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everything old is new again
Oct. 17th, 2023 09:26 amThe last time I went to the Stratford Festival was between phases of the experiment where I stayed at Himself's old house for a solid week to see how we did with proper cohabiting, not just girlfriend-staying-overnight-or-even-for-the-whole-weekend. The second phase was overtaken by events—that is, my father died—but we did eventually do it again, and then we moved in together, and then we got married and bought a house and had a baby and here we are. All of which probably combines to contribute to my having failed to post reviews of the plays I saw at Stratford in 2012:
- Henry V
- Elektra
- Cymbeline
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Much Ado About Nothing: A delightful production in period dress with not a lot surprising about it until they got to the end, where a modern playwright has done a fix-it on the wedding of Claudio and Hero, that is, Claudio agrees to marry Leonato's "niece" in place of the "late" Hero, and all the women come in veiled, and he says the things he says, and Hero unveils and says "when I lived, I was your other wife," and then they have a scene in which she lights into him about how he'd been wrong to spurn her for being "ruined" not because she was in fact not ruined but because fuck off, do you love me (as I am!) or do you not? (The Hero who died defiled was the one who gave a shit about whether she was a virgin or wasn't.) Which was a satisfying position for the play to take, even as it was completely anachronistic and extratextual (and, textually, the seams showed quite a bit—like I knew what was Shakespeare and what wasn't, plot-wise, and the modern text scanned okay technically but no, one could also tell what could plausibly have come off his pen and what couldn't). (The modern fixer had also written Beatrice a prologue, which by me fit a lot better.) I was there at a matinee, where I didn't have my usual effect on the average age of the audience because in addition to the many, many older adults there was also a busload or two of high schoolers. They loooved Dogberry the Constable and the rest of the watch, unsurprisingly. Someday I will be in an audience that doesn't laugh when Beatrice says "Kill Claudio." It wasn't that it couldn't be funny—she gave that line in a kind of screaming rage—but I must have imprinted hard enough on Emma Thompson's reading in 1993 that I feel like that should be a moment where the bottom just drops right out from under the whole scene. I don't know. This Beatrice made me cry, so the fact that practically everyone else in the room apparently thought that scene was funny felt like a personal affront to me. 🙂
- King Lear: Where the costumes were oddly distracting (one of these sort of modernized faux-period concepts, but whatever, they color-coded the households, which was useful), but really the impressive thing was how in the first couple-few scenes they gave us a Lear who was an utterly unsympathetic, straight-up abusive, mean old bastard and daughters—all three of them—where you could see where they were coming from, and then by the time the storm blew in just before intermission you were on his side. I also observed, just from (literally) where I was sitting, that watching this play is a whole different experience after a parent has begun to lose their mind than it ever was before. (Not that my mother is at all like King Lear nor that my brother and I are in any way like his elder daughters, but I'm sure you know what I mean.) So maybe previous Lears were also sons of bitches until previous Gonerils and Regans turned out to be worse, and I didn't notice as much? But I don't think so. I feel like previous Gonerils and Regans have been craven and grasping from the get-go, but this was the first time that I came away from the play wondering what had happened right before the play began. Good stuff. The best King Lear was still William Hutt in 1996 and always will be, world without end (and he also had the best Fool); but this was Paul Gross as Lear, whom you will remember as the Hamlet in 2000 whose "too, too solid flesh" soliloquy was a literal feet-kicking tantrum,1 and it turns out given 23 years and a different director he turns in a performance that I, at least, find a lot more compelling and convincing. (The Fool was fine. I still want to do a Lear where the Fool is Cordelia in disguise. We'll have to think of a way to handle the dialogue where Lear says "Where's my fool? I have not seen him this two days" and one of his knights says "Since my young lady's going into France, sir, the fool hath much pined away," but I'm sure it can be done.) I'm ready to conclude that costumes aside—they really were weird—this was a better production than the 2002 one with Christopher Plummer as Lear (although I loved him as Prospero in 2010). I don't know, I feel like my thoughts are still pretty disorganized, but I've been thinking about this King Lear and dementia for five days, so they must have done some things right, mustn't they.
1. Yes, of course, fandom also remembers Paul Gross in other roles, and I think he was better in them than he was in Hamlet. Or, I think they were better than the Hamlet he was in, which even at the time I laid at the feet of the director; it's not that I don't think he had the legs to play Hamlet, but that whole show was full of choices that didn't quite get where they were trying to go, and I don't think that's the actors' fault. I mean it can't be down to all of them. (Paul Gross's character in Slings & Arrows directs a better Hamlet than Paul Gross himself was in in real life, though Paul Gross himself was not the director of those episodes of television nor of that entirely fictitious production of Hamlet, so the meta-analysis gets me twisted all around myself after a point—but the point is, I've said several times that I appreciate watching people work who are good at what they do, and it turns out Paul Gross is (surprise!—no, one shouldn't be surprised) a good actor rather than merely a good-looking one. . . . You'll forgive me for continuing to believe he's a better actor than he is a dancer or musician.)
