BLITHE SPIRIT
Director Brian Bedford has positioned Ruth as the production’s focal point in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit and Sara Topham’s Ruth begins high and keeps it high, almost overwhelmingly intense at times. She seems squeezed to the edge of shrillness since she belongs to a class squeezed beyond endurance with its manners, a class who speak as if each time they are making a speech, as if they know little more than their sense of decorum. When husband Charles through Ben Carlson, speaking to the unseen to Ruth Elvira, says, “Oh shut up,” Ruth retorts with “How dare you speak to me like that, ” as if a cosmic law has been violated. It’s an interesting pairing, these two: he sort of feels his way and she, a priori, looks down on the world. Still they do everything as they should and convey the empty formality of their class.
Topham’s Ruth is tightly wound and, according to Elvira, “incapable of seeing beyond the nose on her face”. She does indignation on a dime, is always saving face, and seems almost insane with pomposity. She has a done-to quality about her, speaks with a measured and deliberate enunciation, and is so good at it that one feels suffocated in listening and unable to breathe. Husband Charles is a man of deeply rooted ease in placidity, a man whose big effort is the inhalation of a cigar. He is starched, also measured in speech with some relaxation, low keyed, perhaps resolute and resolved to women, and in time we want him to be released from the demands of womenfolk. Nonetheless, husband and wife are pleasantly secure in their snobbery before Ruth Goes over the top , hysterical on Elvira’s vase breaking prank.
Elvira as played by Michelle Giroux, is sexy and insinuating, casually intimate, and invitingly seductive with her seductive glide. She takes a sensual delight in being, a delight into which she incorporates Charles, and she is funny because she has feeling and flesh with which she speaks to those who exist by self-denial. They in turn are funny because anything out of the ordinary is dismissed from their world until Elvira unsettles them. In reference to ectoplasm, she calls Madame Arcati “a silly old bitch”. This Madame, played by Seanna McKenna, seems real and not arbitrary in her unforced dottiness. She wears the most hilariously and flamboyantly and garish wild patterns, seems exuberant in her other world connections, moves with an unselfconscious energy and vigour and sometimes with spastic movements with a mind of their own. Her speech can be bold, dynamic, calm or piercing and she is too loud for this atmosphere as she growls in telling a juicy anecdote. She fills the stage delightfully.
James Blendick as Doctor Bradman is solid, resonant, laid back, and deeply buried in his way of being. Wendy Thatcher’s Mrs Bradman takes delight in speech and likes to relish her words and their gossipy chatting quality. Her airheaded curiosity about things is oblivious to much. Since this is Noel Coward, maid Edith is in constant run mode, all awkwardness and overdrive and something of a frenzied truck. So although we probably have seen Blithe Spirit many times before, this production brings fresh takes to it and one laughs throughout at its refreshing surprises. Each characterization is made of new insights and understanding and one senses a subtle compassion for these people in the air, since director Bedford, with Coward’s help, makes it clear that each one is trapped in a way or isolated. At the same time it is a very funny production.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
We soon realize in Stratford’s Measure for Measure, that director Martha Henry intends Shakespeare’s text to be heard and understood. Thus, characters here speak ideas as the result of their actual thoughts and behave in a given situation as whole beings unfolding. We are struck that these people do listen and do communicate. Words are heard, thought about and responded to and we delight in the ensuing verbal tennis matches implicit in conversation. Since there is much knack for timing and emphasis in this cast, words do have their effect. On the other hand, most of these characters do not necessarily broadcast their inner worlds, especially in the cases of Angelo and the Duke and Isabella who, by propensity or by need, are not used to letting out many feelings.
The setting is a post-war Vienna of nitpicking rigidity in some and hypocrisy of no flexibility in others, so one’s cards must be played close. The plot involves the society as much as it does the individuals and, whatever the case, one doesn’t feel safe with these people. This is, however, a production of surprising comedy and while some comedic touches stand out as arbitrary, most are effectively contrapuntal to the play’s dramatic development. Thanks to designer John Pennoyer and the lighting of Steven Hawkins, it’s a darkly lit world of unforgiving shadings with a prison like metal door that prevents both physical and psychological escape. This dark world serves as both post war Vienna and the darker realms of the soul, all while a soundtrack by Todd Charlton growls ominously overhead and around us.
Apparently, some have been troubled by Tom Rooney’s low key Angelo in this production, but I find him intriguing. He is a decidedly average man who must risk himself in the realm of expressed lust where he is not confidant. He has the self-propelling and un-introspective security of a stereotypically diligent accountant, no offense intended, meticulously doing his numbers and not entertaining thought about anything else. He is an emotionally limited man and then he gets turned on by a nun. So what happens when an average un-self-challenging guy is given cause for his passion to speak? We know his kind well- he does his job and therefore approves of himself because he doesn’t engage as a player in the complex world around him. He is inward and self-assured without flaunting his morality and so we must work harder to enter his thinking. Who is he? He does everything behind the scenes. He’s like a….a…prime minister. Yes, Angelo is strict on himself and “his integrity stands without blemish” but he is also a small man who erupts when he is found out. It’s a telling touch that Angelo does not take Mariana’s extended hand; this will not be a good marriage, all will not end well here.
