Stratford Solution

A summer drama festival can be defined as a green field where Shakespeare meets an army of clever directors--and often loses. For playgoers tired of seeing their Much Ado About Nothing in Teddy Roosevelt costumes and Troilus and Cressida outfitted in Confederate grays and Union blues, the 22nd Stratford Canada festival offers two solutions: the little-known worst of Shakespeare and the little-known best of Moliere. The second alternative is infinitely attractive, starting with the visual sense of the word.

For The Imaginary Invalid, Director Jean Gascon has framed adroitly what is in essence a portrait. He has positioned the malingering Argan (William Hutt) exactly at stage center on a brocade chair--a seedy tyrant's throne for a little kingdom of hypochondria. Hutt clutches his mangy fur robe about him like a security blanket. A red snot-rag, dangling from one pocket, signals the color of his hysteria. His face is pure Daumier caricature, built around the downcurve of a mouth conditioned by only the most vile-tasting medicine--a mouth determined against any evidence to expect the worst from life.

The geometry of Tanya Moisei-witsch's set places Hutt between a skeleton on his right and a spinet on his left, perfectly balancing Moliere's intentions: to rattle tragedy's bones with one hand while trilling comic grace notes with the other. Unfortunately, Gascon, Hutt and company allow the spinet --wildly jazzed up--to take over the evening. They mug and yuk it up.

And they are half right. Plots to Moliere were only conventions. The joy of the game was the almost vaudevillian exercise of all the resources of theater: music, dance and slapstick. A devotee of mimes and tumblers, a performer himself, Moliere composed sight gags like a 17th century Chaplin.

Still, Moliere is more than the sum of his pratfalls. He makes an audience laugh at what has made him cry. Stuttering and stammering, Argan is finally raging, not at his fellow characters or the audience but at his own mortality.

Moliere was playing the role of Argan at the time of his death. His chronic hiccups, which he converted into stage business--a trouper works with what he is given--had by then turned into a racking cough. He was Argan proved right--imaginary invalids become real ones in the end. But this is just what Moliere knew all along, and this is just what the Stratford production neglects. The moral for the great Moliere revival of the '70s is this: Don't shoot the spinet player, but leave room for the skeletons' danse macabre.

Like Moliere, Shakespeare was a player before he was a playwright. But nobody would guess it from Love's Labour's Lost. Here is Shakespeare as a Bright Young Man putting conceits, puns and sonnets in other Bright Young Men's mouths. When not strutting their foppish pedantry, these athletes of wordplay--led by the King of Navarre --turn into the kind of sighing lovers who seem destined to carve their initials on the cardboard trees of a thousand Elizabethan stage forests.

This, then, is a boy's rehearsal for what the playwright man would do in As You Like It. But what a work of theatrical grace Michael Bawtree has fashioned out of all the artifice! The obvious temptation would be to bury the verbiage under antics. But good lines are scrupulously respected, the hyperboles cast off like arpeggios. Without missing a joke, Bawtree plays for something subtler--a humor that permits, above all, modulations into the lyrical, his favorite key. In the finely staged entrances and exits, the elegant circlings of wits and their ladies, here is theater as sophisticated as a minuet by Mozart.

If Love's Labour's Lost anticipates As You Like It, Pericles anticipates The Tempest. Shipwrecks are what pass for plots here as the pseudoclassical hero washes up, island by island, it seems, across the Aegean and the Mediterranean, losing and finally regaining his wife and daughter in the process. Before their reunion, the wife becomes presumably the only matron in a tem ple of vestal virgins, the daughter certainly the only virgin in a brothel -- peaks of survival which may outdo even Pericles' own. Shakespeare, the scholars say, wrote only the last three acts, and perhaps ought to be forgiven for them.

The Stratford company, if it has not quite triumphed, has brought its subject matter to a worthy draw. It has avoided embarrassment -- a small miracle in itself. The cast is good-looking in its various bathing costumes. A certain epic dash fills the air. What more could Shakespeare and that other scribbler ask?

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