Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
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The perfect theatre
There are a lot of wonderful places to see theatre in this big, broad country of ours. Some of my favourites include the Palace Grand Theatre in Dawson City, a reconstructed turn-of-the-last-century opera house; Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, one of the best-ever locations for outdoor Shakespeare; the National Arts Centre in Ottawa; and the Festival Theatre in Stratford, one of the most exciting environments for play-watching ever invented. A woman named Tanya Moiseiwitsch designed it in the mid-50s in collaboration with Stratford’s first artistic director, Tyrone Guthrie, and it still works marvellously.
I spent a decadent three days last weekend in Stratford with three most excellent companions, gorging myself on two of my favourite things: good theatre and used bookshops. We saw four plays that illustrated the wondrous variety that Stratford puts on every year: Macbeth, starring Colm Feore as the ruthless and reckless Scottish king (except he wasn’t in Scotland, but more on that later); The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s Victorian comic masterpiece (which I was eager to compare with Uxbridge’s recent production); A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, one of the silliest musicals ever written (and made even sillier thanks to Stratford’s big budget, which can spend hundreds or even thousands on a 5-second visual gag); and West Side Story, probably the most riveting musical drama in theatre history (I was emotionally wrung out by play’s end, even though I’ve seen, and been in, the show many times).
Uxbridge, by the way, can take a wee bit of pride in the Stratford shows this season. The female lead in both West Side and Forum (demonstrating a rather awesome acting range) is Chilina Kennedy, who choreographed several shows for Uxbridge Musical Theatre right out of theatre school, and directed Camelot here last season while she was getting ready for her Stratford debut.
We saw Forum and Earnest at the Avon Theatre, a rather ordinary proscenium-style theatre which has to rely on technical splendour to make up for the run-of-the-mill staging. Neither show disappointed; the set for Earnest was particularly spectacular, drawing applause on its own (although I thought our production held its own in most other areas, and was even superior in some).
The Festival Theatre, on the other hand, doesn’t need beautiful backdrops or expensive props. It is its own best technical asset. The actors can enter and exit a dozen ways, including from the ceiling (which they did in Macbeth), and the set changes can be incredibly smooth and lovely to behold. One friend warned me, in fact, that the set changes were the best thing about Macbeth. Unfortunately, he was pretty well spot on the money.
The reason the Festival Theatre works so well is the same reason Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre was so brilliant; it lets the minds of the audience do most of the creative work. The Globe’s stage was essentially a big, bare platform, with almost nothing in the way of fancy props or set pieces. The idea, as the Bard puts it in his prologue to Henry V, was for the audience to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”, to just listen to the playwright’s words and let their imaginations do the rest.
And the Festival Theatre is ideally designed to do exactly the same thing. West Side Story works extremely well for that reason; there’s a bed in one scene, a jukebox in another, that easily roll on and off, but for 90% of the play, the stage is occupied only by actors. The script and the music are enough to tell the story.
Too bad the director of Macbeth didn’t get it (he’s also the new artistic director of the Festival, which is a disturbing sign). In the climactic scene of the play, for instance, the stage is totally dominated by a jeep, of all things, which just sits there while Macbeth and MacDuff try to fight a machete duel around it.
In the program, the director tries to justify the jeep and the machetes by saying the play “resonates” with an audience which has witnessed all the turmoil in Africa in recent decades.
It always boggles my mind that these directors change the period and locale of the play, but don’t change the script. So even though we’re supposedly in Africa, there are frequent references to Scotland. Why not just leave the setting as 11th-century Scotland, as the playwright intended? It’ll still “resonate”, for Pete’s sake. We’ll still recognize the characters and situations as applying to our own world. We’re not stupid.
I love the Festival Theatre. I just wish directors would leave it alone.