So what of Geraint Wyn Davies’ Duke Vincentio? He has ultimate worldly power, but he is also a games player, testing all the moral issues in society through those who represent them. He too demonstrates a prevailing ambiguity about human motives and worth and one wonders if he is really bound to anything beyond himself. For he is a chess competitor who, one suspects, is sometimes guided by whimsy. He likes to play with people and when he virtually orders Isabella to marry him, no matter what her wishes, he seems, as they say, out of control. This Duke is a fussy fellow with a temper who accepts no contradiction, a busybody who breaks into “Falling in Love Again” and goes off to, no doubt, be arbitrary somewhere else. After all, though concerned about a “too general vice” in Vienna, he skips town and leaves Angelo as a broom to clean things up. Yes, we enjoy the Duke’s suppressed rage when Sterhen Ouimette’s Lucio unknowingly tells the Duke about himself, but we don’t here feel much greatness being abused.
Overall, this production is full of many splendidly realized and flavor-full performances that make this Vienna an interesting world. Stephen Ouimette’s Lucio is worn and worldly, a readily intriguing fellow who likes an intrigue. He is smooth and slick, and walks like a man who has been shooting dice all night before. Peter Hutt’s Escalus speakswith a voice of insinuating syrup. He commands the stage as a man sat upon by the bureaucracy he serves, a suppressed soul whose propriety can be broken when pushed. Stephen Russell’s Provost is a fascinating blend of function and textures of personality, a man both assertively and quietly poignant. Christopher Prentice as Isabella’s brother Claudio is a young man of desperate snippiness and resentment, since, though secure with where he is as a person like his sister, his life is on the line. Even the brief role of the hangman shows a compelling man of attitude.
Randy Hughson as Pompey is a most engaging performance, ragged and gravelly, physically dynamic, a man in his own reality and in his own world. He is rumpled by the underside of city life and eager to involve himself as a performer, using every word as occasion, to be on life’s stage. Brian Tree’s Elbow is a man of jerky physical presence, even chaotic physicality, and he walks, inflated with his perceived self-importance, in a mechanical march with a mechanical swinging arm. His mentally disturbed rationality is made even funnier by his arbitrary way of expression. In the pivotal and key role of Isabella, understudy Sarah Afful offers a woman starched in virtue and distinct innocence, a woman withdrawn from the logic of the world. This is an Isabella of inherent self-assurance who speaks from an inner luminosity, since her course has been only spiritual and everything is new for her. Since her emotions are spoken from a cut and dry assurance, her breaking actually means something, as it does with Angelo. These people are risking all that they are when the real world taps them on the shoulder.
WAITING FOR GODOT
Director Jennifer Tarver’s Waiting For Godot is a conceptually unified production that sets its entertainment stakes quite high and doesn’t falter in achieving them. It makes sure that we get the point, that all the spaces are filled appealingly, that the continuum of entertainment doesn’t break lest we might experience ourselves and not just the actors before us. The acting is quintessentially fine, although I find we are given diversion and not as much cause for introspection as I prefer. We await the punch line of each physical gag and it comes awaited but unanticipated. Unlike with Godot, we are certain that something is coming. It’s a very extraverted production, and I have only once before heard so much laughter, especially young laughter, at a Waiting for Godot. It’s a production with a need to entertain and therefore the director, from where I sat, lets the audience off the existential hook by providing a superb production. It seems geared to diversion and not much attempt to encounter raw existence.
Each suggestion of stage visualization in the text seems to be used and in this production we are surely aware of Beckett as precise theatrical writer. Vladimir and Estragon are here a surprisingly perky pair, especially the latter, and their dialogue is treated as a vaudeville exchange at a brisk clip, as in “Who’s on First?” These guys are certainly on a theatrical stage and if they dwell within an infinite expanse of the universe, we don’t feel a bleak pointlessness here, not speech to fill the void or reach out, but instead to entertain. We see more performance than existence as the a priori requirement to be filled. These guys are always in gear, in verbal momentum, always taking speech as something that leads somewhere. The production doesn’t revel in bleakness, nor does it seem to be at home there, since these people always have extending beyond themselves and their solitude as possibility available to them. Unfortunately, since security of existence permeates them, we feel that they can get away.
This is a beautifully polished take on the play, with the often superb actors diligently aware of the text’s potential and with the characters finely shaped as theatrically beings. We will be entertained by these people, but we will not smell them, perhaps because they seem abstract performers and thus cannot decay. This production is meticulously directed and acted but I feel more entertained than reached, since it has the self-contained air of perfection that one finds in a carefully choreographed dance. If the director is secure in what she is doing, the characters also seem secure that, as they speak, their words have somewhere to go. Of course, the director follows Vladimir’s indication that diversion is one’s only escape from nothingness. Says Vladimir: “We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste … In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!”
