Geraint Wyn Davies as King Arthur in Camelot
This is Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot on Stratford’s 2011 stage. The tree vines and balconies are all gold. A “bird of prey” about which we’ve been warned by a sign in the lobby soars down for a twenty second appearance and is carried off. We meet King Arthur, aka Geraint Wyn Davies aka Falstaff on Merry Wives nights, here quite full of anxiety as he sits all boyishly innocent up a tree. Merlyn aka Brent Carver looks on with an aged twinkle posing as an eye and we learn that Arthur is “scared” in anticipation of wedlock. We feel instantly protective of this seemingly guileless lad.
It turns out that bride-to-be Guenevere is equally anxious about same wedding, even as she bursts with girlhood and girlishness dreams. Both are finding their way, for he is “not very accomplished at thinking” and she is a blend of eagerness, prematurely assertive attitude, charm, and romantic notions. Arthur’s body is awkward and he does not quite know what to do with his limbs, while Guenevere is both womanly sexual and tomboyish. We are immediately on their side as they maneuver through their first meeting, for their innocence together is very dear. We want to preserve them safe from life’s inevitable complications but, of course, it won’t be so in this two-boxes-of-tissue classic musical.
We also want to preserve the wondrous place that sprouts from Wyn Davies voice each time, as Arthur, he opens his mouth. His nuanced manner of speaking creates a world made of the human heart, at once awkward among others and still true to its purity. He is a constantly accommodating fellow, one who can’t reach the potential in his world because his brain is not acute and Merlyn who guided him before is now, when he is king, gone. He does have a loving and loyal Guenevere as his queen, romantic as before and now ambitious too, but Kaylee Harwood keeps her not much changed in adulthood from the girl she was and we sense unrealized dreams in the air, hers and his.
Meanwhile Arthur’s idealistic dreams are beyond the scope of Guenevere’s inner realm and part of the emotional clout of this production is that Wyn Davies makes them human and necessary, although a potential that he and we can never reach. The catalyst for change in the status quo enters all brightly shining and metallic in knightly attire and he too will see his ideals mangled by the facts of life in a triangle of love. Like King and Queen, he too has inevitable inadequacies, although he too means well, loves truly, and tries his best.
Jonathan Winsby’s Lancelot is street corner handsome, has a charming toothy smile, and his vocally ringing entrance with “C’est moi” seems ready to conquer the world. But that too doesn’t happen in life, does it? Even when driven by a young man’s enthusiasm, intentions and the roles one chooses to play get foiled, even if a clueless and Christ-like Lancelot who adheres to virtue can do miracles. Again it is Arthur, achingly played direct and complex by Wyn Davies at the end, who shows the wounding and confusing impact of life.
Other key roles include Brent Carver as King Pellinore who is delightfully worn and rough-edged, a man like Arthur of nuance but also –and this is a Carver trademark-with eyes that drill forth in almost predatory glances. Lucy Peacock does a juicy star turn as Morgan le Fey with grand gestures, meaty delivery, and many a phrase made into a conversational weapon. As Mordred, the very evil counterweight to Lancelot’s goodness, Mike Nadajewski offers a potent creation who is smarmy, conniving, self-indulgently cynical on the seven deadly virtues, and, as he should be, hateful, hateful, hateful.
So this production of the classic Camelot is special because it has, among other things, a human centre, one which director Gary Griffin keeps genuine. He subtly stresses the ineptitude of people in impossible situations and we keep hanging in emotionally because we live lives too. We know, perhaps admit, that adults are still kids even in duds that grownups wear, that people don’t change all that much from what they were. Wyn Davies brilliantly and constantly shows the tension of struggle between was and is, and if sometimes we don’t get the same sense of inner bruises created by life in Guenevere or Lancelot, one point of the tragedy is thus made even more deeply. Not everyone hurts the same.