It's Bigger. It's Bolder. It's Possibly the Best Ever. Stratford Fest; Actors From Seasons Past Return to Stage

Thoughts on Shakespeare
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Carey Perloff thinks the world of Canadian actors. She isn't Canadian herself, though she's a frequent visitor, especially to Stratford, Ont. She is in fact the artistic director of the American Conservatory Theatre of San Francisco, one of the most enterprising and distinctive resident theatres in the United States. I visited it last fall, and found Geordie Johnson, who a few years ago was Stratford's Richard II, rehearsing the all-American role of Starbuck in The Rainmaker. He was initially surprised at the casting but seemed to be taking it in stride. Recently, Perloff has been working on a new version, by the British writer Timberlake Wertenbaker, of Jean Racine's Phedre, the most celebrated of French classical tragedies and a notoriously hard nut for the English- speaking theatre to crack.

Last year she found she had hit a wall. "I thought," she told me, "that it would help Timberlake find her way to the next stage of the translation if we could try it out with people who have the acting chops to handle the language, and who can also play the sexuality -- it's death if you have cerebral actors."

Most American actors, apparently, can't do this, maybe because they don't have the practice; British classical acting, according to Perloff, has been spoiled by the all-pervasive "Essex accent," a whining kind of debased Cockney. I agree, but I was relieved to get confirmation from an independent source.

Canadians speak the classics in a manner that's essentially, and blessedly, classless. So Perloff phoned Antoni Cimolino -- then executive director of the Stratford Festival, now in overall charge as general director. -- and a Stratford workshop was set up. Perloff came as director, bringing with her Olympia Dukakis to play the nurse.

The Festival supplied the other actors, with Seana McKenna playing the desire-ravaged Phedre, Scott Wentworth as her husband Theseus, and Jonathan Goad as Hippolytus, her stepson and love-object: practically dream-casting for these roles.

The resulting rehearsed reading was, by all accounts, sensational; there has been talk ever since-- though as yet no official confirmation -- of a full-scale production at the festival in 2009. It would, on the face of it, be criminal for it not to happen.

McKenna, reflecting, in a conversation earlier this year, on the "very intense five days" of the workshop, noted that "you have to go with the Greeks; you can't dip your toes into the Aegean Sea -- you have to jump in." She should know; she was a fine Medea at Stratford a few years ago (in a production that's being revived in Toronto next season), and she appears at this year's festival in The Trojan Women, opposite Martha Henry: the first time, amazingly, that these two female powerhouses have acted together.

As the cast also includes such terrific actresses as Yanna McIntosh (absent from Stratford for years) and Kelli Fox (completely new to the place) the amount of talent encamped on the plains of Troy looks quite extraordinary.

Which could be said of this year's Stratford company as a whole: A combination of festival regulars and newcomers that looks, on paper, like the strongest team ever to be assembled in Canadian theatre. One has to say "on paper" because a barrage of gifted individuals doesn't always translate into an ensemble, and even when it does it can be hard to keep such a group together for a period of years -- which presumably is the intention. Also, an undeniable cloud hangs over the festival with the resignations of Marti Maraden and Don Shipley, two of the artistic directors responsible, with the surviving Des McAnuff, for assembling the actors in the first place.

Maraden will still be directing two plays, The Trojan Women and All's Well That Ends Well, and I believe the protestations of all concerned that they're too immersed in getting the actual shows on stage (what else could they do, after all) to let themselves get affected. Still, it's a downer.

But there's promise as well. Peter Hinton, who directs The Taming of the Shrew, told me that his cast contains half-a-dozen possible Petruchios (including one, Evan Buliung, who actually plays him). Adrian Noble, the former director of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company responsible for this year's Hamlet (and also on the judging panel of TV's Triple Sensation on CBC), shares Carey Perloff's opinion of the local talent; though he's understandably less inclined than she is to disparage the standards in his homeland.

What he does say is that the festival actors are "pound for pound, as good as you'll see at the English Stratford at this moment" and that Canadian acting combines "the best of the North American method tradition with that of the British classical verse tradition. The quality of verse-speaking here is very high. There's a healthy respect for tradition -- which isn't always the case in the U.K."

His Hamlet, set at the beginning of the 20th century ("you can't go any later than the First World War -- you need a hierarchical society") stars Ben Carlson, a Stratford debutant but with a formidable record in striking sparks from classic texts; his long speeches in the Shaw Festival's Man and Superman stopped the show the way actors do in musicals.

This is Carlson's second Hamlet -- he played the role last year in Chicago, coincidentally for another former RSC director, Terry Hands -- and one of three roles he's playing at Stratford. Together they amount to an actor's democratic ideal: one whopping lead, one meaty supporting role (Tranio in The Shrew) and one lesser but still important part (First Lord in All's Well).

He's been rehearsing all three at once, and admits that if he were doing Hamlet again, he might like a slightly less hectic schedule. But the mix, he says, is terrific; "It's why you get up in the morning; I think all actors should do [repertory] -- it flexes your muscles, gets your energy up."

The problem of course is that there aren't enough Hamlets to go round, and this year's Stratford company is crammed -- for better or worse, and we don't yet know which -- with star-quality actors playing only supporting roles: they include Fiona Reid, Tom Rooney (Horatio to Carlson's Hamlet, a nice touch since for three years in Ottawa the roles were reversed) and Randy Hughson who has a substantial part in Shrew but is otherwise confined to First Soldiers and Second Gravediggers.

It turns out, though, that this is at his own request: "I was apprehensive about my own skill in terms of the verse; I wanted to check out the vibe." He's found he likes the vibe on several levels ("you've got to jump in at Stratford, or you'll be trampled ... it's wonderful to sit in a rehearsal room and there's Martha Henry ... when you step on the festival stage for the first time, you're aware of all the history, you're struck by the power of that stage") but is beginning to feel impatient for bigger challenges.

The possibilities for this newly assembled company are exciting. It will be fascinating to see how it all shakes down. And I want to see that Phedre.