Tag: Stratford 2019

Stratford 2019: Birds of a kind – a remarkable dialogue between the author and the director

Stratford 2019: Birds of a kind – a remarkable dialogue between the author and the director

By |

 

Members of the company in Birds of a Kind. Photography by David Hou.

“Is it really important to cling to our lost identities?  What is a life lived between two worlds?  What is a migrant?  A refugee?  A mutant?”

 There is an important backstory to the Stratford Festival’s brilliant and timely production of  Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad’s Birds of a Kind, which brings a remarkable initiative between the playwright and director full circle.  It was Antoni Cimolino, Artistic Director of the Stratford festival, and the director of Birds of a Kind, who first introduced a pivotal character in the play’s central theme to Mouawad, over a dozen years ago with the hope that a play could come out of it.   After a winding history and a hugely successful production in Paris, the complex drama which grew out of that gift of sorts, now comes home to one of its creative points of origin.     …

Read More Read More

An Act of Grace: Mild success at Ottawa’s Gladstone Theatre

An Act of Grace: Mild success at Ottawa’s Gladstone Theatre

By |

 

cast of An act of Grace  Photo Maria Vartanova

Things that don’t make for prescient, contemporary theatre: excessive swearing, pointless tapping and swiping on (turned-off) smartphones, the objectification of tangential women, or references to recent developments in North American golf culture. The Gladstone’s An Act of Grace by John Muggleton, directed by Venetia Lawless, unfortunately relies upon these signifiers of modernity in its attempt to construct a 2019-friendly farce. Though the eighty-minute romp finds occasional success in its pacing, An Act of Grace feels like exactly what it is: a successful 40-minute one-act (with an attractive, functional set to boot) extended into a perhaps too-ambitious, under-energized play. …

Read More Read More

Stratford 2019: Nathan the Wise, A Parable of Tolerance.

Stratford 2019: Nathan the Wise, A Parable of Tolerance.

By |

 

Diane Flacks (centre) as Nathan with members of the company in Nathan the Wise. Photography by David Hou.

“ I hear, I hear, come finish with thy tale.  Is it soon ended?”     Nathan the Wise

 There are moments of heightened intensity in the theatre when time seems to stand still, signaling to us that this is the dramatic kernel that distils the central meaning of the play.  

We pay attention to Nora’s frenetic dance of the Tarantella in Ibsen’s A Doll House because we know that her hysterical performance condenses the fullness of her situation.  The Mousetrap play-within-a-play in Hamlet stages in nuce the murderous backstory of the action, but it also supplies the hallucinatory image that the failed revenge hero cannot match to action.  And when Mitch, in A Streetcar Named Desire, tears away the paper lantern that obscures the sordid reality of Blanche’s life, his action is not only an assault on her flight to illusion, but a trenchant commentary on the whole poetic world of Tennessee Williams.   …

Read More Read More

Stratford 2019: The Front Page,a pitch perfect production lurching forward into full-blown farce.

Stratford 2019: The Front Page,a pitch perfect production lurching forward into full-blown farce.

By |
Ben Carlson, Maev Beaty. Photography by David Cooper

Chicago. 1928. The hard-boiled boozy reporters on the crime beat are sitting around a table, playing poker and wisecracking about the fate of the last murderer to hang before the electric chair arrives on the scene. It isn’t easy passing the time like this, running interference between the police and the mob, making stuff up, unless you’re lucky enough to get the skinny on a real story. And hanging doesn’t even count for the front page any more. …

Read More Read More