FTER four very successful years in a tent, the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario, is now housed in an exciting new theatre. From the outside, with its circular scalloped roof fluting into deep folds like some great nun's coif and topped by a jaunty coronet flying two flags, it still retains the carnival atmosphere which the tent had. Inside, the stage designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch and Tyrone Guthrie remains relatively unchanged. There is a large main stage jutting thirty-four feet into the audience and a triangular balcony at the back with steps leading up to it on each side. There are four large steps round the main stage and two platforms halfway up the stairs. There are thus seven levels of playing in the open and a large trapdoor which gives access to an invisible but very effective eighth. auditorium has been enlarged by the addition of an 858-seat balcony, but the arc of the pit has been slightly lessened so that no spectator has his sightline interrupted by the pillars of the balcony. Surprisingly enough, though the theatre now seats over two thousand people, no one in the audience is more than 70 feet from the stage. aisles through the audience are used for entrances and exits, three aisles running down to the stage and two running down from the stage under the audience. This makes a total of nine major entrances to playing areas on seven different levels. In a word, then, this is an Elizabethan theatre. It does not slavishly follow Hodges or Cranford Adams or any other of the scholars who have taught us so much about the Globe and its fellows, but it does reconstruct a stage which has the essential facilities for the production, in its own idiom, of a drama which demands close identification of the actor with the audience, a variety of levels for the playing of eavesdropping and discovery scenes, ease of entrance from all sides to cope with the rapid swirl of battle or the more stately pomp of royalty in progress, and a sufficient cellarage for ghosts, prisoners, and other infernal beings. Walter Kerr, summing up the theatre in his review in the New York Herald Tribune on July 7th, said: The authorities responsible for the Canadian Festival have created something more than a dazzlingly handsome and superbly functional playhouse. They have given us the only really new stage and the only really new actor-audience experience of the last hundred years on this continent. Those same authorities were aware that they must this season offer a program worthy of their new playhouse. So far, they had staged the less popular comedies, All's Well and Measure for Measure; they had given us a pantomime