Cara Ricketts as Maria in Twelfth Night

In the lobby of the Festival Theatre, the lightly swinging jazz duo of Don Englert on alto sax and Michael Wood on vibes plays on as we are eased, with the welcome and seductive sounds of their music adrift in the air, into our seats. Lights soon dim and a group of five rock-slanted musicians play themselves, one by one, onto the stage. The air is already quite ripe with music when Mike Shara as Duke Orsino declares, “If music be the food of love, play on/Give me excess of it” and it will stay that way all though director Des McAnuff’s celebratory and boldly eclectic production.

 In this musical atmosphere, whatever transpires is carried along as if on melodic lines. Everyone seems a musician in this land of Illyria-a piano appears out of the blue, of course the fool plays bass guitar, folks go a capella at will- where everyone seems to be a musician who sings background harmonies or duets when the mood or opportunity arises.  It’s an accepting world of sorts, both a play and much like an actual gig, where anything goes -unless your name is Malvolio, but then he’s such an unaccepting guy who kills enjoyment and spontaneity.

 The theatrically supportive music by McAnuff and co-composer Michael Roth might make reference to rock, MOR, and the rest, but it’s Debra Hanson’s set that is heavier metal with a gold-plated frame around multi-shaped mirror fragments, a metallic chandelier, and costumes of musicians metal-covered. The set is made of strong elements, like a large kneeling stone angel for one, that visually sustain McAnuff’s broad spectacle of fun, and costumes often reflect several eras in one single garment. Another nice touch is how musicians seem like trees popping up all about, as if the earth too is made of music.

 A major delight of this spirit-tickling production –other than Shakespeare’s use of suspense, misunderstandings, confusion, and happy resolution- is McAnuff’s knack with comic actors. We hear not spoken text but individual human voices in the characterizations, with words and phrases often shaped into delicious meanings. Many a character seems pivotal to the tale because each one is substantially realized and each comes with hilarious identifying qualities or, in the case of Sara Topham’s Olivia, accompanied by a Valkyre-like quartet.

 A number performances, like some situations, feel so freshly conceived and realized that they seem to glisten with dew. Ben Carlson is a quick and sour Jester Feste, a man with assertive and secure confidence,  a man quick  enough of mind to do subtle put downs that sometimes elude their victims. When Feste sings for us, we hope for a longer set, a CD. Tom Rooney is a rigid, humourless Malvolio, indeed a “churlish messenger” with a furrowed brow and a confrontational attitude. He is a man of limited spirit who brings no happiness, a man who is smugly dismissive like a social crab.

 Cara Ricketts brings both an extroverted femininity and a spritely sexiness to Maria.  She is a playful creature who helps to humiliate Malvolio, yet she is also a woman of linear elegance like a dancer, one infused with rays of feminine light that emanate from her presence. Sara Topham’s Olivia shows a secure authority through both her clipped delivery and her girlish twinkle.  She is self-indulgent in melodramatic feelings, made of inner energy wanting some place to go, and has the pleasing effect of a happy and delighted lightbulb.

 Brian Dennehy’s Sir Toby is bullish and plodding in his levity, a bloated dirty old guy, a somewhat repugnant, well, belch of a man who dominates space by his large figure and especially his unwavering manner. He’s a golfer too. Mike Shara’s Orsino, a man more inwardly directed than Toby, seems ever befuddled of mind, suggests a short fuse and speaks self-regardingly as if to mirrors. Steve Ouimette’s Aguecheek has a pummeled face, one that has been through the grinder of life, it seems. He is sluggish in enthusiasm, like a mentally challenged prune, and a memorable blend of seeming inner doubt and self-regard.

 In the central role of Viola, Suzy Jane Hunt does intriguing fill in for Andrea Runge, out with a bad back, who one assumes would have been an open-hearted and emotionally forward Viola. Hunt’s Viola, however, while not outwardly glowing with inner emotion nor overly expressive as a figure of authority, draws us consistently to her nonetheless. This Viola seems a woman of inherent sadness, reflective, distinctly rich with a quiet but intense passion. She has a quality of emotional aloofness that seems equally decisive and vulnerable at one go. A quality of yearning pervades her character. She ably fills the androgynous bill and suggests a sense of daring as she negotiates with her own heart. She keeps us curious and tuned in. We like her and feel concern about her.

In John Mighton’s The Little Years, Irene Poole’s performance as Kate is a haunting creation. Kate has lost the spark she once had, doesn’t say very much except for occasional terse comments spoken with blunt objectivity, and seems a frozen life, one not allowed to feel or even be any more. As a child, Kate shows passionate interest in scientific speculation, wants to “ discover  a particle from which all particles are made,” but she and  her passions are squashed in every way.

