The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0355 Thursday, 2 July 2009
[1] From: Phyllis Gorfain <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 1 Jul 2009 16:04:56 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0347 Stratford (ON) Festival 2009
[2] From: Louis Swilley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 2 Jul 2009 06:39:40 -0700 (PDT)
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0347 Stratford (ON) Festival 2009
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Phyllis Gorfain <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 1 Jul 2009 16:04:56 -0400
Subject: 20.0347 Stratford (ON) Festival 2009
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0347 Stratford (ON) Festival 2009
I attended Bartholomew Fair on opening night, and the audience seemed
electric; I think most audiences have no expectations for what the play
will be, of course, and many are unprepared for the Jonsonian satire and
the wildness of this production, which is very imaginative. When I
looked again at the script, I was amazed by the brilliant production
choices! My husband, a physicist, enjoyed the play and appreciated the
opportunity to see what may be the first professional production in
North America.
Three Sisters, also at the Tom Patterson Theatre, I found excellent! For
that show, I took my 16-year-old god-daughter, and she was astonished by
how much she loved the play, the Chekhovian humor and pathos, and this
particular ensemble that convinces one they've spent 11 years together
in the backwater town. The audience did not seem to "get" the subtle
humor, but the production still worked magnificently, in my opinion.
Macbeth, at the Festival Theatre, I found somewhat disappointing,
considering one of my favorite Canadian actors, Colm Fiore, as Macbeth.
The setting, in Rwanda, worked for me, in many respects, but the
references to Scotland and England became discordant in a way -- it was
as if there was one visual and material reality, and another verbal
reality. The two could uneasily co-exist without quite cancelling each
other out, but made little sense. Feore seemed to me too cerebral,
somehow, and I found him also too bland as Cyrano, in his other star
role. Nonetheless, I recommend Macbeth, Bartholomew Fair, and Three
Sisters. I did not see Caesar.
The town is lovely!
Phyllis Gorfain
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Louis Swilley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 2 Jul 2009 06:39:40 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: 20.0347 Stratford (ON) Festival 2009
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0347 Stratford (ON) Festival 2009
I saw "Julius Caesar" at The Courtyard Theatre in Stratford. For too
many minutes before the play, two young men in large diapers "wrestled"
unconvincingly under a large projection of Romulus and Remus and that
famous she-wolf. Then the play itself opened and shortly produced a
sprightly Caesar who seemed about 35 years old. (A nice touch here was
his kissing Brutus before leaving the stage for the ceremony of the
race..). Brutus' nervous, anxious interview with Portia, wherein he was
brought to tears to convince her of his love while keeping from her from
knowledge of the conspiracy, was something new and well-done, ending in
a desperate sexual embrace that was interrupted by the late arrival of
another conspirator.
The actor playing Cassius had a stronger voice than the one offering
Brutus, and several actors seemed to have no vocal training at all. The
actor playing Decius Brutus -- that small part -- had the best voice in
the whole group.
Periodically, a dark curtain was raced diagonally across the stage -- to
what intended effect was hidden from me. And periodically masked figures
appeared at the end of aisles barking lines.
The seats at the Courtyard did nothing to help the audience appreciate
the play. My left shoulder had to be tucked behind the person seated on
my left; the person on my right was required to tuck her shoulder behind
mine. The seats were that uncomfortably close.(I am of average build, by
the way).
I attended some fourteen plays during my recent stay in London,
Stratford, and Cambridge, and I was struck by the sad lack of evidence
of a director's hand in most of them. There was no governing *concept*
for many of the plays and, in many, the directors depended on tricks of
spectacle (e.g., Julius Caesar) rather than give us new insight into
character. At the New Globe, the "direction" of "Romeo and Juliet"
consisted exclusively of having the characters whip about the stage in
all directions, waving their arms and shouting their lines. (The Juliet,
we were told by our production-proud usher, had had NO training for the
stage. It showed.). And, again, the seating - on backless wooden benches
for two and a half hours - did nothing to help us attend to the play.
When we see the ferocious professional showmanship, the close command of
every word and gesture of such wonders as Lisa Minelli -- a woman who
so desperately sings and dances "as though she has a knife in her
garter" -- we should wonder why this precise sense of meaning and timing
has been forgotten or dismissed by so many directors and actors, for
this is the very essence of realized interpretation of character. Every
play must be choreographed, and the "dance" it produces must be
intensely new and insightful. When we (so rarely) see such a
performance, we move to the edge of our seats and our mouths drop open
with pleasure and wonder (e.g., Brando in "On the Waterfront").
Spectacle is the very least important of the aspects of staged drama,
yet spectacle seems to have become the chief concern of many of today's
directors; they are smitten with car-chase movies and the clankings of
Disneyland and suppose that to depend solely on the playwright and the
actors is to miss the theatrical moment - yet plays like Neil LaBute's
"Bash" with its actors simply sitting on folding chairs facing the
audience eloquently tells us that we are deeply and lastingly moved by
*story* and *character*, spectacle be damned.
The phenomenon is one with our stupid, characteristically American
conviction that school buildings and labs and "innovative" programs are
more important good teachers - and our sick, uncritical belief that
quantity is more important than quality.
L. Swilley
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