#VIDEO PLUS BOOKS STRATFORD ONTARIO PRO#

#VIDEO PLUS BOOKS STRATFORD ONTARIO PRO#

Much of the play feels thin yet padded, a pro forma tribute to the House of Tudor but then there are scenes so rich in poetry and emotional detail they can tear your heart out when properly performed. This rarely seen collaboration between Shakespeare, at the height of his powers, and John Fletcher, at the far lower height of his, compresses a 13-year slice of Henry’s life, from 1520 to 1533, into what seems like a few days.Įven if you don’t know which passages scholars say are Shakespeare’s and which Fletcher’s, your ear will guide you accurately enough. Or at least, as “Henry VIII” demonstrates, they were lucky for a while. (One scene is trenchantly set among hair dryers in a beauty salon.) Especially in the haunting conclusion, a community prank that suggests the birth of theater itself, I thought about how acting was one of the first professions available to women.Īnother, for a lucky few, was queen. Though they are radiantly successful, we are always aware that the success depends on leveraging their limited powers. (The set resembles what you see while wandering the residential streets.) It’s an apt connection, not just because of the story’s inherent theatricality: The women devise and enact “scripts” of comeuppance for the men. Cimolino’s charming production is set in a town like Stratford at the time of the festival’s founding in the early 1950s. Ford that his wife is sleeping with Falstaff is matched only by Falstaff’s absurd fantasy that Mistress Ford and her bestie, Mistress Page, are gaga for him. But it became most obvious when the tragedy of “Othello” flipped into the comedy of “Merry Wives.” The absurd fear harbored by Mr. That idea came into relief, in both senses, in “Little Shop” and “Private Lives,” the sour Noël Coward comedy of divorce and infidelity. So destabilizing are female bodies, and so fragile men’s egos, that, even today, they must be kept apart. I left “Othello” thinking, oddly enough, about Vice President Mike Pence and other politicians who observe the “Billy Graham rule,” not allowing themselves, even at work, to be alone with women who aren’t their wives. Miller (a ringer for Tony Hale of “Veep”) gives us Iago as a hypercompetent desk jockey who turns, after hours, into a vicious, fake-news-spreading incel.īy the time Emilia points out that the failings women regularly stand accused of are merely reflections of men’s worse ones - “The ills we do, their ills instruct us so” - it’s too late for Desdemona. (Iago imagines that Othello has slept with his wife, Emilia, here a soldier in Desdemona’s retinue, not just her maid.) In a superb performance, Gordon S. Though race can’t help but be a theme in “Othello,” it is not the main one here Iago’s hatred, and Othello’s susceptibility to it, seem to stem less from each man’s response to outsiderness than from their common fear of cuckoldry. Under the artistic directorship of Antoni Cimolino, the mix of Shakespeare, classics, musicals and new work demonstrates the continuity of theater through the ages, as well as the continuity of injustice that makes it necessary. Even if the individual productions are often B-plus efforts - rarely as good as the best versions you’ve ever seen but almost always among the better - the variety and cleverness of the programming more than make up for it. Not only do you see the plays’ characters everywhere, but you also feel the world taking up the threats and questions of the works.įor me, that’s the joy of Stratford, the largest repertory company in North America, now in its 67th season. I had also seen how actors, switching among multiple roles each week, inevitably brought bits of each with them: a perfume of Prospero, an aura of Miss Adelaide.īut when you spend more time at the festival, and five or six hours a day in dark theaters, something else happens: The dark starts to leak. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.From previous, shorter visits, I was already familiar with the way plays in proximity start talking to one another, seeming to raise common themes and bat about their differences. Kat Stratford: But mostly I hate the way I don't hate you. Kat Stratford: I hate it when you're not around, and the fact that you didn't call. I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry. Kat Stratford: I hate it, I hate the way you're always right. I hate you so much it makes me sick it even makes me rhyme. I hate your big dumb combat boots, and the way you read my mind. Kat Stratford: I hate the way you talk to me, and the way you cut your hair. anyone brave enough to read theirs aloud? I assume everyone's found time to complete their poem.

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