 Young Kate doesn’t do well in school because her learning rhythms are inconsistent with the mechanical fixed template of the educational system. Her inability to endure mediocrity, conformity, pretension, artificiality, boredom, intellectual containment and a tax on her spirit by mundane others leaves her no allies. She feels and will feel tolerated, embittered, frustrated and in time is subjected to electrotherapy in an institution. In adulthood she becomes hunched and tight.

 Chick Reid is Alice, a mother brewed in tradition who is proud of her son William’s success and doesn’t like that her daughter is a failure in school. Indeed she has Kate sent to vocational school where her daughter of deep intellectual passion and imagination will learn stenography, home economics or library sciences. For Alice, Kate’s purpose is to be a “wife and mother” and she is dismayed that Kate won’t play stupid to catch a guy. Later, as an adult, Kate forgoes a potential relationship because the guy is both a “stupid artist” and a “ condescending asshole”. Kate just can’t play the game that many women do.

 At one point, Kate declares, “If you think you can walk over hot coals, you can. It’s even easier to convince yourself that you can’t do something, that’s why schools exist”. It is a devastating comment and accurate condemnation of our insane educational system in which the progress toward lifeless mediocrity of spirit is inevitable for  too many in some significant way. Mighton and director Chris Abraham succeed in making such tragedy intimately relevant to each of us; after all, who has not been destroyed somehow by going to school.

 The cast is exceptional. Poole and Reid are chilling, Bethany Jillard as young Kate and later Kate’s niece is constantly fresh with detail, Evan Buliung compactly pinpoints the subtleties of aging, Yanna McIntosh keeps Grace’s humanity genuine, and the rest of the cast are precise and economic with life-revealing details. Like all humane productions, this one is a compassionate mirror to the lives we live or have lived and it maintains an air of authenticity throughout.

In one year, as a teen, about twenty years after the Great Depression’s end, I read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, saw John Ford’s film of the novel, and heard Ramblin’ Jack Elliot at a club sing Tom Joad by his legendary mentor Woody Guthrie who had grown up in Oklahoma’s dust bowl. My own parents had endured the depression’s drought and a precarious farm existence in the 30s, and the memories that haunted them as a result have stayed in my bones to this day. Therefore, thus influenced, I feel much enthusiasm and one or two specific doubts about Frank Galati’s adaptation of Steinbeck at the Avon.

To begin with one of the outstanding features of the production, Antoni Cimolino’s direction wastes no opportunity to mine human character, all the while placing the Joads and company evocatively in an epic dimension. His care with character-revealing detail in both lead and minor players repeatedly creates a compelling and textured production. Let me give two examples, both outside the main and spoken action. First, Tom sits with his back to the group and Rose of Sharon, still insecure with his return from prison, approaches him from behind and tentatively but lovingly places a jacket on his shoulders and then, burst free of caution, hugs him.

The second involves young Abigail Winter-Culliford as Ruthie and very young Gregor Reynolds as Winfield, both placed down stage when Ma reveals that Granma has died. Winfield in a quick glance looks imploringly at his sister with concise and precise hopelessness. Meanwhile, Ruthie in a few moments conveys shades of inner wonder at seeing California, unaffected compassion for Winfield, and sensitivity to the many human pulsations around her. Earlier, Ruthie has lifted a sack- of flour? – and thrown it onto the truck and in one grimace and strain you know it is quite heavy.

Ironically, Evan Buliung as Tom Joad, Tom McCamus as Jim Casey, and Chilina Kennedy as Rose of Sharon, in their expert fusion of human depth and its mythic implication, expose the play’s Achilles heel. On one hand, we have a complex and profoundly subtle exploration of human suffering and dignity in these and the other characters and, on the other, we have the same play doing a surface treatment O, Okie where art thou?

Buliung makes “ordinary” an art because we sense in subtle clues his struggle to understand brutal injustice. He embodies human vulnerability edging toward self-respect and becomes a quintessential everyman who is firmly present as an individual but who also mirrors and stands for his surrounding social conditions. His face slowly reveals internal pain, humiliation and growing rage. He is assertively average but becomes epic with the realization that “They’re working on our decency”.

The Casey of Tom McCamus is thinking all the time and like Tom and Ma, his thoughts are not abstractions but slowly evolving response to a dire social situation. Casey’s presence is solid and easy, with wisdom being the heart of the man. He is the play’s thematic anchor and its symbolic narrative because he progresses from victim to activist, from man of spiritual struggle to man who finds spirit in human struggle against social and economic pressure. His struggle for purpose, and not the musicians’ lyrics, are the play’s inherent chorus.

Chilina Kennedy’s Rose of Sharon is quietly volatile, a young woman not so much naïve as inexperienced, not so much a victim as a seed of human hope. If memory serves me correctly, Steinbeck has a scene with a turtle on its back on the highway trying to right itself and escape potential danger. Such is Rose of Sharon’s and all the other Okies’ progress, from hopelessness to self created salvation. When Rose of Sharon nurses a dying stranger, we sense a purpose much larger that he and she in this deed of mercy. We see the reason for life and it is a truly beautiful theatrical moment.

