Monday, August 17, 2015

A sampling of Stratford summer 2015














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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