By Louise
Rachlis
The Alchemist was one of the 10 plays we saw the
first week of August as members of the Stratford Seminar Society for the 5th
year, and we were captivated in all the plays by the theatrical alchemy – using human imagination to transform us for a
brief time.
The theme this season is Eureka moments, after which
the world is not the same.
The variety, depth and quality of all the plays made
me feel that indeed I’d suspended disbelief and been temporarily transported to
another world of illusion, and I’m now back.
There were 68 in the Seminar Society group this
year, the majority from the United States. Good friends Claes and Puck Winqvist
came from Rochester, N.Y., and my brother David joined us from Toronto for two
days. The five of us stayed again at the Mercer Hall.
Every morning the Seminar Society discussed the
plays of the previous day, had a session with a theatre guest (each of whom was
presented with flowers and a smoked salmon (we are nicknamed the Salmonar
Society), and we were briefed by one of our two lecturers about one of the
plays we were going to see. We went to the theatre each afternoon and evening.
This was one of the best seasons ever. In the past
it had been much easier for the four of us to informally rank the plays on our
last day; this year it was impossible because each had different strengths.
Even in the Seminar Society group as a whole, every day was a surprise in the
post play discussions, as one person’s gem was another’s “this play should have
stayed in the closet.” One member said “the play was too loud”, and another
followed with “it was the first time in the Patterson Theatre I could make out
every word.”
The plays we saw – and what was special - were
Hamlet (wonderful clarity and emotion), Oedipus Rex (business suits, nude
Oedipus, and hand sanitizer against the plague), The Taming of the Shrew (good
acting), The Physicists (really surprising), Pericles (Deborah Hay in three
roles), The Alchemist (good costumes, and funny Stephen Ouimette), Love’s
Labour’s Lost (funny prologue, I won’t reveal), Possible Worlds (very strange,
but grows on you), and She Stoops to Conquer (Lucy Peacock) and Lorne and I also went to Carousel
(powerful singing and dancing), and the Winqvists saw Diary of Anne Frank
(great set). Each play was in its own way amazing, and we were particularly
impressed with Hamlet and Oedipus Rex.
The first night group dinner was held for the first
time at the Marquee restaurant in the Festival Theatre which is only for
events. An excellent venue we will be repeating next year. Dessert was our
traditional Pavlova, there, and at several other Stratford restaurants. We
enjoyed Bijou, Revival House, Raja, Red Rabbit and Keystone Alley.
Our first Seminar Society guest was Geoff Scovell,
associate fight director for Hamlet and other plays, and a stunt performer in
many movies.
He said the title of fight director has only been
around for 20 or 30 years. “In the past, they’d look at the cast and say ‘who
has fighting ability?’ And there would be injuries.”
As fight director, he is responsible for the health
and safety of the actors, and to provide consistency. “We create violence and
action within the capabilities of the actors. There are two rules – Be safe,
and look good.”
How do you maintain safety? “You break down
everything. A sword fight is a technical exercise. The target never changes.”
They use swords that look good and sound great,
aluminum rather than steel and historic reproductions.
He said that “every single fight is unique, to the
play, to the actors, to the stage.” “Musical companies are our favorite to work
with; they are so disciplined, so sharp.”
There is a fight captain in every cast who makes
sure the work of the fight director has been carried through. “Stage is about
being able to repeat the action, while film is faster, harder, quicker.”
“We want to create ‘snapshot’ images that will stay
with the audience, like Hamlet dying. It’s moments that people remember, not
the choreography.”
Born 1572, son of a bricklayer, Ben Jonson who wrote
The Alchemist had a 40-year career in London theatre. He wrote over a dozen
plays and was known for four. He thought teaching virtue is a central aspect of
what a writer should be doing. He was made fun of because he took writing so
seriously. Because Johnson published his plays, Shakespeare decided to do so
later on. Johnson preferred a realistic portrayal of the contemporary world,
rather than imaginative fairies and magic of Shakespeare. The Alchemist is set
in London, fall 1610, the time and place it was written. The theatre had been
closed for the plague. The language in the Alchemist is difficult because
comedy speaks in various vernaculars, not the legal, more formal dialogue of
tragedies.