John Arnone’s set and Steven Hawkins’ lighting design and Carolyn Smith’s costumes all contribute to a striking visual experience of human hopelessness with implied salvation. We have a panoramic sunrise or sunset behind potently evocative setting devices: four posts suggest a countryside, a doorway suggests a wood frame house, and signs of poverty abound and make their effect in dark dirty hues in clothing and makeshift tents. Cimolino accentuates the latter with a mother picking lice from her child’s hair.

Although the economical text suggests inner character through select details and although Cimolino takes great pains that his characters speak fluently in their silences, I find that these features are diluted somewhat in the overall tone of the play. The brutality of the “red” – obsessed thugs in California becomes somewhat incidental, stylized and thus almost neutral in effect. At one point, the sad story by the Man Going Back of starving children with bloated bellies is followed by a functional song about route 66 that serves narrative purpose in general terms but kills the horrid story’s impact.

The play in Cimilino’s production has two outstanding realizations of an everyman figure, both played memorably by Buliung and McCamus. With flavour-generating performances like those of Randy Hughson, Janet Wright, Victor Ertmanis, Peter Hutt, and the rest, the commentary in the songs’ lyrics seems often unnecessary. Certainly, though, when the very capable instrumentalists weave melodic lines and harmonies throughout the play’s progress, they as such contribute to the production’s texture.

The lead singer, however, although he has a pleasing and versatile voice, deliberately misuses it with deviation into a conspicuous mannerism, very much unlike the actors. It’s folkie affectation, one that evolved after the folk boom of the 60s but has no origin in the music of the 30s. As noted already, the fine cast we have here can and should stand on its own without being undermined. There is so much that is haunting and memorable in this production and also two glitches that make one wonder if the play is trying to avoid its potentially devastating impact.

Director Darko Tresnjak’s set for Titus Andronicus has a boldly white marble effect with occasional highlights of striking blood red, all suggesting both a butcher’s slab and a cruel and bloodthirsty Roman culture. Four statues atop a column each depict tortured agony so the striking set suggests both imperial power and the cruelty of this same power. Itai Irdal’s lighting creates a playing field of aggressive brightness or occasionally a revealing darkness that one’s subconscious fears. It’s a very violent play and the poetry of the language, the obvious ironies, the inevitable understatements, the casualness about pain all featured in this setting will soon send the impact of the play even more over the top.

Tresnjak’s production bursts oratorical in voice from square one and also, almost instantly, turns bloody. Titus will show no mercy to captive Tamora’s son and, as he is speared, blood bursts upward. Not long after we have throat-cutting, biting, more spearing, stabs in the gut, the cutting off of one’s hand. Also, after sexually suggestive playing around by Tamora’s crude sons and some orgy, we have offstage rape of Lavinia, the cutting off of her hands, the removal of her tongue, and more stabbings. And we’re not done yet since there’s an amputated hand left on the floor where a dog has a taste of it and the heads of the two same sons impaled high for all to see. If anyone is hungry, there’s a dinner of two pasties, each made from the bodies of Tamora’s sons, which she unknowingly nibbles with pleasure. Yes, she heaves vomit all over the stage when she finds out.

In all this, it’s a pleasure to hear John Vickery’s resonant and sculpted voice whose musical tone, dips and shadings, mastery of innuendo, and hurled phrases make everything he says a gourmet meal for the ear. I’m glad he this year has a sustained starring role so we can hear more of him. Claire Lautier’s Tamora speaks with a pointed and almost elegant prissiness, with an undercurrent of venom and manipulation. She is chilling when vengeful, enraged, conniving and predatory and she seems to articulate even her spit. Dion Johnston’s Aaron is a tender dad when with his babe, but otherwise he’s a man of slimy gusto who relishes intrigue, all the suffering he inflicts or supports, and killing with indifference to his victims. As Saturninus, Sean Arbuckle is envious, spiteful, somewhat gooey in haughtiness, and nasty when he laughs. His presence suggests a rotting of human values.

One more thing, the usher told me that she has seen the whole of act I only once in eight tries. Why? Each other time she had to help a nauseated and upset member of the audience to the lobby during the performance.

Something encouraging happens after a performance of director Des McAnuff’s Jesus Christ Superstar. People, young and old, and some not too old, enthusiastically discuss both the musical and its production. They do so in the Avon’s lobby, in the street, and in cafes around Stratford. “He is the best Judas I’ve seen and I’ve seen lots,” says a young lady waiting near stage door. Minutes before, at the end of the performance, the audience has erupted into standing applause.

