From Titus to Virginia

Titus Andronicus, Much Ado About Nothing
The Stratford Festival
The Observer

I came to Canada, as I generally do, via New York, where the temperature was 10 intolerable degrees higher than it was in Stratford, Ontario. America, though, pursued me: the surrounding conversation suggested that the Stratford Shakespeare Festival gets much of its clientele from south of the border.

Brows were furrowed over Pelican editions of the coming evening’s play, which happened to be Titus Andronicus. ‘Titus has cut his hand off. Can someone tell me why?’ ‘It’s an act of atonement,’ suggested someone not quite accurately. I wondered what they would make of the cannibal fest that closed the show. The conscientious continued to bone up, glancing enviously around as friends wandered away in search of ice cream.

The American connection does much for the alertness of Stratford’s audience: also, of course, for its box office. In other ways, it saps Canada’s theatre. The best Canadian talent gets lured to Broadway or Hollywood, even occasionally to London. (I don’t know what can be done about this: natives can hardly be forbidden to leave the country. The alternative strategy, favoured by protectionists, of stopping other actors from coming in seems to me counter-productive.)

This is the Englishman Robin Phillip’s sixth season as Stratford’s director; the Festival Theatre’s platform stage retains its magic, and he has unequalled ability to make it swirl. He has more bodies at his beck than any director could find in Britain, outside an opera house, and he pours them onto the stage. Maybe it was unfortunate that both his Shakespearean productions on offer during my stay were comedies, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing - in which charm and movement, though certainly secured, seemed to have become ends in themselves. In Twelfth Night the only moments of real resonance came with Stratford’s doyen, William Hutt (who has been with the company since its inception in 1953), burst gravely into song as Feste, making- as the finest theatre always does- an eternal moment out of the evanescent. 

In Much Ado Mr Phillips has oddly done one of his crown numbers on the church scene: a couple of dozen people seem to be in on the secret of Hero’s ‘death’ and it is inconceivable that not one of them would have blabbed. But in general this is a most solid production, blessed with foresight: even an initially unfunny Dogberry turns out to be holding himself in readiness for the revelation that is is an ass.

The imported stars, as in previous seasons, are Brian Bedford and Maggie Smith; and they complement each other well. Mr Bedford’s Benedick is firmly and stolidly a soldier (as his Malvolio is firmly and modestly a steward): he provides the anchorage and Miss Smith the pyrotechnics. Her Beatrice is a woman blessed with wit and passion and almost afraid of her own endowments- in fact, a classic Maggie Smith performance.

Stratford seems to have honed both her skills and her insecurities- each perfectly timed reposed is prefaced by an unnecessary (an anachronistic) interjection: ‘Well,’ ‘Do you know?,’ ‘I mean.’ Maybe she doesn’t know she is doing it; her talent is what makes her mannerisms so irritating . Her gift for self-self-deprecation - dissection her own wise-cracks to the ground with a flick of the wrist- permeates Virginia, the festival’s most trumped new play. It happens to be dead wrong for the ineffable Virginia Woolf, who can never have seen a joke against herself in the whole of her life, but it saves Edna O’Brien’s piece from complete inertia.

This is a play about sensitive literary problems acted out in sensitive literary writing against sensitive literary music. The three characters - Virginia, husband Leonard and intruder V. Sackville-West- are grouped in Mr Phillip’s production like ghosts from Harold Pinter’s Old Times. One expected better from this author and this director, if not, to be honest from this subject

Another three hander, Bosoms and Neglect (hot from failure in New York), is the work of America’s most frustrating playwright, John Guare; frustrating because his perceptions hardly ever cohere. Here an octogenarian woman, trying to dry that she has breast cancer, her bookworm son, and his new found lady-love, who like him, is deeply into literature and deeper into analysis. Many of Mr Guare’s sallies are funny, but as they pile up they group themselves into variants of the New York psychiatrist joke or- with the old lady at the other end of play- of the idea of salt old age, eccentric but indomitable. Each has been done to death, though the second at least gives the cue for a knock-down performance from Kate Reid.

So back to Shakespeare and to Mr Bedford’s production of Titus, simple but powerful, with everyone in the right place at the right time, and the play actually seeming to have something to do with Imperial Rome. Mr Hutt marks time during Titus’s authoritarian phase, but in the onset and then the retreat of madness, with every line an ironic shaft, he is very fine. Other performances run the gamut- too common at Stratford- from vigorous-anonymous through serviceable-dutiful to ambitious-atrocious.

Mr Phillip’s new production of King Lear with Peter Usinov has yet to open when I left. It will, however, be seen later this year in London at the Haymarket. Next year at Stratford the power structure changes; Mr Phillips remains in command, but he will now have a phalanx of associate directors including Len Cariou, the Canadian actor who was Broadway’s Sweeny Todd, and English-born Pam Brighton, who has recently scored a great success with her own conflated version of the ‘Henry VI’ plays.