Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✩✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Marti Maraden
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
June 27-August 23, 2008
"Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull" (I.i.)
When Stratford last mounted “All’s Well That Ends Well” in 2002, I said I hoped it would not wait another 16 years to stage it again. This time the Festival has waited only six years. While the cast is overall much stronger than it was in 2002 and while the design is undeniably beautiful, this new production seems somehow lifeless and static compared to that of 2002.
The principal reason is the miscasting two crucial roles. The play in essence is about how Helena, an orphaned girl, overcomes seemingly impossible odds to win Bertram the man she loves but who does not love her. She has the innate ability to see the good in others that even they do not see, and she has the courage to press on with her task even when it appears most hopeless. The best Helenas are charismatic figures possessed of a kind of magic that, save for her beloved Bertram, immediately wins others over to her cause. In the famous photo of Irene Worth as Helena with Alec Guinness as the King of France in 1953, we can see just in the intelligence of her expression and the glint in her eye the confidence that will conquer the intractable king. This kind of determination and wit was present in Lucy Peacock’s Helena in 2002. Sadly, it is totally absent in this year’s Helena, Daniela Vlaskalic. Her over-emphatic delivery conveys only a general intensity that replaces what should be a wide variety of emotions. Needless to say, such a one-note performance in the central and most sympathetic role of the play deadens its very heart. Unaccountably, she throws away one of the key speeches to understanding the play, “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven”.
The second miscast role is oddly enough one that was supposed to attract audiences to the play, that of famed American actor Brian Dennehy as the King of France. Dennehy is currently doing wonders with the role of Erie Smith in the Eugene O’Neill play “Hughie” at the Studio Theatre. His fame derives from his interpretation of roles in classic American drama, not in Shakespeare. It’s embarrassing to see how compared with such young men as Ben Carlson and Jeff Lillico, Dennehy’s diction as the King is unclear and his ability to speak verse rudimentary. His habit of emphasizing the first word of every line frequently makes nonsense of Shakespeare's sentences. His important explanation of the multiple exchange of rings in Act V, Scene iii, is impossible to follow. Unlike William Hutt’s performance in 2002, Dennehy shows no appreciable difference between the King when he is deathly ill and when he has been fully cured. No production, even when as well-directed as this, can recover from losing its chief focus of interest and its chief authority figure. It also doesn’t help when the Diana of Leah Oster still seems to hail from deepest Iowa rather than Shakespeare’s Tuscany.
This is all rather too bad since all the remaining roles are so well played. Martha Henry gives a lovely performance of Countess of Rossillion, the depiction of a fully rounded human being replete with experience, wisdom and love. Jeff Lillico, in the extremely difficult role of Bertram is as ideal as one is likely to see. He shows the young man as affable and attractive in the early scenes. Once we arrive at the scene of Helena choosing her reward for curing the King, we see him chafing because of the set-up nature of the ceremony much as Cordelia does in the love-test in “King Lear”. His rejection of Helena seems to spring first from his desire to thwart what Helena and the King imagine as a foregone conclusion. His persistence in his rejection, however, begins to look like weakness since he is more willing to commit further indignities toward Helena than to admit his initial flaw. This view is confirmed by his choice of the braggadocio Parolles as personal guide rather than the King or Lafew. Throughout the military scenes of the play Lillico’s Bertram seems have something gnawing away at him, and Parolles exposure as a traitor seems to affect him as the first blow of self-knowledge. In short, this is the most complex and satisfying portrayal of this character I’ve ever seen.
As Parolles, Juan Chioran is absolutely wonderful. Clad as a zouave with their traditional baggy white summer pantaloons, elaborately braided jacket and legionnaire képi, Chioran sporting a trimmed Van Dyke looks like the very picture of egotism and conceit, a man whose soul is in his clothes as Lafew says. Chioran seems to channel his inner feline and is constantly posing wherever he stands looking as if he expects to be admired. He handles Parolles total exposure as a coward and traitor in the episode of the drum with marvellous aplomb and yet when see him at the end beg for help from his former enemy Lafew, he shows a completely broken man, no more the clown. Stephen Ouimette is a model Lafew, the prime raisonneur of the play, and makes me very much the male counterpart to the Countess. Of the major characters one problematic figure is the Countess’s clown Levatch, here called Levache. This is not due to any deficiency in acting on the part of Tom Rooney but rather to the odd interpretation given him by director Marti Maraden. In her director’s note in the programme, she calls him “our special guide” through the play. Contrary to this, we’re more likely to wonder what this character is doing in a play that already has so great a clown as Parolles. Maraden has him played so much like a reeking pigeon-toed tramp that we wonder how the Countess can suffer him to be in the same room with her. Rather than being a guide through the play he seems through his vacant stare to be off in his own world and the repeated gesture he’s given of pushing some invisible object aside remains as enigmatic as many of his comments.
In smaller roles Ben Carlson and Patrick McManus shine as the brothers Dumaine, making much more of these parts than is usually the case. Randy Hughson is hilarious as the Interpreter, who gleefully translates between the nonsense language of Parolles’ captors and English for the terror-stricken braggart. Michelle Fisk is a notable Mariana and Fiona Reid an excellent Widow Capilet, though one has to wonder why such an actor as Reid, who plays leading roles elsewhere, is stuck in two minor roles this year at Stratford.
According to her note Maraden has set the action in the year 1889. Why that specific year is so special is not clear. In France where most of the action occurs it was the year of the great Exposition Universelle where the Eiffel Tower was opened. Italy, where the rest of the action occurs, was in the last year of its war with Abyssinia. Christina Poddubiuk’s designs are beautiful and conjure up an era of adventure and romance, but they include no visual references to either of there events. The softness of Louise Guinand’s lighting lends an aura of nostalgia to the scene. Maraden’s direction is, as usual, highly detailed and the link between the Bertram and Parolles plots has probably never been clearer. When Bertram lends Helena a handkerchief near the start of the play, it grows into a symbol of him for her from then on. Nevertheless, the production is plagued by a certain sense of inertia. Aiming at an air of wistfulness, Maraden directs all the scenes, whether in drawing room or near fields of battle, at exactly the same pace so that this lack of variety plus our disengagement from Helena and the King creates an overall dullness.
Students of the play will want to see it simply for its remarkable Bertram, Parolles and Lefew. Others with less specialized interests will have to wait until Stratford can find a suitable Helena and King of France and hope that the other roles will be as well-played as they are in this production.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Daniela Vlaskalic, Jeff Lillico and Brian Dennehy. ©David Hou.
2008-08-15
All’s Well That Ends Well