Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✩
by Lee Hall, directed by Declan Donnellan
Stratford Festival with Disney Theatrical Productions & Sonia Friedman Productions, Avon Theatre, Stratford
June 4-October 16, 2016
Queen Elizabeth I: “Can a play show us the very truth and nature of love?”
To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Stratford Festival with has mounted the North American premiere of Shakespeare in Love. Lee Hall’s adaptation of the 1998 Academy Award-winning film written by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman is so well reconceived for the stage that you would think that the work had originally been written for the theatre. Declan Donnellan, who directed the premiere of the play in London in 2014, has recreated his brilliant production for Stratford and has drawn superb performances from nearly the entire cast. The romantic comedy is not just a celebration of Shakespeare but of theatre itself.
Like the film, the play is set in London in 1593. Shakespeare has had a great success with his Two Gentlemen of Verona, mostly, it seems because it has a dog in it and Elizabeth I likes plays with dogs in them. Now, however, he is suffering from writer’s block and struggles from one word to another to write his Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”, relying heavily on suggestions from Christopher Marlowe, universally acclaimed the greatest playwright in London.
Philip Henslowe, proprietor of the Rose Theatre, is desperate for Shakespeare to write another play for him because he is deep in debt to his financial backer Hugh Fennyman. Shakespeare has also promised a play for actor/manager Richard Burbage and his theatre, The Curtain. Shakespeare tells both that he is working on comedy called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter, but he has, in fact, not written a word. With Marlowe’s help the play takes shape as a love story.
Meanwhile, Viola de Lesseps, daughter of a wealthy merchant, is in love with the theatre and especially with Shakespeare’s verse. Despite her Nurse’s warnings she undertakes the mad plan of becoming an actor at a time when women were forbidden in England from appearing on the stage. She disguises herself as a young man called “Thomas Kent”, auditions for Shakespeare and Henslowe. While being found out as a woman is one problem, her forthcoming marriage to Lord Wessex, who wants to take his bride away to his lands in Virginia, is another.
Shakespeare eventually discovers that “Thomas Kent” is really Viola and the two fall passionately in love. Shakespeare secretly visits Viola and she secretly escapes to rehearse at the theatre, but soon enough Wessex becomes suspicious. The one benefit of Shakespeare’s affair is that it breaks his writer’s block and his new play takes on the theme of two lovers who are separated by circumstance. To Henslowe’s dismay but to Fennyman’s delight, Ethel, her pirate father and the dog all drop out of the play and the comedy takes its new shape as a tragedy.
Much of the pleasure of the play, besides its wealth of witty lines, lies in the extraordinary cleverness of the plot. The fictional affair of Shakespeare with Viola and her arranged marriage to Wessex is portrayed as giving rise step by step to the plot and even the language of Romeo and Juliet. Further, the device of having Viola disguise herself as a young man and having fall her in love with a man while in disguise deliberately calls to mind Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which he would write about six years after Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare in Love posits that in the Viola of Twelfth Night Shakespeare immortalized Viola de Lesseps.
In providing the fictional origin stories for two of Shakespeare’s plays, the play demonstrates how transient reality is transformed into immortal art. This delicious interplay of fact and fiction is mirrored in Donnellan’s production which makes us constantly aware that we are watching a play. Nick Ormerod’s set consists of two wooden three-story L-shaped towers linked by two galleries. On the ground level there are sliding wooden panels between the towers that allow set elements to be revealed or concealed. When the two-tower structure is shifted far upstage, the space in front can become a large room like Sir Robert de Lesseps’s banqueting hall. When the structure is shifted downstage a smaller space is created that can serve as a pub or the backstage of the theatre. Donnellan plays with our perception of the theatre by having the actors sometimes play with their backs to us as if to an audience in the onstage theatre, sometimes to us when they are rehearsing without an audience and sometimes to us when we become the audience in Shakespeare’s theatre. The brilliance of Donnellan’s direction is that he keeps these distinctions absolutely clear. The point is that we in the auditorium are, of course, observing the action all the time. How the actors stage that action changes our role as viewers.
In the same way, Donnellan places actors on the galleries and towers all through the action as if they are observing a play. Sometimes these observers interact with the actors as when Christopher Marlowe watching Viola from the sidelines hands her a prayerbook when she has to pretend to Wessex that she has been praying. In this play about plays Donnellan thus continually reminds us that we, like the onstage observers, are watching a fiction. Henslowe at one point says that how plays work is a “mystery”. The mystery of the theatre, and of all art, is that fiction and artifice can uncover the truth. In Shakespeare in Love, Queen Elizabeth I sets a wager, “Can a play show us the very truth and nature of love?” After seeing Romeo and Juliet, she has to admit that a play can. After seeing Shakespeare in Love, we, too, have to agree it is doubly true.