Why? Because it is an overwhelming show that does consume the watcher, a show thoroughly splendid in cast, direction, design, and lighting. The show is rumoured to be Broadway bound after a good stint at La Jolla and that is where it belongs. Meanwhile, people in the audience might as a result be encouraged to see more live theatre, maybe even Chekhov or Sheridan. And as much as I am inevitably annoyed by Lloyd Webber-Rice creations, I am glad I saw this spectacular production.

Des McAnuff orchestrates bodies in space and they explode in electrical currents, all frantic and boldly energetic, as they crisscross the stage, climb bleachers, and scale columns into the stratosphere. He is a master of devices, both human and inanimate, and we in the audience are out of breath keeping up with him. He blows you away and so does his cast when its potent physical enthusiasm is given outlet in bursts of movement and dynamic groupings of bodies.

The impact is irresistible, even as heretics to the church of Lloyd Webber, like yours truly, resist. I did succumb to one singer, I must admit, who among the moneychangers was most adept at etching on the air with her ass. Moreover, Robert Brill’s overwhelming set includes eternally high columns, a running electric marquee that gives day by day headlines like “Six days until Passover,” and an elevated U shaped area nine feet above the main stage for horizontal variety. As for effects, Lloyd Webber likes among other devices to drop things from the ceiling: in Phantom it is a chandelier, here it is Jesus Christ.

The cast with Josh Young as Judas, Chilina Kennedy as Mary Magdalene, Paul Nolan as Jesus and Brent Carver displaying his subtle acting chops as Pontius Pilate are most dynamic and impressive in giving as much human dimension as the Lloyd Webber-Rice idiom allows. Both Judas and Jesus constantly impress with their ease at doing full throttle falsetto and upper register gymnastics. Delightful moments occur throughout, like Bruce Dow’s delicious showstopper that has Herod take on the “King of the Jews”.

Judas and Mary Magdalene effectively negotiate complex inner conflict and all the singers, especially the bass, delight us with surprising variety in textures and tones or ease in vocal high jumps. Jesus, poor Saviour, is given limited choices—either be starched and holy most of the time or angry when challenged – but gradually Paul Nolan is permitted to give Jesus compelling substance. When he is allowed to be more than a statue, this Jesus is disturbingly intense.

Before curtain, Des McAnuff announces the following: “If you are thinking of unwrapping a hard candy or lozenge, feel free to do so, because the score will drown you out.” And that’s my first problem with Jesus Christ Superstar, that it’s a continuum of loudness without much variety and with bass and drum pounding away monotonously in four/four. The singers bellow away in upper registers as a way to signify meaning and intensity, but we see them not as having feeling but yelling about feeling at one another.

With this foundation of faux rock, we don’t experience what feels like real people but people saying the right thing, the trendy thing, to music that is usually unimaginative and functional and hiding out in volume. We don’t really know who these characters are because they are reduced to meaningful glances and obvious ironies. Lines like “It doesn’t help if you’re inconsistent” that would be funny when said tongue in cheek are played straight and light years away from Cole Porter’s wit. The double meaning of Christ in “Christ, you deserve it” is clever, but one wonders if Andrew Rice knew it was.

Yes, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” is effectively simple and melodic and some lines like Mary’s “Let the world turn without you tonight” are inspired, but Jesus according Lloyd-Webber/Rice is made into rigidity, supposedly holy but pointless, and I start to laugh because he simply looks stoned. And unkind phrases fill my mind -Much ado about no one; I Don’t Know Why to Love Him; Jesus Kitsch Superstar- and I begin to imagine that this pair has a photo of Sonny Bono on their wall and that, if they thought of resurrection today, it would be Michael Bolton they would have in mind.

Director Miles Potter sees “Richard’s theatrical ancestors” as “the Vice characters of medieval plays” whose “stated mission” was to “destroy virtue wherever they found it. In order to do so, they would do anything, assume any role, in order to suborn the natural order and attempt the triumph of evil.” In his production at the Patterson, Seana McKenna thoroughly realizes Potter’s conceptual premise in a Richard who is, to be sure, a versatile actor in his society and a consummate schemer too but, more to the point, a spontaneously destructive cancer in human form. This Richard is in body and voice a shriveled thing, an ugly boil upon the blameless, an irritating fly one cannot swat, but also he is inherently malicious and inhuman, almost not of this world. Call him Vice, call him Richard, call him too many a political leader of our time, he shakes the foundations of decency, compassion and good wherever he goes.

Richard is a self-celebrating creature, one who bites into any possibility for destruction, and Seana McKenna’s female registers in voice work to the advantage of Potter’s conception. She does not speak with masculine weightiness but, instead, in piercing and tonally squeezed jabs, in shrill upward ascents, and always with a gossipy urgency, often with an intimate tone. Richard never shuts up but controls others by incessant chatter, as if dominance in speech will make him ruler of the world he regards with shiny, piercing, mischievous and acidic eyes. His voice is otherworldly and insidious and, as a person, he flows like corrosive liquid into any conversation, into any private space. This Richard forces others to react, seems ever present and everywhere, so no one is free of him. He says what he must to take possession of others and destroy whatever control they have that isn’t already his.

