Stratford’s Festival Theatre, 1973

Stratford's Festival Theatre, 1973 JOHN PETTIGREW Stratford's twenty-first season was not generally one of its more memorable ones. At the Third Stage everyone seemed to like Billy the Kid, while at the Avon William Hutt's production of A Month in the Country struck me as admirable though it played to very thin audiences indeed. For my taste, however, the other Avon and Third Stage productions offered little (Exiles striking me as decidedly not worth doing), and at the Festival Theatre the two long-run productions of Othello and The Taming of the Shrew were both disappointments. What really redeemed the Festival season were the Theatre's two short-run productions, the revival from last season of She Stoops to Conquer for the first ten weeks, and a magnificent Pericles which joined the repertoire late in July for seven weeks. Fortunately there were few cast changes in Michael Bawtree's production of She Stoops, which seemed fresh and ebullient as ever. Nicholas Pennell appeared even more at home as Marlow, and though Miss Galloway seems to have developed a distracting tendency to blink somewhat excessively on the slightest provocation or even without it, her Kate Hardcastle was as pert and charming as ever (Pat Bentley-Fisher's understudy performances early in the season when Miss Galloway had a broken ankle provided yet another example of the general quality of Stratford's understudies). Barry MacGregor's Hastings continued strong, especially notable being his double-takes, in one of which he appeared to be occupying the whole stage by himself and to be smiting his brow with at least six hands simultaneously . Similarly apparently possessed of six hands, none of which he had the slightest idea what to do with, was the Roger of Stanley Coles, still outstanding among a most remarkably inept group of stage servJournal of Canadian Studies ants. Patricia Collins replaced Carole Shelley as Constance, and though not the star Miss Shelley clearly is, her sense of fun and a better voice for the role served the production well. The other major cast change, Amelia Hall replacing Mary Savidge as Mrs. Hardcastle, was perhaps not quite as satisfactory . Miss Hall's characterization was more farcical and lost some of the satirical bite of Miss Savidge's performance, but she was raucously amusing and her Mrs. Hardcastle continued to mesh well with the spirit of the production. As last year, however, it was the fine performances of Tony van Bridge and Alan Scarfe as Mr. Hardcastle and Tony Lumpkin that stood out as among the more memorable Stratford has ever given us, and if, as I suspect he did, Mr. van Bridge huffed and puffed somewhat more than he did last year, it is more than easy to forgive him. If Mr. Bawtree can sustain the level of direction he showed here with his Love's Labour's Lost next summer, it will certainly be a joy to behold. David William's production of Othello had some good things, but on the whole it was rather dull, embarrassing, and - in all senses except the one that matters - agonizing. As everyone realized, its central and glaring weakness was that its hero simply couldn't speak English well enough. A leading member of the Habimah Theatre, Nachum Buchman had played Othello in his own language before, and showed enough to make clear he'd deserved his accolades in the role: not a large man, he seemed huge on stage and has a real presence that can help him domin 'ate a stage. But Shakespeare's Othello is largely the product of as richly resonant a language as Shakespeare ever gave a character , and without that language with all its pride, pomp, and circumstance, Othello's occupation's gone, and so is the force of this theatrical but fragile play. It is a tribute to both Mr. Buchman and Shakespeare that parts of the play almost survived: the brothel scene worked fairly well, and the final scene produced something like the appropriate 3 hushed awe and horror. For the most part, however, Mr. Buchman simply could not cope with Shakespeare's language: "cause" came over as "cose," "Arise, black vengeance...