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by William Shakespeare, directed by Des McAnuff

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

May 26-November 8, 2008

“A plague o’ both your houses!"

The Stratford Festival’s latest “Romeo and Juliet” is a busy, superficial production more interested in pointless stage effects than in character or in telling the story clearly.  This is the first Shakespeare at Stratford by Des McAnuff in his new guise as the sole Artistic Director after the resignations of Marti Maraden and Don Shipley from the triumvirate of Artistic Directors in March earlier this year.  Problems exist on every level from direction to design to casting and acting.

This “Romeo and Juliet” is a concept production built on two conceits that don’t cohere.  First, is the checkerboard casting.  Romeo (Gareth Potter) is white and Juliet (Nikki M. James) is black, but the enmity of Montague and Capulet is not based on race, since Montague (Roy Lewis) is black and his wife (Irene Poole) is white while Capulet (John Vickery) is white and his wife (Sophia Walker) is black.  So what exactly is the point?  If it is to show that the Verona of the play has conquered race relations but still has family feuds, this is an extraordinarily heavy-handed way to underscore an irony which illuminates nothing.  Second, McAnuff has the action begin in the present and conceives of the Capulets’ party as a Renaissance-themed fancy-dress ball.  However, even when the ball is over everyone remains in their Renaissance outfits until the tomb scene at the very end when, for reasons unknown, they all start re-appearing in modern costumes, except, of course, for Romeo, Juliet and Paris, who die in their Renaissance gear.  If the point is to show us that Shakespeare’s play deals with still-current problems but in Renaissance dress, this is a very awkward way to go about it.  Simply having characters in modern dress speak Shakespearean verse accomplishes that.

The design is unattractive and muddle-headed. Set designer Heidi Ettinger says in her programme note that she and Des decided that the ideal symbol for the play would be “A crumbling Veronese bridge spanning an eternal Italian piazza.”  Anyone who has been to Italy will have seen bridges spanning rivers, canals and streets, but where is there a bridge spanning a piazza?  It goes completely contrary to the nature of a piazza as an open space.  To achieve this look, Ettinger has removed all the stairways and the balcony from Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s set and replaced them with an ached bridge connecting stage right and left with an entrance at the crest in the middle.  Thus, she’s taken out a structure and replaced it with the same thing except that it’s less effective.  It and the entire surface of the stage are covered in what is supposed to look like red granite, but in fact looks like red plastic.  The centre of the bridge detaches and rolls forward to be Juliet’s balcony or the roof of Friar Lawrence’s study, but the effect is noisy, distracting and not worth the effort.  McAnuff is oddly fond of having scenery rise through a trap in the centre stage although other items are carried on and off.  This, too, is distracting and often nonsensical.  He has the fire of the Capulets’ party rise to centre stage so that the dancers burdened with costume designer Paul Tazewell’s heavy, over-elaborate robes foolishly must dance right near a fire blazing at floor level.  Capulet commands that the fire be put out, after which it smokes for the remainder of the ball scene as if people would continue dancing in a densely smoke-filled room.  What, of course, McAnuff wants, here as elsewhere, is the look of the scene whether it makes sense or not. 

It is painfully clear that he is unused to directing on a thrust stage because he unable to establish the geography of any of the scenes.  In Act 3, Scene 5, we find Romeo and Juliet in her bedroom on the main stage.  To “escape” McAnuff has Romeo go with Juliet halfway up the bridge at which point he has to climb down the front side of the bridge only to arrive a few feet from Juliet’s bed where he started.  In the tomb scene Romeo goes halfway up the bridge and uses a crowbar to pry open the sides of the upper entrance to the bridge supposedly to gain entry to the tomb.  But once these doors are open he does not go through them.  Instead he just continues down the rest bridge to the main stage again where the biers were all along.  Yes, plays involve the imagination, but the world on stage must be internally consistent.

As a director McAnuff brings no insight to any of the characters.  The results is reams of words spoken with little sense from the actors that they mean anything.  The one who fares best is Peter Donaldson as Friar Lawrence, the man who tries to make the “star-cross’d” love become the means to peace in Verona.  He is the only actor fully to make sense of what he says.  It’s too bad then that McAnuff interrupts his crucial speech about “grace and rude will” (Act 2, Scene 3), by having Romeo arrive just before the words “rude will” as if that was what the words referred to.  Lucy Peacock does her typical comic woman routine as Juliet’s Nurse, but she is too young for the role.  After all she shouldn’t be the same age as Juliet’s mother.  Evan Buliung would make a fine Mercutio but he needs direction.  He comes off as a kind of dildo-obsessed drunk or lunatic who incessantly babbles nonsense.  Not even the famous Queen Mab speech makes sense as he delivers it.  Steven Sutcliffe’s Paris is a cipher.  Gordon S. Miller’s Benvolio is no more than “friendly’ and Timothy D. Stickney’s Tybalt no more than “angry”.  Wayne Best’s Escalus is all bluster, a problem McAnuff compounds by covering the first several lines of his first speech with gun shots and sword play.  McAnuff has imported two American actors to play Capulet and his wife--John Vickery and Sophia Walker.  There are any number of Canadian actors who could play these roles to better effect.  Vickery relies on a plummy, artificial “ye olde Shakesperarean” voice and diction I thought had gone out with the 19th century.  Walker’s delivery is more appropriate to soap opera than classical tragedy.

That leaves us with the title characters.  On the plus side, both play the doomed couple as the teenagers they are supposed to be.  They both look and sound youthful and inexperienced in love.  Neither, however, digs deeply into psychology or motivation.  Gareth Potter is likable and naive but has a very narrow range of expression.  Nikki M. James, best known in the States for musicals, has a very small voice and does not know how to project.  Many will find her very difficult to hear.  Her initial intensity seems promising, but soon we find that that is the only note she has and that her expressive range is even narrower than Potter’s.    

McAnuff has had composer Michael Roth essentially underscore every important speech in the play as if the the poetry of the spoken words from the world’s greatest playwright were insufficient of themselves.  Not only is this insulting to the text and the actors but the sound is so loud it often obscures what’s being said.  Following the practice of some blockbuster Hollywood movies, as soon as the play is over the soundtrack segues into an upbeat rock song for the curtain calls.  How is that in any way appropriate for the conclusion of a tragedy?  But then how is such a superficial and ill-conceived  presentation of Shakespeare in any way appropriate for “North America’s Leading Classical Theatre”, as the Festival calls itself?    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Nikki M. James and Gareth Potter. ©David Hou.