The fundamental issue of the Potter/McKenna Richard III and, by implication, of human existence –is the ownership of reality through speech. The famous seduction of Lady Anne, played with ferocious and youthful indignation by Bethany Jillard, is one of many examples of Richard’s method and here the newly widowed Anne is charmed, ultimately into the bed of her husband’s murderer, into bed with evil. She may begin the encounter unleashing her rage, but Richard dances verbally with her every word and takes the lead in their dance of words. He thus claims the intensity of her personal feeling, claims what is hers. He is a usurper in words as much as in the political realm. Evil wants into everything, because it’s there.

The encounter with Queen Margaret, shortly after, becomes in turn a battle of good and evil, a battle of autonomous voices in which Richard will use any means to destroy such autonomy in others. As Margaret, Martha Henry mines the resonating depth of her words, shapes them with dramatic elongations and cadences that seem like castle walls forbidding Richard any entry. She speaks deliberately in pronouncements with foot-stomping emphasis in her voice. She doesn’t submit in reaction, makes little concession in words, and if Richard is a supreme actor, a role-player who adjusts performance to underlying intention, then Margaret denies him from solid ground. If Richard speaks hurried and wiry phrases, hers are solid as rock as she “roles” over him.

It’s a crucial scene because we are given a counterbalance of good’s grand stature denying creeping evil. If Richard’s intent is to undermine, nay, pollute good, Margaret‘s solid voice and manner reaffirm not only virtue but existence of independent will that is free of evil’s infiltration. We note much later that the insistent Duchess of York counsels “Be not tongue-tied” in a scene with numerous references to words. For good to battle evil, in Shakespeare and Potter, it must take uncompromising human form that is strong in speech, unwavering in person, and articulate.

Shakespeare’s brilliantly-employed device of having Richard take the audience into his confidence as implied co-conspirators is a gem of the theatrical canon because these asides put us confidently –and willingly- on the inside track of Richard’s schemes. Richard seems a constant winner, he does not give up, and because any silence means space for another to claim control, he talks and talks and talks –and of course we have to listen. This constant role-player is writing the play we watch as it unfolds and we applaud his theatrical devices which are unending and many. When his words of comfort are shown in an instant after to be mere manipulation, we thus become dirty with him. When his lowly bows seem to rub his deformity in the faces of others, done with beautiful spite by McKenna, we to some degree share his distaste for them.

Richard attacks and retreats in speech as required and each victory fuels his contempt for others. His only acknowledgement of others is to undermine them, destroy them ultimately, shout “Off with his head!” and reduce them to nothing. Richard’s dismissal of Buckingham is as arbitrary as his other deeds –to win, evil must be arbitrary and catch good off guard- and because Richard ignores him, Buckingham no longer exists. He and his words served Richard, after all, and now neither do so. We don’t think of Marlowe’s “winning words” of a conqueror in witnessing Richard at work, but a creeping presence and quickly propelled words that bring disease to body and soul. Such evil can see itself only in the ruin it does, understand others only as far as their virtue can be mastered. Such evil is hungry for more evil and never full.

Miles Potter has created an unobtrusively energetic production and made sure that each character embodies a distinct identity. His cast serves his concept well with honed performances too many to detail here and, as a result, we experience a realm of distinctly individual spirits in peril and sometimes in defiance of evil. It’s a production that moves briskly from one situation to the next, driven by the motivating presence of Richard. Throughout, speech is echo to characterization, reinforcing one’s evolving realization that to speak effectively is to exist. Still, if Potter’s ethereal choreography of the final battle scene and Richard’s death is reassuring, it is not so for long.

Richard is dead, but his repertoire of destructive devices remains open to use in the world outside the theatre. Shakespeare is indeed our insightful and relevant “contemporary,” according to Jan Kott, as he explores Richard’s and our obsessive control of people and situations. The need to undermine, demean, dismiss, humiliate, hurt and finally eradicate are not simply potent and disturbing characteristics of a playwright’s creation, but everyday qualities we find in average folks as they neuter others into speechless inarticulation. If others make no sense while speaking words imposed upon them and not their own, if they can’t speak their own process of making sense but must constantly respond instead to attack of some kind until they exist only as response, then individual reason itself is being undermined and evil can thus do as it pleases.

Potter’s production is a gripping exploration of how evil becomes a reality in every human experience. The sex of the lead actor is simply not an issue because, even as he seems a pitiable and mundane man of no distinction, McKenna’s Richard is at the same time a disturbingly inhuman force that works with masterly ease to destroy anyone at will and without remorse. He is capable of rallying his soldiers with a rousing and defiant “If not to heaven then hand in hand to hell” and seem infused with cosmic proportion. Minutes later, however, he can enter the stage with a faint and almost inconsequential “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse” and make his need sound simply pragmatic. There are many such instances throughout the production where one is given a fresh take or a challenge to rethink and reconsider Shakespeare’s lines and meaning and ourselves.

