Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
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by Peter Raby, directed by Miles Potter
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
May 27-October 19, 2013
“Not One for All”
The Stratford Festival keeps wanting to present plays suitable for the whole family, but seems to be utterly clueless what a family play is. Last year it struck out with the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, a nostalgia fest for baby boomers but unknown and uninteresting material for their children. This year the Festival has gone back to its old Plan A – adaptations of 19-century adventure novels – a nostalgia fest for baby boomers’ parents who remember the films of Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power. It’s a mystery why the Festival should revert to this plan when it led to a series of bombs including The Scarlet Pimpernel (2002), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (2003) and The Count of Monte Cristo (2004). This year’s production of Peter Raby’s adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers is the fourth time the Festival has presented this play and it proves no more successful as a play, much less as a children’s play, than it did before.
This year’s “Schulich Children’s Play”, named for the family that donated funds for children’s theatre at Stratford, is not a children’s play at all. The 700-page novel, Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844) by Alexandre Dumas, père, was not written for children, and Peter Raby’s 1968 stage adaptation, written specifically for Stratford’s Festival Theatre, was written as a romp for adults, not for children, as the content and level of discourse make obvious. The two aspects of the story that might lead people to think the work appropriate for children are the good-versus-evil plot and the story of the success of a young man and outsider, D’Artagnan, in realizing his dream of becoming a musketeer.
The details of the story, however, which Raby does not ignore, reveal complexities in morality and narrative that would respectively puzzle and bore most children, and indeed most adults. The young D’Artagnan (Luke Humphrey) may be the hero that young people are supposed to identify with, but Constance (Bethany Jillard), the woman he loves and who loves him, is married. For adults the situation of a young woman married to an old man (Anand Rajaram) is comic because it seems to invite cuckoldry, but cuckoldry is not a big theme in children’s literature. Besides that, when Constance is kidnapped and tortured, D’Artagnan disguises himself to sleep with the evil Milady DeWinter (Deborah Hay) to discover where Constance is being held. He also seduces Milady’s maid (Shauna Black) to win her help. Then, at the end, he goes to the evil Cardinal Richelieu (Steven Sutcliffe), for whom Milady was a spy, and is overjoyed that the Cardinal proclaims him an official musketeer. Luke Humphrey may look like Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in the 1977 Star Wars movie, but sleeping with the villainess to free the damsel in distress means he’s not quite so squeaky clean. The ending is rather like Emperor Palpatine proclaiming Luke Skywalker as a Jedi Knight.
Parents may also find Milady’s description of how she became a prostitute not much in keeping with “children’s theatre”. Milady may be a villain, but when the musketeers with allies and their own executioner corner her and give her an impromptu trial followed by beheading, our “good” musketeers look more like common vigilantes.
The D’Artagnan-Constance subplot mirrors the main plot where the Queen of France (Nehassaiu deGannes) is married to King XIII (Keith Dinicol), a doddering idiot. We therefore are supposed to feel automatic sympathy for her political and romantic liaisons with the English Duke of Buckingham (Skye Brandon). Buckingham wants to attack France to save the Protestants of La Rochelle whom Richelieu has vowed will die. The three musketeers – Athos (Graham Abbey), Porthos (Jonathan Goad) and Aramis (Mike Shara) – are the heroes who come to the Queen’s aid, even though their official role is to serve the King and Cardinal.
The two acts of Raby’s adaptation can be classified as lots of action and some talk in Act 1 and all talk in Act 2. The action, of course, consists of swordfighting. The fights directed by John Stead are easy to follow only in one-on-one encounters. Otherwise, when the three musketeers plus D’Artagnan take on four or more enemies at a time, all you can really take in is a whirl and clang of blades without really knowing who’s doing what to whom. There are so many swordfights in Act 1 that they soon all begin to look the same, and Stead, normally quite inventive, falls back on headbutting and slicing across the back rather too much in his choreography. If parents have taken their children to the theatre to show them a different world than the shoot’em-ups of video games, all they will get is a slice’em-up on stage with lots of dead bodies and several deaths that are meant to be funny.
After introducing the characters in Act 1, Raby crams all the rest of the plot into Act 2. Characters flit back and forth across the English Channel so often you eventually don’t know where they are. There is much political intrigue about saving or destroying La Rochelle without Raby explaining why La Rochelle is important. Set in the period 1625-31, the Protestant English want to save the Protestant inhabitants of La Rochelle, France, from Richelieu’s planned destruction. What is especially confusing is the fact that the musketeers fight at the Siege of La Rochelle on the French side while simultaneously trying to protect the Duke of Buckingham and the pro-Protestant Lord de Winter (Wayne Best), who is Milady de Winter’s brother-in-law. This is confusing enough for an adult. Whoever thought that all this wondering who’s-on-what-side would be interesting to children must not have read the play. The play ends with the now four musketeers pledging their famous “All for one and one for all” with the sanction of Richelieu without knowing why they are all celebrating with the man painted as the arch-villain throughout the piece.
The night I attended, many parents with small children left at intermission because they had fallen asleep. If, against all reason, you feel you must see The Three Musketeers, this is a good policy, first, because three hours is too long for a children’s show, and second, because even adults will find Act 2 boring. Toronto has had a dedicated Young People’s Theatre since 1966 and both the English and French companies of the NAC have performed plays for young people for years. Rather than digging out a worm-eaten chestnut from its past history Stratford, if it seriously wants to stage “children’s theatre”, should look at what gems these long-running companies have uncovered over decades of operation. If it continues to promote child-inappropriate fare like Musketeers as “children’s theatre”, the Festival risks turning families off Stratford to seek better children’s entertainment elsewhere.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Graham Abbey, Luke Humphrey, Jonathan Goad and Mike Shara; (middle) Keith Dinicol as Louis XIII. ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.
2013-06-13
The Three Musketeers