Under Donnellan’s precise direction the large cast works as a completely unified ensemble. He has inspired several cast member to give their best performances ever. Chief among these is Luke Humphrey as Shakespeare. The play views the Bard as passionate but slightly dim-witted. Yet he has a genius for writing poetry provided he is inspired. When we first meet him he is uninspired and therefore appears as far from the world’s greatest poet as you can imagine. Humphrey’s is able to reap the abundant comedy of Shakespeare-as-dullard until, finding his muse for life in Viola, the river of his genius is undammed and flows forth in torrents of poetry. Humphrey ably shows us that like any genius, Shakespeare is not in control of his gift but is merely its humble human vessel.
Shannon Taylor is an ideal Viola. Taylor fills her with quick intelligence, an ability to distinguish the feminine Viola from the masculine Thomas Kemp and a believably overwhelming passion for Shakespeare, first the poetry, then the man. Taylor makes Viola immediately sympathetic and although the play is a comedy in its overall shape, we experience Viola’s short delight in independence and her ruthless enslavement in an arranged marriage as a tragedy.
Among the many secondary characters, Saamer Usmani stands out as a charismatic Christopher Marlowe (1564-93))– elegant, conscious of his genius, gay without clichéd mannerisms and dominating the stage with every appearance. Brad Hodder gives his best-ever performance as Edward Alleyn (1566-1626), the greatest actor in England and one whose vanity shows he is well aware of the fact. As Richard Burbage (1568-1619), the actor/manager whose fame would later eclipse Alleyn’s, Steve Ross is imposing and grandiloquent but not without a sly sense of comedy.
Tom McCamus and Stephen Ouimette are predictably excellent in their roles as Fennyman (a fictional character) and Philip Henslowe (1550-1616). McCamus allows the bullying Fennyman to make his 180º turn on his view of the arts – from despising players to ecstasy at becoming one of them – comically unaware that views his have altered. Ouimette’s Henslowe in contrast is meek, servile and too desperate to give the public what they want to worry about its quality.
Rylan Wilkie steps out of the shadows as Wessex (a fictional character) and manages to portray both the humour and danger that his uncontrollable anger represents. Michael Spencer-Davis is wonderfully priggish as Edmund Tilney (1536-1610), the Master of the Revels, effectively the state censor of what could be shown on stage and how. Sarah Orenstein rises to the grandeur of portraying Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) making her both lofty, yet human, and all too aware that she is playing what is traditionally a man’s role and doing better at it that many of her predecessors.
The only two whose acting styles don’t mesh with the others are Karen Robinson as Viola’s Nurse and Tal Shulman as John Webster (1580-1634). While the rest of the cast follows the general rule of comedy in taking what their characters do completely seriously no matter how silly it may appear, Robinson tries too hard to make the Nurse funny and Shulman too hard to make Webster peculiar.
Though Webster is in the film, it’s surprising that Lee hall has kept him in the play since he functions primarily to set up a long-winded joke. We are meant to wonder why this young man is so ghoulishly preoccupied with gore and murder (which does not come off as comic), only to discover near the very end that he is the man who will later write one of the greatest and goriest Jacobean tragedies, The Duchess of Malfi (c.1613). Since the Stratford Festival and North American theatre in general have hardly accorded Jacobean tragedy the place it deserves – Stratford has staged Duchess twice, in 1971 and 2006 and never his other masterpiece The White Devil (1612) – few audience members will understand what is so funny about this oddly twisted character when Webster is identified by name.
Shakespeare in Love contains large swaths of Romeo and Juliet, and, as enacted by Humphrey and Taylor under Donnellan’s direction, these excerpts are so engaging and so moving that they outshine the full-scale Shakespeares currently playing at the Festival. In fact, one leaves the theatre wishing that Donnellan could direct the two in a full-scale Romeo and Juliet to complement this production.
In short, Shakespeare in Love is wonderfully clever play, a comedy filled like Shakespeare’s own romantic comedies with both joy and sadness, a mixture that makes the world depicted on stage seem all the more true to life. The play is said to be headed to Broadway, but there is no need to wait for that. Go and see it now.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Luke Humphrey as Shakespeare and Shannon Taylor as Viola; Luke Humphrey as Shakespeare (centre) and ensemble); Shannon Taylor as Viola (in gold) and the ensemble. ©2016 David Hou.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2016-06-05
Shakespeare in Love