Marathon Time at Stratford

By T.E. Kalem

In Ontario this season, a waspish Woolf out-tongues the Bard

Opening week at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival is always a dramatic marathon. Trumpeters in Elizabethan garb signal curtaintime and send eight plays sprinting off the mark in five days, beginning a five-month competition that often finds the winners and the losers in close contention. Four of this season's entries:

VIRGINIA by Edna O'Brien

Every festival profits from a conversation piece. Stratford assuredly has one in Virginia, which is based on the life of Virginia Woolf. One may argue that it is not quite a play, since its structure is that of a labyrinthine interior monologue. This will captivate some playgoers and alienate others. Since about 70% of the material in Virginia comes from the letters and diaries of Woolf, Edna O'Brien is at least as much editor as author of the drama. However, she has a deep affinity for her subject and never violates Woolfs tone of voice. In the title role, Maggie Smith is bold, lustrous and moving; it is as if she had stored up every acting skill she had ever acquired and lavished it on this one coruscating performance.

There are actually two other characters, but each is encased in the prism of Woolf's consciousness. Her husband Leonard (Nicholas Pennell) devotedly tended a brushfire of genius at which he was painfully singed. Also vying for Virginia's affections is Vita Sackville-West (Patricia Conolly), an avowed lesbian, or Sapphist in the term of Woolfs 1920s.

How far Vita's feelings were reciprocated is ambiguous: the caress and diverted kiss that occur onstage imply rather more than they reveal. Love is an unbalanced equation. The evidence of the play echoes the reflection offered by Woolf's nephew Quentin Bell in his biography of his aunt: "If the test of passion be blindness, then [Virginia's] affections were not very deeply engaged." Virginia sharpens that point in the play: "Life and a lover she thought. It does not scan." For Woolf, her work was her life. While she would drown herself as pitiably as Ophelia, she could not drown her vocation in Vita.

In this kaleidoscope of memory we encounter Virginia's father as an austere Greek scholar, selfish, stingy and totally un-Hellenic in his rigidity of spirit. Virginia hates him. The second man who stalks her early memory is perhaps worse. After escorting her to a fancy ball, her half brother tries to assault her sexually ("Eros," she says, "came on dirty wings").

Revulsion, inhibition and the eventual declarations of feminine independence may all have been catalyzed by these early perceptions of the male animal. With the father's death, Virginia and her sister Vanessa establish a London salon, the nucleus of the elitist, eccentric Bloomsbury group. The coolly vitriolic tongues and flamboyant narcissism of the "Bloomsberries" mirrored streaks of casual cruelty and self-absorption in Woolf.

This play is a tone poem, and it is surely Robin Phillips at the top form of his directorial career who has elicited from Maggie Smith this confluence of naked emotions. She is, from moment to moment, grieving, loving, bitter, wasp-witted, rapturous, valiant and a wombful of fear. Her most powerfully affecting sequence is the descent into madness, where terrifying apparitions of unreason flit like vampire bats through the buckling rafters of her brain.

TITUS ANDRONICUS by William Shakespeare

There are 13 murders in Titus Andronicus, or an average of about one every twelve minutes. It is an early work (written in 1594), and the poetry is at odds with the fury, rampaging revenge pursued like a blood sport. Director Brian Bedford mitigates the gore, achieving a certain stoic Roman dignity. The drama's chief interest is that it offers embryonic models of characters who would dominate later tragedies.

Titus Andronicus (William Hutt), doughtiest general of the Roman state, has come home with his Gothic captives. Turning aside the proffered imperial crown, he bestows it on Saturninus (Jack Wetherall), an odious opportunist though royal in lineage. Titus prefigures Lear's foolish error in dividing up his kingdom.

Saturninus appropriates Tamora (Pat Galloway), Queen of the Goths, for his empress. A Lady Macbeth-to-be, Tamora seethes with ambition and an acrid hatred of Titus, who had her eldest son killed in a ritual sacrifice. When she takes Aaron (Errol Slue), a Moor, for her lover, the carnage begins. Despite his color, Aaron is Iago's twin in his motiveless malignity. He plots to have Titus' daughter Lavinia (Goldie Semple) raped, and her hands cut off and her tongue ripped out. Then the heads of two of Titus' murdered sons are unshrouded before the father. In retaliation, Titus stabs two of Tamora's sons to death, has their bodies minced and cooked, and serves morsels of them to the unsuspecting Tamora.

All this recalls the dawn of Greek tragedy. But unlike the Greek plays, Titus Andronicus provides no pity, terror or catharsis. The characters are slain with the casual impersonality of gangsters being picked off by hit men. Among the players, Hutt's Titus grows in stature as the bereaved father, and Galloway's Tamora is a one-woman "wilderness of tigers." Devoid of a moral center, Titus Andronicus nonetheless exerts a perverse fascination, for it glows with the phosphorescence of evil.

HENRY V by William Shakespeare

An actor may rally his soldiers ("Once more unto the breach, dear friends"), but he will not be supremely successful in the part unless he makes the audience burn to join the fray. Jack Wetherall, in the title role in this play, lacks that incendiary magnetism.

The fault is not entirely his. An entire generation of actors have been so thoroughly trained to play antiheroes that the heroic style is unnatural to them.

At the siege of Harfleur, Henry roars at assembled elders of the town: I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur Till in her ashes she lie buried. The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass Your fresh fair virgins and your flow'ring infants.

Henry means every last harsh syllable of this. Wetherall recites it rhetorically as if he can scarcely believe what he is saying. He is much more persuasive in delivering Henry's brooding soliloquy the night before the English take the field at Agincourt: "Upon the King! Let us our lives, our souls . . . Our children, and our sins, lay on the King!/ We must bear all."

In the last act, the clangor of arms gives way to beguiling courtship as Henry, with his bad French, woos Katharine (Diana Leblanc), daughter of the French King, with her sketchy English. Alas, all the settings seem to have been repossessed from a stranded road company, and there is no glint of splendor. Blandness mutes all, and chivalric knighthood is presented as a pressed flower.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING by William Shakespeare

This production is handsomely costumed in the style of The Three Musketeers. That is apt, since the most winning part of the play is a fencing match, the thrust and parry not of foils but of wits. Benedick (Brian Bedford) and Beatrice (Maggie Smith) are masterly put-down artists of each other and of just about everyone else. Shakespeare bestowed on them the gifts of sparkling intelligence, pungent irony and a merry tongue, qualities in short supply in the play's other characters. But this is a play of self-deceptions and reversals.

Beatrice and Benedick are self-deceived in that they believe their heads can sternly rule their hearts. "I will live a bachelor," says Benedick with smug assurance. Beatrice swears that she will not marry "till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmaster'd with a piece of valiant dust?" Through the ruses of their friends, they are both overmastered by love. Bedford and Smith have these roles under their skins. She is a whooping crane to his mock turtle. Together they adorn the occasion with the Bard's goodly grace.

--By T.E. Kalem

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