“The plays are not museum pieces,” said Stratford artistic director Antony Cimolino. “They are sources of light on the world we have today.” I’m always surprised by which plays have an impact on me. Before this season, I thought that scenes of war, taverns, sword fights, weren’t my thing. But Macbeth and the Henry history plays made a big impression. I had thought that A Little Night Music was up my alley of romance, and yet it left me cold. Macbeth, All my Sons, The Hypochondriac, particularly lingered.
I can’t tell you what to see, because it’s so personal. For instance, in contrast to my opinion, Bill, a voice expert, in our Seminar Society, thought the singing in A Little Night Music, was technically fantastic and he loved the play.
All the plays were different, all so professionally amazing; acting, sets, costumes.
Cimolino was the first of our five fabulous Stratford Seminar Society guests, along with Martha Henry, Graham Abbey, Ian Lake and Stephen Ouimette.
The 2016 Stratford Seminar Society schedule for the 74 of us began Monday August 1, with an introduction to the week and dinner at the Marquee in the Festival Theatre.
Lorne and I were attending the seminars for the fifth year, with Claes Winqvist from Rochester and my brother David from Toronto. Attendees come from all over, at least half from the U.S.
Every day consisted of a morning discussion of the previous day's plays, followed by a theatre guest and a talk on the day’s plays by professors Peter Parolin of the University of Wyoming or Liz Pentland of York University.
We had a matinee and an evening play every day, because we added the musicals to the eight Seminar Society plays.
Both Tuesday’s plays were in the Tom Patterson Theatre, Breath of Kings Rebellion (combining Richard II and Henry IV), and John Gabriel Borkman, the second-to-last play of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, written in 1896.
The plot (by Wikipedia) is that the Borkman family fortunes have been brought low by the imprisonment of John Gabriel who used his position as a bank manager to speculate with his investors’ money. The action of the play takes place eight years after Borkman’s release when John Gabriel Borkman, Mrs. Borkman, and her twin sister Ella Rentheim fight over young Erhart Borkman’s future.
Wednesday afternoon was Breath of Kings Redemption (Henry V) and All My Sons by Arthur Miller in the evening, both in the Tom Patterson as well. Thursday was Macbeth (taut Scottish thriller of guilt and violence) in the Festival Theatre and The Hypochondriac by Moliere in the Festival Theatre.
Friday, both plays, Shakespeare in Love and A Little Night Music, were at the Avon.
Saturday was A Chorus Line and As you Like it in the Festival Theatre (a Newfoundland-themed romantic pastoral comedy in which a cross-dressed heroine escapes court life to live and woo in the forest.) My bracket summaries are mainly from The Cambridge Shakespeare Guide by Emma Smith. I couldn’t sum them up in a sentence myself.
In this quick blog, I won’t give the play discussions, just a few highlights from the comments of our theatre guests. Guests traditionally receive flowers and a smoked salmon for doing the “salmonar.”
Day 1 The first half of the week was very gloomy, with the more cheerful plays the second half. Someone in the group remarked that “we’ll all feel like Scandinavians (gloomy like Ibsen) by tomorrow.” Next to Shakespeare, Ibsen is one of the most performed playwrights, said Scandinavian Claes.
Antony Cimolino, speaking on the theme of this season, said that all the post 911 victories “weren’t as clean as we thought...We’ve sowed our seeds for future defeats. It’s about the ambiguity between victory and defeat.”
-- He said that Ibsen is more modern and still speaks to us today, because except for the Norwegians, there’s a freedom to translate the text as you want. There are many ways to interpret each word. Re Borkman, “there are charismatic characters that think they can ‘make America great again’,” he said wryly.
In Macbeth, “it’s a big canvas.” “We undervalue it because it has witches in it.” The word “fear” comes into Macbeth three times more often than in other Shakespeare plays, and “corruption” is at the centre of the text.”
He deliberately cast younger actors in Macbeth because “there is speed to their actions. They don't have time to think.” Also, “because the play is about the future, I thought a young couple would be best. In casting, you can’t undo personality and you can’t undo age.”
The rhythm of night and day is very important, and it gets destroyed as the play goes on and the greyness takes over.
-- Cimolino on Moliere:
Louise IV loved the arts and was a patron of Moliere. He loved his satires of nobility, doctors, lawyers and priests. Moliere was constantly sick but when he took ill in 1673, the doctors wouldn’t come and the priest wouldn’t give last rites because of Moliere’s writing. Because of that, he couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. The King asked “how deep is consecrated ground?” The priest replied, four feet. The King said, “Would you mind burying him at five feet?”
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Professor Peter Parolin gave us insight into the two views of history in the Henry plays - the providential view that history is dominated by God, and the Machiavellian view that power is all and the end justifies the means.
Day 2
We discussed the previous day’s plays in the re-designed Patterson theatre, and the difficulty of hearing lines when characters’ backs are turned. Later in the week we learned that the Patterson will be torn down in a couple of years and a new theatre built.
