Canada's Dramatic Lodestar

By T. E. Kalem

If variety is the spice of repertory life, the Stratford Festival in Ontario is the place to savor it. Crowning this season's six initial offerings are two intrepidly ventured rarities:

THE WAY OF THE WORLD by WILLIAM CONGREVE

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Restoration drama takes us into a licentious world of high style, low morals and ice-cold wit. Interestingly enough, its aim is never bedroom comedy but drawing-room raillery. It is as if sex had been invented as a topic of conversation --either the veiled allusion or the saucy double entendre.

Congreve was the master dramatist of the genre and of its convoluted mechanics. Plots, subplots, stratagems, backfiring intrigues and unmaskings make up The Way of The World. In simplest terms, the play hangs on a purse string. The superannuated but insatiably lustful Lady Wishfort (Jessica Tandy) controls a fortune and has an itch for the philanderer Mirabel (Jeremy Brett). He, in turn, has fallen in love with her niece Millamant (Maggie Smith) and schemes to blackmail Lady Wishfort in order to secure her consent to his marriage to Millamant. That is just about what happens.

The pivotal center of the comedy is S Millamant, as iridescent a creature as a g dramatist ever pinned on paper. She is almost a pre-Shavian heroine, a kind of ' sexier cousin to Shaw's Major Barbara. Like Barbara, she is independent in mind and as spirited as a thoroughbred. Unlike Barbara, Millamant is a complete coquette, full of feminine witchcraft. She adores the marital chase but is eminently dubious about its outcome. She fears she "may dwindle into a wife." She faces marriage like a firing squad, but with her eyes open.

The luck of the gods fell on Stratford when Maggie Smith was cast in the role. She has an invincible gift for Restoration comedy. She can tease a spasm of laughter from an inert line, and she renders the great set speeches as if Mozart had been transmuted into prose. She makes startlingly effective use of what can only be called Brecht's "alienation effect," inhaling a line in one breath like a drag on a fresh cigarette and instantaneously tossing it away like a dead butt. This is well suited to Congreve, with his worldly ability to appraise life in the very art of savoring it.

The other performances are anticlimactic. Jeremy Brett seems not so much to be playing the role of Mirabel as modeling for it in some 18th century fashion parade, and while Jessica Tandy gives Lady Wishfort a brave try, she lacks the coarse, sensual vulgarity of what is, essentially, a dirty old woman.

In justice to the 19-member cast, none flags in his or her efforts. As artistic director of the festival, Robin Phillips deserves unstinting credit for offering Stratford audiences the full bounty of a playwright of Congreve's stature. In The Way of the World, Congreve walks as close as he ever could in Moliere's footsteps. He casts a pitiless light on the vices of a leisure class that is trapped too high on the social scale for aspiration. Following an endless round of pleasure, these people are self-indulgent, inconstant, frustrated and foiled. In their cynical worldliness they dare not believe in friendship or hope for love. They are as tarnished within as they are polished without. They talk as one might expect people to talk in heaven, but they live like people who have fashioned their own hell.

Antony and Cleopatra is a devilishly difficult play to put on convincingly. To begin with, the imagery applied to the two lovers has an Olympian grandeur that somewhat dwarfs merely mortal actors. Antony is "the triple pillar of the world" and an erstwhile demigod in battle. When he dies, Cleopatra says "the odds is gone"--meaning that the world has lost its prime measure of greatness.

As for Cleopatra, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite variety ... other women cloy the appetites they feed; but she makes hungry/ Where most she satisfies." Even the vows that she and Antony swear in lovers' defiance of the world are thunderously imperial. Says Antony: "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the ranged empire fall!" and Cleopatra echoes, "Melt Egypt into Nile!"

Granted the almost insuperable problems of portraying such exalted beings, Maggie Smith's Cleopatra and Keith Baxter's Antony are blazingly well executed. Smith is not precisely a sultry, sun-kissed figure of voluptuousness, but she is regal, cunning, mercurial, and desperately in love with her "man of men." One feels about Keith Baxter's Antony that he has outgrown the self-sacrifices characteristic of the Roman code. The grizzled veteran now prefers to make love, not war.

One of the most compelling achievements of the Smith-Baxter performances is to show how separation from each other is the divorce that Antony and Cleopatra cannot bear. Their love has grafted each in the other's heart and mind so that when they are forced apart, it is a semi-suicide. She wonders, in rapt preoccupation, whether he is sitting, or standing, or riding his horse. When he orders his fleet to turn and follow her deserting ships in the sea battle that destroys his fortunes against Octavius Caesar, it is not that he has totally lost valor, but that being anywhere but with her is the severest loss he can contemplate. When her eyes water in remorse, he chides her with his undaunted love: "Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates all that is won and lost ..."

The polar conflict of the play is be tween love and empire or desire and duty, with Egypt symbolizing one and Rome the other. Director Phillips sets up a telling counterpoint between the brisk, businesslike military scenes and the perfumed enchantment of the amorous interludes.

The entire cast does fine ensemble work in this production. The smarmy look on Alan Scarfe's face as Octavius Caesar adds a disquieting menace to his steely will. Max Helpmann's Lepidus is an aridly pompous dotard of a triumvir, and Lewis Gordan's Enobarbus employs something resembling the barbed antics of Lear's Fool as he tries to jar the doomed Antony loose from the madness of his love. There will be other productions of Antony and Cleopatra, but it is quite possible that this remains the one to have seen.

T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.