The Stratford Shakespearean Festival

Abstract

UMMER stock is a light-hearted affair. Summer festivals often feel some obligation to be equally attractive to the dilettante tourist. The Canadian Stratford could hardly have been accused this year of following the trend. In fact, as far as much of the press of Canada was concerned, a program which offered The Comedy of Errors, Troilus and Cressida, and T imon oJ Athens seemed eccentric-a little-known comedy, a little-played tragedy, and a difficult, dark-period drama. Michael Langham, the artistic director of Stratford, does not, however, conceive his role to be entirely one of purveying the old favorites to a summer audience. The Stratford Theatre is, and always has been in its ten-year existence, a place where Shakespeare is done just as well as the resources of the Foundation permit. Since the Foundation has a first-rate, permanent theater seating over 2,000 people, and a yearly budget near the million-dollar mark, its resources are considerable. Excellence then is the aim of the Ontario Stratford and each of the three plays this summer was to be approached in its own way to give a new and vital interpretation to a public paid the compliment of being regarded as intelligent. Each play was produced in an entirely different fashion: Troilus and Cressida was a fairly orthodox production, but the arena stage of Stratford could make the battles hair-raising; The Comedy of Errors, directed by a French Canadian trained in the French classical tradition, was commedia dell' arte; Timon of Athens was done in modern dress with a musical score composed by Duke Ellington. Of these three plays, the one which excited most comment and interest was not, curiously enough, the modern dress Timon, but the commedia dell' arte Comedy of Errors. Jean Gascon, the director, was the co-founder of Le Theatre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal, and has had a rigid training in French classical theater. Whether because of this or despite it, he chose to ignore the text of The Comedy of Errors and make it a Punchinello pantomime affair. All the costumes were exaggerated pantaloon (designed by Robert Prevost and Mark Negin), and the whole performance was done as a play within a play, five Punchinellos acting as general theatrical factotums around the stage. They lighted the little lamps which stood around the center area and in which the action was from then on confined. They made comments in mime on the action of the play, which sometimes called for the actors to stop dead in their tracks and wait for this foolery to happen and to get its laugh. Though the idea of presenting it as a play within a play was good, in Jean Gascon's hands it had three disastrous effects. First, it reduced his playing area