Two views of Stratford: I: The Festival Theatre

Two views of Stratford: I: The Festival Theatre JOHN PETTIGREW Stratford's nineteenth season, a great boxoffice success, was more than satisfactory artistically. Granted that The Red Convertible at the new Third Stage was not worth doing despite a brilliant performance by Mari Gorman ; again, that Much Ado, The Italian Straw Hat and Volpone were extremely uneven; and that Macbeth, substituted for the originallyannounced Pericles on the grounds that a box-office "block-buster" was needed, was indeed a bomb. Nevertheless, a season including the virtually perfect There's One in Every Marriage, and the powerful Duchess of Ma/fi demands summing up as a good one. And it is no accident that Jean Gascon directed the two undoubted artistic successes; the season once again underlined the crucial importance to Stratford of the quality of the direction. Stratford is having its problems at present: the average level of acting and sense of ensemble are emphatically not what they were a few years ago. But M. Gascon's Duchess in itself showed that the problems are not irremediable, and I would judge that the new Associate Director, William Hutt, to whose acting· the Festival already owes so much, is going to give us distinguished work in future seasons. It is remarkable that, with the single exception of the rather special case of Douglas Seale's King John, only six directors have risen above mediocrity or worse at the Festival Theatre: Tyrone Guthrie , Stuart Burge, Michael Langham, David William, John Hirsch, and Jean Gascon. At any rate, it is to M. Gascon that we owe the past season's overall success. He is truly a great director. At the opposite extreme is Peter Gill, whose version of Macbeth succeeded, mirabile dictu!, in being even worse than the unfortunately unforgettable awe-inspiring awJournal of Canadian Studies fulness of Peter Coe's travesty of 1962. Mr. Gill's Macbeth was faithful enough to Shakespeare 's text and structure (as Mr. Coe's was not), it was not nearly so perverse. But the Coe disaster did have some very good things in it, and (and not just because is was so ineffably silly) it was not agonizingly dull; whereas to sit through Mr. Gill's Macbeth was to empathise quite desperately with Macbeth's feelings about the benefits of sleep. While it is only fair to point out that some reviewers liked it (or at least said they did), and that packed houses generally seemed to like it, I think this was Stratford's worst Shakespeare production ever, and Mr. Gill's remark that he was proud of it seems to me to carry bad taste and egotism over the brink of idiocy and megalomania. Goodness knows, the play is a nightmare for directors and actors, and only in small measure because most audiences are so familiar with it. Perhaps, given Shakespeare's materials, the last half must be a decline from a first half so remarkable that the play tends to collapse rather than build as th~ other great tragedies do, the last half being as inevitable as that of the other great tragedies without being surprisingly, thrillingly , so. Perhaps - one may even in desperation come to believe - there is truth in the actors' old legend that the ghost of the historical Macbeth haunts productions from a sense of outrage at the insult done to him. Whatever the reason, however, the play, so indubitably magnificent in the theatre of a reader's imagination, seems almost invariably to fail on the stage, and were it not that I have seen one good production (Chichester's in 1966), I'd be tempted to emend Lamb's erroneous observation about Lear and declare that Macbeth cannot be acted. All of which is no excuse for being confounded out of the attempt to produce something like Shakespeare's play. Mr. Gill's production was a "clever," unconventional, "relevant," low-keyed and almost unbeliev15 ably boring version of what one would have thought was an untenable conception of the play. One felt sorry for the actors, who must have hated what they were doing, and who, with two or three exceptions, bear no responsibility for this lamentable bomb, all...