But for me, these people all take the presence of others for granted, so as they speak they will be heard and mean something to the listener. Thus it is hard to determine what’s really on the line here except trying to attain consummate theatricality and the most entertaining version of the play possible. It’s as if the director, in ably being able to create a very entertaining production, has thus defined entertainment as her characters raison d’etre. They act as if performance is the sole dimension of their existence, as if “me to play” is the end of it. Thus, if Vladimir’s quote is existential, it entails a very comfortable absurdity here and, watching, we do not co-exist in the same world with these people. They exist in reaction to each other like parts of a comedy duo and the laughter here is not out of a hopelessness which has no place to go.
But, on the hand, this is indeed a splendid cast and each character is a strong presence and distinctly and carefully realized. Stephen Ouimette and Tom Rooney do consummate stuff as Vladimir and Estragon and who wouldn’t walk, not even drive, to Stratford to see them do their art. Brian Dennehy’s Pozzo displays a declarative presence and a self-sustaining fullness, so perhaps his smugness and sense of superiority doesn’t need as mean an edge in his abuse of Lucky. Perhaps the revelation here is Randy Hughson as Lucky. This is a special performance and I first really paid attention to this production from my gut when he spoke his monologue, because he seemed to be happening before us and was not simply a theatrical fait acompli. He was palpably inward made outer and delivered his plight in anguished bursts. Often skyward gazing and always at the beck and call of his master, the delivery of his monologue is brilliantly existential, struggling to find essence in the sound he makes. I hadn’t sensed much existential doubt here before, except in Vladimir asking “You did see us, didn’t you?”
Certainly this is a laudable production and it has received deserved mega raves in some quarters and I admire it very much. Even the set, by Teresa Przybylski, is stunning. It’s an isolating elevated winding white strip, a foot above the shiny sheen of a black stage, on which stands perhaps the most solitary tree in theatrical history. A dozen paces away is a solitary stone on which often sits a solitary figure. The production, however, begins with a lilting brass music, provided by Jesse Ash, and strangely it suggests a coziness, a comfy opportunity to escape and be safe. In turn, I remember a revelatory and most memorable Godot in everyday Irish at the Old Vic in 1997 with Alan Howard and Ben Kingsley. Afterwards, I passed under a nearby bridge where each hungry man huddled around a fire, trying to make his way for the night without much hope to survive on. The production I had just seen mirrored each hopeless mundane life under this bridge, and I didn’t feel let off the hook in either place.
MARY STUART
All elements –translation, direction, set , lighting, sound, and above all, acting – conspire to offer outstanding theater in Antoni Cimolino’s intense and gripping production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart. This is a high pitched production in which scheming is a fine art, as various individuals constantly test and betray one another and two queens, on both political and personal levels, verbally duke it out. Mary is Catholic and Elizabeth is Church of England, Mary is imprisoned and Elizabeth is threatened monarch, Mary is full of grace and dignified and Elizabeth is regal, manipulative and tormented. In lush billowing costumes by Eo Sharp, these character-centred performances resonate with their world and our own as insightful looks at power and its abuses. Sharp’s stage is surrounded by barbed wire, while Todd Charlton’s soundscape unsettles with grinding and booming electronics or nods to Tallis and Steven Hawkins atmospheric lighting shapes our mood. Willing or not, we are involved.
Schiller’s play, via Peter Oswald’s energetic and accessible translation, is full of ringing exchanges that vibrate at both ends in this gripping drama. It is full of ironies, plays on words, innuendo, confrontation and the kind of dialogue that fuels this historical account with individual personalities. We are often not sure of the intention or purpose of some of these people, as from scene to scene they show new loyalties and alliances. How will each one be revealed next? The text provides potent acting cues for these characters to come to life and a freshness of language prevails in, for example, “Leicester is addicted to his existence and “Wake up, it is no longer yesterday”. If great acting needs great lines, this is a meeting ground.
Seanna McKenna’s Elizabeth is pulled in all directions and under pressure to off the head of Mary. She is certainly complex with a tone that here is casual, ordinary, and intimate and there sexually manipulative, here full diatribe and there dripping with acidic vindictiveness, here leaning to bitchy snide cracks and there sounding contrived to show the self indulgence of Elizabeth. One needs ‘flexibility’ to serve her according to Melvil. Lucy Peacock’s Mary speaks with a less burred edge than we are used to with Ms. Peacock, her voice now dropped into rounded resonance and full of impassioned and contained frustration. At times, her happy face and eyes seem intended to incite a happy revolution of joy. She inspires respect. We feel protective about her.
The words and movements of Geraint Wyn Davies’ Davies as Leicester almost burst with vigorous persona, although Leicester is indeed a slimy pragmatist, speaking with ease from both sides. Ben Carlson’s Burleigh is dry and resolute, while Peter Hutt’s Aubespine speaks with rich and meaty delivery, and Brian Dennehy’s Shewsbury is an intelligent embodiment of an aged- soaked body and a creaking command of person. But then, there are other gripping characterizations here, like those of Patricia Collins, James Blendick, Brian Dennehy, and Ian Lake –but then Cimilino never wastes a role but instead seems to make it pivotal. In a word, the acting all round is splendid, varied with evocative textures and most theatrical. This is edge of seat drama and, alas, for most, now sold out theatre.