Another guest was actor Graham Abbey, in his 16th
season at Stratford. We saw him as Sir Isaac Newton in The Physicists. He said
that two shows earlier, a cell phone rang in the audience, and Abbey pulled out
his gun (as part of his character in the play) and turned and pointed it at the
audience member. “He caught it in one ring.”
When we saw The Alchemist it was still in previews,
and director Antoni Cimolino was in the audience. Being a work in progress may
have contributed to the fact that we had a bit of trouble with the dialogue. The
group also had mixed feelings about the next play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, the
length and the language. Similarly, our problems could have been because the
play was still in previews.
Abbey is the founder of Groundling Theatre in
Toronto, which will be doing Shakespeare this winter. “I’m obsessed with
Shakespeare’s late plays…These plays have so much to say about our time,
leadership and invasion…”
Abbey said that playing Ferdinand in The Tempest
with William Hutt, he said to Hutt in the Green Room afterward, “I think people
are thinking ‘bring back Bill Hutt’ when I go out on stage.” Hutt told him, ‘you
must believe you are going to bring something to that stage.’ Ego is important.
You have to have confidence and bravery on stage. Otherwise you’re dead in the
water.”
“Shakespeare has been my therapy,” he said, “whether
after 911 or the death of loved ones. You find meaning in words and passages.”
The next play was Hamlet, about what our lecturer
called “interiority”, “the most talkative character in the Shakespeare world”;
“a revenge play, a theme popular in the 1590s.”
In our group discussion, participants didn’t like
the circa 1914 costumes and hairstyles for Hamlet but loved the basic
presentation and the language and humour.
Jonathan Goad who played Hamlet was our guest the
next day. He talked about the challenge of Hamlet; “it’s not about the 1500
lines, it’s the 1500 moments, the quality of the emotional journey.” “You’re playing the same story every night,
but not playing it in the same way.”
Also in the Alchemist, he said the Jonson play is
more difficult because of the language. “It’s a domino effect if you stumble on
a word, and everyone falls down.”
He loves the theatre because it’s a live experience
“between actor and actor, and actor and audience”, even though there are
coughers and other noisy audience members he has to work around.
“You must know the text so well you can forget
it…You need to be in the underwear of your character.”
Our guests the next day were Ben Carlson and Deborah
Hay, a married couple playing the leads in the Taming of the Shrew. They said
the imagery in the play is that of falconry. “They are both outrageously tired
and hungry together…The bird is still wild, but they have an alliance. In
Shakespeare’s time that would have been common knowledge.”
Actor Mike Shara who we saw in three plays on the Festival
stage was our guest for the first time.
He said that at the end of high school he was
drafted to play baseball, and that’s what he wanted to do. He took one drama
course in high school because he needed an arts course and couldn’t draw or
play music.
He auditioned for a few acting schools, one accepted
him and then kicked him out. “They were trying to teach discipline and I was
there for a good time. It was a good eye opener.”
His first acting job with at the Citadel Theatre in
Edmonton with the late Robin Phillips. “He really turned me into an actor…To be
with Robin in that room, I knew I was with somebody who knew how to do it. He
put me on the right track.”
In Hamlet, he has a two-hour break within the play.
“I spent that time learning my lines from Love’s Labour’s Lost,” he said.
“Acting gets harder as you get older. You agonize more. You expect more, you
want more. You realize how much harder it is to do these plays well. What I
find challenging in Shakespeare is to speak these articulate lines and make it
appear that you just thought of it. He’s an amazing playwright.”
“It’s a
singular experience to be on that stage when the theatre is full or almost
full. To be in Hamlet in front of 2,000 people is very freeing. It’s three
dimensional; it’s hard to disappear. I find it really liberating.”
He likes physical acting and movement, not “park and
bark” Shakespeare, he said. I hadn’t heard that expression before but I love it
because it’s what I dislike to watch myself – and fortunately ‘park and bark’
was nowhere to be found at Stratford this summer.
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