Robust Aroma of Tradition

By William A. Henry lll

Few things divide directors from their audiences as abruptly as attempts to innovate the classics. Stage professionals often think about a text for decades, absorb observations from a dozen or more productions, and feel so weighty a burden of tradition that they see no value in reviving the play unless they can do something offbeat with it. Audiences, on the other hand, often find older texts hard to follow. They prefer a straight, uncomplicated rendering that delivers faithfully what the author intended. But it is often impossible to be sure what the author intended. In the case of William Shakespeare, the most revered and toyed with of dramatists, what we think of as straight is by and large what the Victorians and Edwardians thought Shakespeare meant; the revisionism of one generation becomes the received wisdom of the next.

The rich if rather fusty aroma of Victorian tradition permeates the work of North America's most celebrated Shakespeare troupe, Stratford Festival Canada, which is making its first U.S. tour in 13 years, with a repertory of Twelfth Night and King Lear. The shows have played to nearly sold-out houses in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and Palm Beach, Fla.; are running in Fort Lauderdale for most of January; and will finish in Washington on Feb. 2. Founded in 1953 by Tyrone Guthrie, the Stratford company prides itself on echoing the style of Britain's Old Vic of the 1940s, which in turn derived from an earlier era. Stratford productions sprawl grandly. The stage spills over with bodies, and even walk-ons are played by seasoned performers. Directors seem concerned more with creating stage pictures than with unearthing moments of character revelation. There is scant search for subtext, for the sort of humanity that lurks within people rather than revealing itself readily in words.

Stratford's style serves well for Lear, a robust and propulsive production of a play that is explicitly about great emotions. But the hard gloss reduces the subtler depths of Twelfth Night to mere giggles and kickshaws. Seeing these productions together may enable modern audiences to understand why earlier critics revered the Bard's tragedies but undervalued his comedies, overlooking their moral complexity and their glimpses of humiliation and pain in commoners' everyday life. The stress on low comic exaggeration also robs Twelfth Night of much of its social consequence: there is little sense that the battle between Sir Toby Belch and Malvolio has anything to do with the decline of the old gentry and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Three things salvage the production: the visual ingenuity of Director David Giles, who, for example, opens this play about the loss of loved ones and renewal through fresh love with an image of autumnal leaves being swept aside; Edward Atienza's bravura performance as Feste the fool, repeatedly given center stage to emphasize the folly of lovers; and the glowing impersonation of Viola, the girl dressed as a boy who inspires love everywhere, by Seana McKenna. She is young enough for the role but experienced enough to seduce an audience as ably and innocently as her character seduces the nobles of Illyria.

The role of Lear may be the grandest challenge for an actor, and Stratford Veteran Douglas Campbell is not quite up to it. He is thunderously imposing in the court scenes but not free enough when howling, half-maddened, on the heath. Otherwise, the energetic farewell production by Stratford Artistic Director John Hirsch is strikingly played, notably by Richard McMillan as Edgar, Lewis Gordon as Gloucester, and McKenna as a passionate, not just saintly, Cordelia. In an echo of Twelfth Night, Hirsch also features the Fool, whom Nicholas Pennell, unbearably mannered as Malvolio, plays with clearheaded reason and heartbreaking foresight. Together, the shows remind what should be an envious U.S. that its neighbor has a grand if at times misguided national theater. --By William A. Henry lll