Retheatricalizing Theatre: The 1996 Shaw and Stratford Festivals

them. By investing in the arts, governments are in fact creating jobs, stimulating the economy and raising Canada's international profile - not, as some would have it, supporting a privileged class of artists in activities of little general value. This economic argument, however, must follow upon the more central issue of social priorities. None of the above claims could have been made in Canada in 1950. Only public support for the arts as an essential part of our society has made such a state of affairs possible. But the motive behind that support was not, in the first instance, a jobcreation strategy, nor was it merely capitulation to the pressure of special interest groups; it represented a recognition, albeit at a very modest financial level, that the arts are one way, and a significant way, in which our citizens can grow and fulfil themselves, once their basic needs for subsistence have been met. For the last 50 years, we have been developing a vision of our society that seeks to go beyond mere subsistence, that seeks to place the potential for personal fulfilment within the reach of as broad a range of our citizens as possible. The rhetoric of either/or would replace that vision with a brutal egalitarianism that reduces all to an equal level of basic impoverishment, thereby removing the opportunity for artistic and intellectual development from all but the wealthy. (Let those who can afford that sort of thing enjoy it.) Subsistence-level planning is no substitute for a genuine vision for the future. The arts in Canada must not, in the name ofsuch false egalitarianism, become the private enclave of those who can afford them. However difficult it may be, our Jong range thinking must defeat the rhetoric of either/or with the inclusive vocabulary of both/and. Only in this way will we keep the arts a part of our democratic vision, within the reach of all. NOTES I. Matthew 25:29 2. Peterborough Examiner, 19 November 1996. 164 JAMES NEUFELD Trent University 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," ' the greatness of the classics does not annihilate the need for re-imagining the texts, and re-imagining implies retheatricalizing. Aproduction 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 MerchantofVenice at theAvon, 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 Jack 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 otherearlierAmerican and European productions had already taken Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 31. No. 4...