The 1983 Stratford Festival

Commentary The 1983 Stratford Festival KEITH GAREBIAN The troubles of John Hirsch continued at Stratford, where the most vulgar publicity campaigns were launched to minimize the deficit for the 1983 season. Was ever a souvenir programme or official poster so bathetically conceived as in Heather Cooper's lurid illustration of Shakespeare as gardener? Was ever a promotions stunt so crassly promul gated as the Bardair gimmick, offering tourists an around the world tour beginning with Moliere's France and eleventh century Celtic Scotland, and continuing with London in 1675, Victorian Arden, and New York in the 1940s? Even the much vaunted Virtuoso Performances fizzled, except for Douglas Campbell's Blake and Edward Atienza's superbly judged anthology of Shakespearean "ham." Surely only the most religious or reverend audiences could have found theatrical nourishment in Aldyth Morris' protracted monologue, Damien, about a Belgian priest who served the lepers on Moloka'i before succumbing to the dread disease. The script needed a more theatrical mode to make it interesting on stage. Guy Sprung's Jean direction, Barbra Matis' ascetic design (dominated by a huge, overhanging metal crucifix), and Steven Hawkin's muted lighting did nothing to camouflage either the play's defects or Lewis Gordon's inadequacies in the title role. The shapeless text, opening with the disembodied voice of Damien from beyond the grave, played hopscotch with chronology; and Gordon, never an actor of distinguished vocal quality, simply had no variable pitch, colour, or force of personality to relieve the monotony. Irene Worth is never monotonous whether acting a full role on stage or reading from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. However, there was nothing unparalleled in the evening of Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. Her interpretation of a scene from Portrait Journal ofCanadian Studies of the Artist As a Young Man was sensitively felt but hardly suited to her feminine aura, and until she caught fire with Joyce's letter to Ibsen and then with Molly Bloom's interior monologue, she was simple without being especially memorable, clear without being particularly striking. But with the Jetter of homage from nineteen year old Joyce to venerable Ibsen, her tone was brilliantly powerful and her sense of rhythm deeply affecting. As Molly Bloom, she captured the woman's vulgar sensuality, pride, and lyrical voluptuousness in rhetoric whose axis was Molly's own body. The Virginia Woolf section, however, was disproportionately brief and hardly as versatile. Only the high noon passage from The Waves cast a bewitching spell, and Worth's measured vocal technique pointed up the literary devices captivatingly. Virtuoso performances are designed, presumably, to showcase histrionic talent rather than dramaturgy; Elliott Hayes' monodrama , Blake, was little more than a collage of poems, reminiscences, and observations from Blake himself. The portrait of the poet as visionary was interesting but hardly novel. Douglas Campbell, mannerisms and all, battled the "mind forg'd manacles" of an age that resisted Blake's sensational apocalypses . Dancing jigs, launching into trumpettongued lyrics, railing against the political, social, religious, and artistic enemies of Christian virtue and apocalyptic art, Campbell 's Blake was everything but subtle. What Frederick Tatham wrote of Blake could have applied equally well to Campbell's performance : "The serpent had no share in his nature." The actor's brute power was undeniable ; his craft, though, was hardly sublime enough for the Celestial City it was meant to lead us unto. The most accomplished virtuoso was Edward Atienza as septuagenarian Jack Rice who secretly reminisced about his former colleague, Shakespeare, while the Puritans were supposedly about their pleasure-killing business. Once again, the script (by Atienza and John Mortimer) was simply an excuse for a versatile actor to parade his talent, but as Atienza "hammed" his way through Lady Anne, Cleopatra, and a gallery of other female roles, his running discourses on 149 Elizabethan theatre, the society and politics of Shakespeare's time, and the Bard's biography were a colourful instruction in seventeenth century background. Atienza's classical talent gave us the sense of a rounded life. The full productions themselves were very much a mixed bag. Once again, as in 1982, the best mountings were by guest directors rather than by Hirsch himself. Were there...