Retheatricalizing Theatre: The 1996 Shaw and Stratford Festivals

Abstract

Retheatricalizing Theatre: The 1996 Shaw and Stratford Festivals Reacting to a bad French revival by Roger Blin of Waiting for Godot, in 1960 Samuel Beckett complained of the indigestion of old work with all the adventure gone. Beckett's comment implies that the challenge of theatre resolves itself into a hazard of re - imaginings, especially in the case of the classics. Despite some scholars and critics who (in the words of Robert Brustein) place themselves before the sacred texts like an army of Switzers guarding the Vatican,(f.1) the greatness of the classics does not annihilate the need for re - imagining the texts, and re - imagining implies retheatricalizing. Apro duction needs a controlling metaphor, whether this takes the form of a specific emblem in decor, the very frame of a production or the particular stylization of a piece. The 1996 Shaw and Stratford Festival season had several productions that tried to re - imagine and retheatricalize their texts, not all of which succeeded. Marti Maraden's The Merchant of Venice at the Avon, with the help of Phillip Silver's tall, austere, rough - textured and claustrophobic set of high walls and largely windowless ghetto houses contrasting with Portia's Art Deco Belmont, attempted to escape the excessively romanticized mode of treating Shakespeare's prickly moral comedy. Its atmosphere of fascism and narrow, realistic view of Shylock (played by Douglas Rain as a rational materialist who was too sane to act up to or above Shakespeare's text), however, did not transcend conventional treatments of the play. Maraden attempted to soften some of the anti - semitic cruelty in the Trial Scene, but other things also mitigated against the production: the lack of at least an implied homosexual relationship between Antonio and Bassanio; an unconvincing Nerissa; a Portia who couldn't pull off her male impersonation in the Trial Scene; and, most of all, the imbalance between the harsh politics of a heartless Bay Street Venice and Shakespeare's mixture of romance and comedy. Many Canadian reviewers made much of the fascist Venice, unaware, perhaps, that this was by no means a new perspective, for other earlier American and European productions had already taken this slant. In any case, a more cutting nuance is that Shakespeare's superficially cultured and civilized Venice has deep fissures of rotten bias. Maraden's Merchant did have an interesting reading of the text, and Silver's design was a sly satire on Portia's its painted backdrop with a deliberate lack of perspective betokening a lack of reality to her world of glittering silks, satins, chiffons, metal caskets and ritualistic choosings. Silver's design was easy to read, unlike Richard Rose and Charlotte Dean's concept for As You Like It at the Tom Patterson, where in deciding on conical symbolism as an expression of themes of contradiction and reconciliation, the director and designer lost actors and audience in an abstraction out of sorts with the play's texture. Rose selected the cone as his central symbol because it contains within its peculiar geometry a triangle and circle, and this metaphor could repeat itself in the costuming, props and blocking. For instance, as Rose explained, everyone in the court moved in triangular patterns while everyone in the forest moved in circles. At the end of the play, when the exiles from returned to the court, the two patterns crossed to form the cone. Rose justified his choice by contending that the fantastic nature of Arden, which appears as something of a safe haven from the outside world, lent itself to the almost abstract design elements. Arden is a paradise, or at least what we think paradise is, and that's what's so interesting about it. The idea of paradise is constantly evolving as we move through time. It's really a product of our imagination. But in moving his design concept into abstraction, Rose lost the tone and texture of Shakespeare's pastoral comedy, and his production was ploddingly pedestrian in its acting. …