The Bard in Neon and Doublets

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The biggest resident theater company in North America is not to be found in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago. Nor, as stage cognoscenti might suppose, is it in a thriving regional center like Minneapolis, home of the Guthrie, or a festival city like Ashland, site of the Oregon Shakespearean Festival. The champion -- as measured cumulatively by number of productions and performances, size of troupe, total audience and budget -- is located in an unpretentious town in the Canadian province of Ontario, about 90 miles from the skyscrapers of Toronto. It is a place that began with scarcely any claim to cultural status, except that it was called Stratford, and its river was dubbed the Avon.

From that flimsy association with the Bard, and a lot of local mercantile hustle, emerged a 1953 season performed in a tent, with a rotating repertory of All's Well That Ends Well and Richard III, featuring Alec Guinness, already an established film star, in the title role. Thirty-five years later, the Stratford Festival has three theaters, seating a total of 3,870 people, and its repertory sometimes offers as many as six different shows on the same day, a dozen within a single week. Guinness has been followed by Tony Winner Brian Bedford, two-time Oscar Winner Maggie Smith and, last year, Oscar Nominee Howard E. Rollins Jr. (Ragtime) as Othello.

But, for the most part, the performers are not stars, and the attraction that draws some 450,000 theatergoers a year -- about 45% of them from the U.S. -- is the shows themselves. The staging can be as traditional as a Richard III in doublets and armor or as giddily updated as The Taming of the Shrew transported to 1950s Italy. Shakespeare, which makes up at least half the schedule, can be complemented by the sober heft of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral or spritzed with My Fair Lady in an ingeniously extravagant production that bejewels the stage with chandeliers, dinner jackets and hats. Oedipus can share the schedule with The Three Musketeers and Irma la Douce.

Institutionally, Stratford has never been healthier. The $2.5 million deficit brought about by the last administration has been converted under John Neville, artistic director since 1985, to a projected $820,000 surplus this season. The old era's often staid and unimaginative productions -- typified by a dusty Twelfth Night and a ranting King Lear that toured the U.S. in 1985 -- have been supplanted by lively, risk-taking efforts, including innovative versions of Twelfth Night and King Lear, which are highlights of this year's offerings. Although the search has dragged on for more than a year to replace Neville, 63, who plans to retire after next season, the process has not yet been encumbered by the kind of vehement nationalism that blighted previous selections. When Briton John Dexter, a Tony winner for directing, was approached for the job in 1980, Canada's government at first denied him a work permit, and then a public outcry scuttled the idea.

Stratford's renewed popularity is easy to understand. At the least, the work is sturdily professional. At its best, it rivals the general run of offerings by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company. Last season Neville chose many of the plays to underscore the evils of war. This season, 35 years after the opening, the theme is more one of nostalgia for the festival's history. Of the Shakespeares, the splashiest is Richard III, performed by a sword-swishing cast of 51. There is nothing revisionist in Brian Rintoul's staging or in Colm Feore's cackling skitter through the title role. This is a bottled spider of a king who unmistakably enjoys his wickedness, at least until a chillingly effective dream sequence in which his victims haunt him before his final battle.

Feore's charm works equally well in the clownish Shrew, a slapstick rendering that does no violence to the text, while interjecting motorcycles, neon signs and gawking tourists to emphasize the eternal nature of the battle of the sexes. Unfortunately, Director Richard Monette is better at diverting audiences from the play's central question -- How far does a husband's authority extend? -- than at illuminating it. The play can be staged as a feminist screed or a male-chauvinist tract. What it does not seem to be is neutral, yet that is what Monette appears to attempt. His case is not helped by Goldie Semple, who, in the title role, roars onto the stage as though deranged, more in need of a whip and a chair than a spouse.

Among non-Shakespearean offerings, The Three Musketeers is a pure romp, about as close as a work of art can come to having no inner meaning or subtext, and My Fair Lady is a splendid showcase for the company's senior talents, including Douglas Campbell as a deliciously dirty Doolittle and Neville himself in the Rex Harrison role of Higgins. In his early career, Neville was considered one of London's leading young men: he and Richard Burton alternated as Iago and Othello in the West End in 1956. This coming Christmas season, after years away from high-profile acting, Neville returns to stardom in a new film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, directed by erstwhile Monty Python Member Terry Gilliam (Brazil).

+ Part of the reason for Neville's success is that he has, in effect, a second artistic director, Robin Phillips, who headed Stratford from 1975 to 1980 and returned two years ago to run an autonomous ensemble of actors in their mid- 20s to mid-30s at the festival's third stage. That group provided the most powerful work last season and is aglow again. Twelfth Night has as fanciful a plot as any Shakespeare comedy, but its emotional texture is among the most realistic. Phillips has found that honesty, alas at the wholesale expense of the play's comic scenes of slapstick and artifice. The production's most striking touch is the performance of the clownish Feste by Albert Schultz, the young company's ablest member. This "fool" is highly intelligent but is treated as a sport, an entertainment, because he is afflicted with a palsy that lames one leg, curls one hand into a useless ball and convulses his face whenever he speaks. In a play in which everyone in sight winds up happily coupled forever after, Schultz's Feste mutely speaks volumes for the legions to whom romance seems eternally denied.

For Lear, the young players are joined by William Hutt, 68, perhaps Canada's most distinguished stage actor, in what may be the performance of his career. His king is no autocrat but a dotard whose authority has long been a polite fiction. His plans for dividing the kingdom are a surprise to no one; his daughters' resistance to his extravagant wanderings are no meanness but utter common sense in the face of senility; the brutality they eventually show is brought on by invasion and civil war, both instigated by their holier-than- thou sister. Hutt superbly manages Lear's transition from apparent lucidity to frank madness. In the most inspired moment of stage interpolation, his repeated demand as to whether the horses are ready comes as he is already bouncing, and dozing, in a horse-drawn coach.

Just such imagination, vividly expressed, is what brought Phillips the artistic directorship in 1975, when he was 32, and the same qualities made him the front runner to succeed Neville. According to highly placed sources at Stratford, the board's negotiations with Phillips have broken down, and there is some concern that, as a result, he may also eventually give up the young company. For the moment, however, the team of Neville and Phillips has made Stratford not only the biggest theater in North America but one of the very best.