsistent with the outrageous, over the top character that Richard is in the play. Further to that, I think Henry produced an ensemble of women that were the most powerful I have ever seen in a R-III. She turned what can easily be a long whine into a staunch demand for justice and retribution with excellent work from Sarah Dodd as Lady Anne, Seanna McKenna as Queen Elizabeth and Diane D'Aquila as the curse leveling Queen Margaret.
Richard III and All's Well That Ends Well were the two plays that made up the entire inaugural Stratford Festival season fifty years ago. There is a scene in All's Well That Ends Well when the braggart, Parolles - after the business with the drum and being abducted by Florentines who speak a gibberish foreign language, says in exasperation: "Who cannot be crushed with a plot?" I'd say Shakespeare for one. As we get about half way through the play, you begin to wonder - where on earth is he going with all of this nonsense? And so it is that AWTEW is called one of Shakespeare's "problem plays" because it's - well, it's problematic.
The problem wasn't helped it all by casting Lucy Peacock as Helena. There were inadvertent shades of The Graduate in asking us to believe in a significantly older woman going after a much younger Bertram (David Snelgrove). The performance redeems itself only when William Hutt as The King of France gracefully pulls every nuance from the role and gently guides us down the street named Consummate until we are finally won over and convinced the play's title is no sham at all.
With corporate logos pasted over every program, park bench and flower garden, it was nice to see the Festival produce the Brecht/Weill musical The Threepenny Opera to remind us that capitalism may not be all that it's cracked up to be ("What is a picklock to a bank share? What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?"). The enduring nature of the piece seems to be that it can always be called upon to challenge the status quo. How unfortunate, then, to mar the honesty of the work by a patently false start to the show by the use of an actor made up to be an aggressive, homeless man who forces his way into the theatre and insists on singing the opening musical prologue, "Mack the Knife". One can hear an alienated Brecht shouting from the grave: "This is not my method!"
And yet the production thrives purely on the strength of its material with Tom McCamus as a fine Macheath backed by a sterling cast of musical performers with superb performances from Susan Gilmour as Jenny, Diana Coatsworth as Polly Peachum and Blythe Wilson as a domineering Lucy Brown.
That evening in the same Avon Theatre, Brecht's socialist revolution gave way to the communard's of the French Revolution in Baronness Emmuska Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel. Originally written as a novel in 1900, the original dramatic adaptation was done by Orczy herself in 1903. After numerous stage and film incarnations, this latest one comes from Beverley Cross's work with the Chichester Festival in 1985.
As a melodramatic potboiler, this piece should not take itself too seriously. Unfortunately, director Dennis Garnhum does. With earnest depictions of Madame Guillotine in full throttle (which the kids loved), the brave and morally superior English spirit away the beleaguered French aristocracy as the Marseillaise intones mournfully in the background suitably transposed into the minor mode. Only Peter Hutt as Chauvelin seems to follow his own, lone instinct to camp it up. The rest of the cast should have followed his lead.
In his autobiography, A Life in the Theatre, Tyrone Guthrie, the Stratford Festival's founding artistic director, describes the early years: "The Stratford Festival is not perfect. I know well that over the years, subsequent directors will make many alterations and many improvements. But I am convinced partly by my own productions there, and far more by those of my successors, that the principle is right."
Fifty years on, the rightness of the principle still prevails.