A compelling feature of Potter’s splendid large cast is how, in limited time, each one becomes an individual of some human value in our eyes and does so in concise theatrical detail. We believe these characters –the young woman’s confusion and needs in Bethany Jillard’s Lady Anne, the precocious and guileless confidence of the princes, the maternal and vulnerable concern of Yanna McIntosh’s Queen Elizabeth, the efficient but naïve sycophancy of Wayne Best’s Buckingham, the naïve congeniality of Nigel Bennett’s Hastings, and all the others. It’s a cast of unwavering substance that creates a genuinely human world around Richard and I could be here for days if I counted all the ways. Because I still feel the unyielding impact of, especially, Richard, Lady Anne, Queen Margaret and Buckingham, in my mind, I’m sure this production in reflection will continue to have much more to say.

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.

My Fair Lady opens with an aggressively active Covent Garden setting, one that feels alive and abrasive with survival in Molly Smith’s broadly realized production. Entertainers and regular folk do acrobatics and vigorously dance in this drab and dirty late night place. The tarts look unwashed and the grimy crowd visually suggest a dense human smell, which is a notable accomplishment by designers Ken Macdonald, Judith Bowden, and Jock Munro, in set, costume, and lighting, respectively.

 Note that Eliza does indeed resemble “a squashed cabbage leaf”. Later after her transformation from cockney “good girl” into the socially desirable Miss Doolittle, she will declare with dignified vulnerability, “I’m not dirt under your feet,” but we know throughout that she began as society’s discard.

The appeal of Eliza at the outset of this production is not a given. She is crude, blunt, spunky in a growly voice when angered, and she does make ugly sounds. We don’t automatically deem her nice; we don’t automatically think Audrey Hepburn. Still, although she looks worn but not worn out from surviving, we are touched by her yearning for a dream to come true in “Wouldn’t it be Loverly” and saddened by the reality that this dream has no chance at all in her class-divided world.

Nevertheless, Eliza’s an unselfconsciously feisty gal with cockney fire in her DNA, energetically committed to what she is or what she wants to become. If Higgins condescendingly thinks her “deliciously low,” he merely confirms that his is a protected world. On the other hand, she has been given the strap by her own dad all her life. When, in a softer voice, she reveals an innocence of spirit and a private delicacy of the heart, we are on her side. We feel she deserves her dreams, especially since Deborah Hay as Eliza provides eye-opening human substance throughout. This Eliza has lived a life.

Henry Higgins, deftly inhabited by Benedict Campbell, is crude in his own way, a boorish bully of a man. He is instinctively dismissive of human dignity and emotionally remote and unreachable as he plows ahead brilliantly in his field of study. Intellectually advanced, but otherwise pathetically a child, he dwells safely protected within a box both social and emotional, at least until he’s “grown accustomed to her face.” Campbell’s Higgins is solidly conceived and thoroughly intriguing as a creation who implies a contained wild centre.

As Pickering, Patrick Galligan offers a man of  impassioned decency and strength of character who acts as foil to Campbell’s Higgins who has neither. It is a lively pairing with each man decidedly forward in manner as they disagree endlessly. Eliza’s dad, Alfred Doolittle, played by Neil Barclay, has initially a grimy lousiness about him. He is a man both unprincipled and unwashed who is happily secure in being too poor to have morals as he ekes out both existence and drink. Pragmatic and principled in his own way, he is an appealing S.O.B. Sharry Flett as Mrs. Higgins is a poised, compassionate, and wisely assertive mom to her embarrassing son, while Mark Uhre does Freddy with an endearingly sincere lack of depth and a pleasant resonance of voice.

There are many delights in this production, including Eliza’s short fuse that anticipates effrontery. Campbell’s resonant singing voice, as it breaks the Rex Harrison mold with actual melody, demonstrates the beauty of sound in the English language of which Higgins constantly speaks. The way we are compelled to struggle along with Eliza with marbles in her mouth and one swallowed puts us decidedly in her court.  Her faux pas are funny because we feel her struggle to do what she has newly learned, although her crude roots keep popping out as in “move your blooming ass.”

This is not a comfortably era-reproducing show that takes upper class rituals and status quo as the way of the world. It is rather a declaration of the inherent, albeit sometimes crudely shown, worth of lower classes who have their own harsh realities to live. Thus Eliza shows herself to be a woman of confidence even when she is vulnerable and not a marionette playing to the rules of society.

Macdonald’s set of birdcage motif is a visually busy yet appealing creation of many verticals that counterbalance the horizontal expanse of the stage. The projected silhouettes of birds in flight, however, seem an extraneous touch, perhaps pointless. The costumes at the Ascot races are rather out of tune with the production and garish- why??- and ugh as in ughly.

