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by John Murrell, directed by Diana Leblanc

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

July 30-September 27, 2013

“Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!” Othello, Act 3, Scene 3

If you are a fan of Martha Henry, John Murrell’s new play Taking Shakespeare will be a must-see.  Murrell wrote the play for Henry and it is the only play Henry appears in at Stratford this season.  Judged on its own merits, however, the play is slight and inconsequential.  Over the course of its two hours, we learn surprisingly little about the two characters or Shakespeare.

The play’s premise is that the dean of a university is worried that her 24-year-old son Murphy (Luke Humphrey) is not doing well in is first-year English class.  The main stumbling block for him is Shakespeare, so the dean sends her son for special tutoring with the professor who turned her on to Shakespeare years ago.  The ageing, misanthropic professor, known simply as Prof (Martha Henry), takes a brief look at Murph, who main interest is video games, and says the cause is hopeless.  Only when he tells her that one of the two Shakespeares is Othello does she agree.  Othello is her play, the play that got her hooked on Shakespeare when she was a student. 

The play moves along the totally predictable lines of other plays that throw a grumpy older person together with a vital younger person like Jeff Baron’s Visiting Mr. Green (1996).  The two characters move from mutual distrust to finding things in common to learning about life from each other.  Visiting Mr. Green has the advantage of dealing with religion and thus with an entire belief system common to both.  Taking Shakespeare deals only with one play and Murrell’s attempts to expand the range beyond that seem artificial.  The type of personal questions that Murph asks the Prof and that the Prof asks Murph would be off  limits if the sessions were conducted in a professional manner.  Murph’s session with the Prof are more like cognitive therapy than academic tutoring. 

Anyone who has had private classes with a professor will be surprised at how unenlightening this Prof’s classes are.  From the amount of time spent on it, one would think that iambic pentameter was a characteristic specific to Shakespeare rather than typical of all Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry.  Why the Prof makes Murph say aloud whenever he encounters a feminine ending is a mystery since it repeatedly interrupts the flow of his reading. 

Murph and the Prof discuss Othello and decide he has a noble character but do not discuss how it is he should fall into Iago’s trap.  They discuss the vexed question of Iago’s motivation and decide that he is not racist but rather a nihilist who seeks to bring the world into chaos.  And they conclude that the point of tragedies like Othello is to make us sad, although the Prof adds that this is also the point of Shakespeare’s comedies. 

In a play like Taking Shakespeare which makes constant reference to a specific text, one would expect that there would be some similarity in situation between the people discussing the text and the text itself.  Unfortunately, it turns out there is no relation between Othello and the lives of the Prof and Murph.  The theme of their lives is unrequited love, not jealousy and evil.  If Murrell wanted the two to find a literary correlative to their situation, a more appropriate play for them to study together would be All’s Well That Ends Well – but, of course, that play is not as familiar to a general audience as is Othello.  Murrell never has Murph find any parallels between Othello and Murph’s favourite writer, George R. R. Martin, or his favourite video game, Bandwitch, that he explains to the Prof at length.  In any case, the discussions the two have about Othello are so general, that Murrell really could have chosen any great literary work since the specific focus on Shakespeare and Othello is meaningless.

A line of Emilia’s to Othello strikes home for the Prof: “Thou hast not half that power to do me harm As I have to be hurt”.  Because Murrell has the Prof repeat it so many times we have to assume that the Prof feels it signifies something important in the Prof’s life.  What that is is left completely fuzzy.  We are supposed to feel that Murph has gained some sort of appreciation for Shakespeare, but to what end Murrell again leaves vague. 

Murrell tries to enliven a play where his characters spend much time reading the lines of another play aloud to each other by setting up the notion of some secret in the Prof’s past that would explain why she did not get her Ph.D., why she has never left the university where she was an undergraduate and why she has lived in the same dingy house for the last 35 years.  To this end Murrell has Murph rifle through the Prof’s desk drawers when she is not in the room and later has him ask the Prof why she has clothes that don’t belong to her in her bedroom closet (after having searched there).  This sort of behaviour would certainly be enough for any professor in real life to put a stop to any further tutoring.  That should end the play, but Murrell carries on nonetheless.  Worse than that, Murrell drops this thread completely.  We never find out what exactly Murph was hoping to find or what the strange clothes in the closet are supposed to mean.

In only five sessions, Murph moves from being even more ignorant about Shakespeare than the average high school graduate to reading Shakespearean verse well and with feeling.  This seems to have been accomplished more by the magic of the theatre than by anything the Prof does whose prime concern seems to be having a cup coffee to hand at all times.       

             

Despite all these flaws, the play does serve its prime purpose well as a vehicle for Martha Henry.  She has appeared in so many serious plays of late that it is pleasant to be reminded what a fine sense of comic timing she has and how devastatingly she can phrase a withering remark.  The action lets us see the Prof at her happiest, most despondent, grumpiest and most playful.  The highlight is inevitably hearing her declaim speeches of Iago and Othello that she has otherwise never acted on stage. 

Luke Humphrey is an amiable presence.  Any normal guy would have been scared off seeing the Prof because of the growling, frosty reception she gives him.  Humphrey makes Murph seem brighter than the lines he says which is just as well since it helps make his precipitous improvement more believable.  Diana Leblanc suggests through Murph’s actions that he sees through the Prof’s gruff exterior to the hurt person underneath.  It’s a pity that Murrell doesn’t supply Humphrey with more to work with in that regard since it wouldn’t hurt for Murph to have a more emotional response to the Prof than the present text allows.

So do go to see Martha Henry and celebrate her 39th season with the Festival.  And see Luke Humphrey to celebrate his third.  Let’s just hope that the Festival can find meatier material for both to work on in the future.

  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Martha Henry and Luke Humphrey. ©2013 V. Tony Hauser.