New Shakespeare in Canada

Shakespeare has a new home this side of the Atlantic. The place: Stratford, a small (pop. 19,000) railroad town in the dairy country of southern Ontario, on the banks of Canada's River Avon. But the Shakespeare festival which opened there last week--on a neo-Elizabethan stage under a spreading carnival tent--is not straw-hat; it is distinctly top-hat. And the two plays, presented by a first-rate cast (stars: Alec Guinness. Irene Worth), are as surprising as the event itself. For the real hit is not the famous, battle-tested King Richard III, but the rarely produced All's Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespeare's lesser comedies, a kind of operetta without music.

When directors undertake to dust off Shakespeare plots, the noise of the vacuum cleaner all too often drowns out the play, but Director Tyrone Guthrie, a veteran of the Old Vic, never allows that to happen. The story of All's Well, lifted from Boccaccio, is about Helena, a poor physician's daughter married by royal command to a snobbish young count. The groom runs off to the wars before the wedding day has even reached the cocktail hour. The rest of the play tells how Helena plots her way into her husband's bedchamber and eventually his heart.

Instead of shrinking from the play's preposterous involvements and broadly comic scenes. Director Guthrie and his cast seize them, hug them, and waltz them right into the present. The transformation is aided by brilliant modern costumes, both Voguish and roguish, designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch; Shakespeare in tails seems no more anachronistic than Shaw in a toga, and at times quite as cynical. The play's "Florentine Widow" becomes a wonderful old madam catering to the occupation forces; Helena's choosing a husband is turned into a charming kind of debutante cotillion; and the scene in which the braggart Parolles (superbly played by Douglas Campbell) is exposed as a miserable coward becomes a genuinely funny affair, full of the gaiety, and cruelty, peculiar to the pranks of soldiers and children.

Alec Guinness, in a beard-and-wheel-chair getup reminiscent of Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner, is delightful as the King. But the real star is the Old Vic's Irene Worth, a Nebraska girl who went to England a decade ago and came back (she was last seen with Guinness in Manhattan in T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party) sounding more English than Edith Sitwell. She plays Helena as if she meant it with all her heart; her love for a fool is convincing, her distress in a farcical predicament truly moving, and her every word audible, even above the tooting of passing trains.

Richard III, the alternating attraction, is considerably less successful. The play surges stirringly over the steps and platforms of an ingenious permanent set; troops of actors use every conceivable kind of entrance, save sliding down the tent poles. But the production traps Alec Guinness like Houdini in his water tank, and he manages only a few times to burst forth with some real acting. Guinness could never be really bad, and is always good company. But he is apt to be subtly ironic where Richard must be grandly hypocritical, mildly unpleasant where he should be heroically evil.

In a sense, the most remarkable performance is furnished by the town itself. Led by a Stratford magazine editor named Tom Patterson, a small group of citizens without experience in theater production last year plunged into the huge tasks of raising money, importing stars and building a stage. The result is a minor theatrical miracle. Seldom have so many Shakespeare lovers owed so much to so few.

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