In sum, there is much life in all the curbside dirt of this My Fair Lady. The choreography bursts with a vibrant street energy that is somewhat mirrored in Higgins’ animated and almost athletic stage presence. In this extraverted production, Henry is always pacing, always briskly walking the expanse of the stage. Like the poor, he is made of energy and so, as a result, this is an energetic production.  And as we always hope, we do love Eliza in the end- if not much sooner. Both she and Higgins are obviously not equipped for the emotions that ensue after their first encounter, and their awkwardness in sensitivity gives this production an unforced heart.

Christopher Newton’s gradually unsettling production of Heartbreak House begins with strains of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, one of music’s most potent statements of primitive energy and chaos. It ends with the sound of not too distant explosions as the Shotover household and their visitors stare upwards, transfixed by the airship carriers of death overhead. Destruction, one of the most fundamental needs of the human race, fascinates these folk, even if the impending destruction is their own.

This brief moment is all the more disturbing because we have repeatedly verified the absence of self-respect in the household. We have heard the native land referred to as “this soul’s prison called England”. We have heard “nothing ever does happen” and then “nothing will happen”.  Of course, World War I is waiting in the wings to destroy a generation and, bored or not, this self destroying human species is about to do itself in. No wonder that the Captain asks “Do you suppose at my age that I make distinction between one character and another?” Regarding people, he has seen it all before and anticipates nothing new.

The Shotover home of eccentricity is also one of lazy ennui, one too weary to be cynical as in this exchange: “How can you love a liar?” “You can, unfortunately; otherwise there wouldn’t be much love in the world”.  Ergo we later hear, “If we women were particular about men’s characters, we would never get married at all”.  As usual men, women, and humankind all get poked by GBS’s sharply perceptive pen and he has Hector -aced delightfully vain, roguish and practical by Blair Williams- assess our species as “useless, futile creatures…… there is no point to us”. Of course, these are people of diversion who thrive on games to redirect their pointlessness and Hesione declares, “It matters little who governs the country as long as we govern you”.

The set by Leslie Frankish is made of bold visual elements and the country house doubles as the hull of a ship. It soon seems more like a Sartrean hell than a hull. The ship’s sails hang heavily over library shelves and later, symbol of humanity’s doom, the masts of this vessel in a storm collapse. There are some spirited back and forth battles in this setting—Hesione and Ellie, Hesione and Boss Mangan– but mostly the undercurrent is humanity doing its decline through individual lives. These folks rant, they compete, they chat away but make no mark of substance. They are lightly amused by one another, but nothing they do really matters, and they seem to know it. Their futility is in the air.

Michael Ball as Shotover is gruff, individualistic, self-perpetuating and weathered like a solid seashore rock. His puttering manner and voice possess a seen-it-all wisdom for he has known enough of humanity’s ways to know what comes next. Because of Ball’s shaping of Shotover as hopelessness with a heart, we warm to Shotover and like his company. Ellie is played subdued with quiet longing and an implicit and fetching reticence about life by Robin Evan Willis. This Ellie is a heart looking for mooring, yet she is also assured and precocious in womanly manipulation of Mangan. She wants Hector, who is married to Hesione and learns in short order that almost all is false in the world. This floating take on Ellie compels us to make sense of her and come to terms with what we discover.

Laurie Paton’s snobbish Ariadne has a chirpy, sometimes automatic, musicality of voice that reveals her to be stuck in one of life’s roles. Deborah Hay, in a dark wig, is a Hesione who has both world- punished qualities in her person but also an inherent gusto with a sexy bite to it. She seems tuned in to the outer world. The nerdish-looking Mazzini Dunn of Patrick McManus, who looks like Franz Shubert after an electrical shock, and Patrick Galligan’s self-directed Randall add distinct flavours to this human brew, as do Patricia Hamilton and William Vickers. Benedict Campbell does moneyed confidence with a deep resonant syrup of a voice. His Mangan is adept at crass manipulation of lives and one of his notches is that he ruined Ellie’s father. He will stay up all night “thinking how to save six pence” and a nasty fellow is he, all anxious and centred with darkness.

Newton’s production is one of compelling scenes held together thematically by a thread of ongoing futility. All the cards of meaning in life have been played, only petty ritual remains, and these characters ache almost by rote because they have little to offer. They are hollow and without purpose no matter their rants and schemes. They float without development because they sense inwardly that there is nothing of true interest in life or themselves and no place in life to go.

This is hard stuff to show in a production because ennui on stage can beget ennui in the audience.  Newton, however, has shaped an atmosphere that pointedly reflects and creates on stage a pointless and worn out society just existing, just getting by in futility by means of diversion. We in the audience know that war and their demise are coming, since the creation of Heartbreak House coincided with World War I, and nothing can be done.  As a group these characters embody such futility.

