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by William Shakespeare, directed by Dean Gabourie

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 10-September 19, 2010

“The sourest-natured dog that lives” (Act 2)

“The Two Gentlemen of Verona” is often considered Shakespeare’s weakest play.  The current Stratford production directed by Dean Gabourie, Assistant Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival, will do nothing to dispel that opinion.  Gabourie has created a concept production where the concept itself is confused and does nothing to illuminate the problematic text.

In the complicated plot, the title characters, Proteus and Valentine, are best friends.  Valentine goes off to Milan but Proteus will not accompany him since he is in love with Julia.  When Proteus’ father orders his son to Milan, Proteus and Julia exchange rings and vows.  Meanwhile in Milan, Valentine has fallen in love with Sylvia, the daughter of the Duke, who has promised her in marriage to the foppish Thurio.  But this is not the main difficulty.  Upon arriving in Milan, Proteus instantly falls in love with Sylvia, too, and vows to have her even if it means betraying Valentine.  This proves to be easy since the trusting Valentine, unaware of Proteus’ change of mind, tells him of his plans to steal Sylvia away.  To add further confusion, Julia, as will several future Shakespeare heroines, decides to dress as a boy and seek out Proteus in Milan.  The primary difficulty with the play is that it concludes with a happy ending that seems in no way justified.  Valentine’s offer to give Sylvia to Proteus seems inexplicable as is Julia’s willingness to accept Proteus back after he’s been such a heel.

Rather than trying to find out how to make the play work on its own, Gabourie decides the only solution is to present unrealistic actions as part of an unrealistic genre.  As Gabourie says in his programme note, “What if this play was never intended as a romantic comedy in the later Shakespearean manner but as a satire--or, as [G.B.] Shaw put it, a vaudeville?”  Gabourie mistakes many things in this statement.  First of all, a satire and a vaudeville are not the same thing.  Gabourie thinks a satire is a genre that pokes fun at conventions.  He thinks that when Shaw called a musical version of the play in 1895 a “vaudeville” that Shaw meant the variety act vaudeville of American theatre.  Yet, at the same time Shaw wrote Chekhov called his short farcical plays “vaudevilles” referring to the popular late 19th-century form of theatre in France (from “voix de ville’) that mixed light comedy with melodrama.  Gabourie takes his mistake one fatal step further by presenting stage vaudeville (the American kind) and silent film as interchangeable.  When we enter the Studio theatre we see clips from silent movies flickering behind a thin curtain and throughout the play Gabourie switches between stage techniques and imitation film techniques as when he has a chase scene take place under a strobe light to emulate the flicker of a old movies. 

As might be expected such conceptual confusion does nothing to clarify the play.  Gabourie has costume designer Tamara Marie Kucheran move the setting up to the 1920s and had Lorenzo Savoini ring the Studio Theatre stage with footlights and make his sets look backstage dressing rooms or like parts of a set, as  the often used movable door and frame without a wall.  When characters give speeches he often has Savoini as lighting designer train a spotlight on them as in old-fashioned theatre stagings, although this seems to happen not only when they are nominally on the stage on stage but also backstage and outside.  The effect of this odd mixture of techniques is to separate the various speeches and action sequences of the play into distinct compartments that seem to have little to do with each other that completely undermines whatever narrative drive the play has. 

A strong cast can sometimes overcome directorial whim, but only half the cast has that kind of strength.  Of the principal actors the one who fares best is Dion Johnstone as Valentine.  He is a good man bent on doing good and even makes Valentine’s conversion to outlaw believable since he still means to do what is right when others wrong him.  As Proteus, Gareth Potter acts well enough but he needs more voice training to increase his resonance to be more effective both as a romantic lead and as a villain.  His present nasality makes him come off as a rather wimpish bad guy.

As is always the case with this play, Proteus’ servant Launce and his dog Crab steal the show.  Robert Persichini’s deadpan delivery of Launce’s two main monologue’s about his relationship with Crab, played by Otto the basset hound, were made even funnier by Otto’s ability to sleep through everything Persichini said.  He roused himself for the arrival of Bruce Dow as Speed, Valentine’s servant,but began to clean his nether parts when Launce explains when the meaning is of Crab’s actions.  “What doth he now?” Dow asked.  “He licketh himself,” Persichini ad-libbed and brought down the house.

Of the main female actors, Sophia Walker, with little voice control and incapable of conveying more than one generalized emotion at a time, is a poor choice for Julia.  She doesn’t even change her voice or manner when Julia disguises herself as a boy.  Her exchanges with Trish Lindström as her maid Lucetta, showed that Lindström could get more of of just a few words than Walker could out of entire speeches.  Claire Lautier is more successful as Silvia, here conceived not as the daughter of the Duke of Milan, but as Shakespearean actress working in her father’s theatre called The Palace.  Gabourie has us first meet Sylvia when she and Thurio played by Timothy D. Stickney are playing the final scene of “Othello” on stage in a comically melodramatic style.  Along with Johnstone and Persichini, Lautier creates a believable character and speaks her lines with real understanding.

This is certainly not true of Stickney, who blusters so much, it’s hard to know what he is saying.  As the Duke of Milan, John Vickery is even more of a pain than usual.  Obviously enamored of the sound of his voice, he distends vowels and rides up and down the scale in imitation of the old style of “singing” Shakespeare.  This might be comic except that Vickery uses the same method in tragedy and to just as little effect.  He should recognize that Macbeth’s of an actor “full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” is not advice to emulate but a condemnation.  We have to wonder what bizarre casting directive has put such fine actors as Stephen Russell, Andrew Gillies and David Collins in such tiny roles as Sir Eglamour, Panthino and the Host while placing these blusterers in larger roles?

The Stratford Festival’s publicity seems to think that “Two Gents” as the first Shakespeare to be staged in the Studio Theatre is some sort of milestone.  Instead, it confirms that the Studio theatre, which was supposed to be home to contemporary plays and plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, has fallen by the wayside.  At least Gabourie’s failure of insight into “Two Gents” will reach a smaller audience than Des McAnuff’s failure of insight into “As You Like It” and “The Tempest” on the Festival stage.  This year only Marti Maraden in “The Winter’s Tale” bothers to look closely at the text to see how the play works rather than concealing gaps in understanding with gimmicks and theatrical smokescreens. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Robert Persichini as Launce and Otto as Crab. ©David Hou