Our guest was director and actor Martha Henry, 78, and in her 42nd season at Stratford. She has worked many other places as well, and this year went back and forth to Niagara on the Lake where she directed Dance of Death, as well as All My Sons at Stratford.
She said All My Sons by Arthur Miller is the first play written in her lifetime that she has directed at Stratford. Because of its colour-blind casting, she had asked Miller’s estate for permission to add a line such as “You know Chris, she’s a coloured girl” or something like that, but they turned her down. She said we should pretend the line is there because it would have been mentioned and noticed in 1946.
All My Sons was the first play in the reconfigured Patterson, and the action takes place on the porch as characters go in and out of the house.
Martha Henry has also been in charge of the Conservatory program for seven years. It was started because the young actors auditioning “couldn’t speak,” she said. “I basically tried to teach them speech and context.” There are thousands of applications which are narrowed down to 10 in the Conservatory each year. They also learn from all theatre fields from stage managers to dressers “so they can act in any theatre in the world. I tell them ‘you’re not the centre of the universe. No actor of mine will ever throw a costume on the floor.”
Even with more new and Canadian plays being offered, she believes in the classics as a learning experience. “Shakespeare educated me. You don’t get that anywhere else.”
Actor Stephen Ouimette will be taking over the Conservatory from her next year, with his own ideas to add to the program.
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In our afternoon Henry V play, Peter told us to watch for the examples of the English being better than the French in every way, so the country will support the war against them.
-- Day 3
Earlier in the week we learned about 90-no, which means a 90-minute play with no intermission. The history plays were twice that, three hours long each. We thought the young actor playing Henry V needed more nurturing to be stronger. Chuck in our group said he didn’t think the play is “done” yet. “The director has to watch it and go back and see what’s working and what isn’t.”
Bill suggested one of the problems with the voices was because of “hearing inversion.” “We don’t hear ourselves the way others hear us; that’s why we don’t recognize our voices on the answering machine. A good actor has to be aware of that.”
-- We all agreed that All My Sons was a master class in acting. When a play is good, there isn’t much to say. When it’s bad, there’s a lot to say. We sat for awhile in silence. -- Our guest was Graham Abbey, adapter, associate director and actor in the Breath of Kings plays. He is also the founder of Groundling Theatre in Toronto, which won the Dora Award for independent theatre last year for. A Winter’s Tale.
He said he’s “interested in human beings and what Shakespeare brings to them.” “Macbeth was written for James I who believed witches had caused the storm when his wife was travelling. It was a real world, not Halloween. Macbeth is about a union of two people that disintegrates. It’s about that couple.”
-- Day 4
It was wonderful to have Macbeth actor Ian Lake talk to our group, relaxed in shorts and a t-shirt. He said he was “wiped” from the previous day, when he played Macbeth, followed by his very funny part in The Hypochondriac as Dr. Diafoirerhoea. He said it would be easier when the order of the plays is reversed. “Macbeth was the most physically, emotionally and psychologically taxing experience of my life...I’ve learned the most about myself than in any job I’ve ever done.”
Growing up in B.C., he said he was “destined to be a rugby player”. He attended University of Victoria because they had the best rugby program but studied theatre “where I was rugby boy” and played rugby “where I was theatre boy”. He then he attended the National Theatre School and the Birmingham Conservatory in Stratford.
Last year he acted, sang and played the guitar in the musical “Once”. I realized you can you can succeed at things you don't know you're good at yet...Readiness is nonsense. If you’re ready, you should have done it already.”
With the fight scenes, he said the focus is on “storytelling, not just cool looking fights. The fight director liked having a young Macbeth, not an older one who says ‘I have this thing about my knee.’”
He said he and “Lady Macbeth” are a week apart in age and have known each other for 10 years in real life. “People realize they could be this amazing couple. When the relationship actually starts to deteriorate, and the chasm starts to grow, their ambition is for the other person.”
Auditions were in pairs. “It was like a chemistry test,” he said. “Relationships are the core. That's what audiences connect to... To me, my goal every night is to fill the Festival stage without sounding as if I’m yelling.”
-- Day 5
Our last guest was Stephen Ouimette, in his 22nd season in Stratford, fresh from the opening of The Hypochondriac in previews. He said a late opening is a “tough sell”. “We couldn’t wait for an audience to see what was there. We’re now trying to refine and control, to navigate the boat. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a little laugh to get a big one.”
The audience was shocked by the ending of Moliere, sick and dying at the end of the play. “It brings a multilayered experience to this,” said Ouimette. “Moliere was sick and wrote this play to make money. The best play is when comedy is next to tragedy and has a root in reality.”
“I kind of feel about Moliere the way I feel about Shakespeare,” he said, “in that we put them in a different pile...I still think you have to see a living, breathing human being in a classical play. The audience wants believability and reality as in modern playwrights Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. If it’s done well, there’s something released in the air, and it’s intoxicating.”
This has been an intoxicating season at Stratford.
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