That sense of nothing can be done and that twin sense of nothing much to do are hard to achieve and Newton succeeds with accumulating effect upon us. He gives us subtly engaging characterization and entertaining theatrical encounters, he gives us shades of poignancy, to be sure. But most of all, he gives us cause for profound sadness because, in these people, we so often see ourselves. Their self-indulgence is not purpose, their shallowness is not is not salvation, and thus we observe that our pointless species will not, cannot, change

Lucy Peacock as Mistress Ford and Laura Condlin as Mistress Page

As a theatrical presence, Geraint Wyn Davies’ Falstaff  is playfully physical yet burdened with both bodily weight and the weight of age. He is stiff and sprite at the same time and, as he waddles from scheme to scheme, his paunch claims the man and leads the way. He is also a fellow of impish sensuality. Ever ready with a pelvic thrust, via Wyn Davies he is a creation of subtle versatility who slowly suggests qualities of serene foolishness and of personal dignity.

Of course, Falstaff isn’t the sexually desirable package he assumes he is. Of course, his pursuit of the Merry Wives proves him an ass along the way. But we also sense a man of inadequate powers who is touchingly out of his depth in the world, a world where he struggles to survive but where he also thrives on a manageable adventure and an audience.  He takes small bites out of life and in his mind makes them into large chunks. Falstaff is harmless, somewhat ordinary, beautiful in foolishness, and a man of magnificence in his mundane deeds. In other words, Wyn Davies’ Falstaff moves our hearts.

The more dominant thrust (no pun intended) in the play is Tom Rooney’s Master Ford, a cranky and sour fellow who is easily displeased and obsessively jealous of his faithful wife’s suspected wanderings. “A man may be too confident” about his wife’s fidelity he maintains and Ford is quite the opposite, absurdly suspicious at every turn. He is a man decidedly ready to push the Othello button and without his jealousy to drive him on, it seems he would not exist. He is absurd and out of control. Rooney’s insightful take on Ford’s obsessions and frustrations make for a comic gem, especially when we sense him to be potentially nasty at his core and a man foolishly or helplessly consumed by doubt as he thrives on jealousy.

Lucy Peacock as Mistress Ford, is wide-eyed and breathless, delighted to have Mistress Page as cohort in a counter scheme against Falstaff. She is an inherently funny dynamo of a woman. Laura Condlin’s Mistress Page is a woman who almost implies a country twang, a woman of some poise who seizes the chance to go over the top with some mischief and intrigue which she savours. Christopher  Prentice as the bumbling and hopelessly clueless Master Slender  gives us genuine delight with his repertoire of facial  contortions that punctuate each word he speaks. James Blendick as his exasperated uncle is hilarious each time he reveals a crack in his staid composure.

Frank Galati’s production feels secure and comfortable with its low key and not too bawdy dynamism and its sensitivity to textual potential. At times these people look too sophisticated for “townsfolk” and designer Robert Perdziola’s decidedly upper class attire  is such that one might see on Austin’s Mr. Darcy instead of Page and Ford et al. What Galati and Perdziola achieve is a leisurely country feeling in which events are often relished simply as a diversion. Even Ford’s lunatic jealousy seems taken as a matter of course, although director and actor do suggest here a truly disturbing undercurrent in human behaviour. As much as we are moved to fondness for Falstaff, we are scared by the unsaid in Ford.

The whole production is delivered in a usually articulate, measured and musically spoken fashion that supports the director’s leisurely pace. The setting is functional yet atmospheric, makes for flowing movement and strategic stage placement of characters, and is imaginatively suggestive of more detail than it actually contains.  On occasion, a character may not emerge far enough off the page (another pun unintended) or a voice of fuzzy tonality might not ring to the festival theatre’s ceiling but remain somewhat muffled below, but on the whole this production entertains solidly without a glitch.

As a play, The Merry Wives of Windsor offers characters of some complexity, stock creations, and, best of all, characters with a foot in each camp. In this production some are easily fleshed out into entertaining and individualized characterizations and some entertain us well as far as they can. There are running gags at the expense of say the French and some redundancy in Falstaff’s comeuppance. If Falstaff hiding in the laundry basket is a classic situation (see Verdi), the beating by Ford doesn’t really offer much that is new or interesting. For the most part, however, there is much comic potential delightfully realized in Galati’s production, say in Falstaff’s attempted come on to Mistress Ford.

Where both play and production shine comically is in pairings: Falstaff and the disguised Master Ford discussing Ford’s wife, Falstaff with Mistress Ford choking back her laughter,  Mistress Ford and Mistress Page eagerly conspiring to get back at the two timing seducer Falstaff, and Shallow’s exercise in futility as he helps the very challenged Slender to woo are some. Falstaff by himself and Ford by himself are each thoroughly engaging, each one bountiful with human failing, to be sure, but  very human and theatrically splendid. For this production, we sit back and laugh often and well.