STRATFORD — The Stratford Festival’s new production of John Mighton’s award-winning Possible Worlds begins with the sight of a man’s naked body, dead in a pool of water.

The imagery is bold but not quite real. The lighting is dank, the soundscape ominous. Near the body, silhouetted in the water, is his clothing, evoking the shape and substance of what he once was. And then the corpse pulls himself back to life — well, at least, a sort of life. But there’s a questing element to all this as he splashes through the water and dresses himself in his soaking garments.

And if we’re not sure at this point who or what he is, neither — we suspect — is he.

It’s the sort of moment that can have us retrieving pop-culture references out of our own consciences. William Holden looking down on his own murdered corpse in Norma Desmond’s swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard? Or maybe Jeff Bridges struggling into a form of being in Starman? Or is this simply how my own particular world responds at a particular moment in time in watching the play? …

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Photo: David Hou.

STRATFORD, Ont. — For modern-day audiences, the most contentious moments in The Taming Of The Shrew come at the end.

That’s when Katherina, the fiery and rebellious spouse of the swaggering Petruchio, finally appears to be yielding to her husband’s god-given authority.

By this time, she has been dragged kicking and screaming into marriage. She has then been subjected to emotional humiliation, to starvation, to sleep deprivation by her new spouse — and doesn’t all this remind us of the classic interrogation techniques practised by today’s CIA?

Defenders of Petruchio may argue that he’s merely imposing tough love on a young woman whose out-of-bounds behaviour, furious temper and tendency towards violence have earned her the label of “Katherina the cursed” — that his determination to reduce her to a state of total submission is “done in reverend care of her.” But is it really that simple? Not by a long shot when it comes to the Stratford Festival’s astonishing new production.

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Courtesy of the Stratford Festival

STRATFORD, Ont. — There’s genuine pleasure in watching two veteran
Canadian actors successfully mining the humor of Oliver Goldsmith’s
classic comedy, She Stoops To Conquer.
So when the curtain rises at the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre to
reveal Joseph Ziegler and Lucy Peacock in warm and witty conversation,
their world of comfortable privilege further defined by Douglas
Paraschuk’s amusing country-mansion setting, you feel that you’re in
safe hands.

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STRATFORD, ONT. — We’ve arrived at one of the many great moments in Hamlet. It’s also an opportunity for us to take further measure of how actor Jonathan Goad is doing.

And now, we encounter a man possessed.

The playgoer always awaits this particular soliloquy with anticipation because it’s so important in defining the kind of Hamlet we’re experiencing. Goad, who has the title role in the Stratford Festival’s sterling new production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, doesn’t disappoint. His explosion of rage and anguish sweeps through the theatre like a flame.

But there’s more than anger here. There’s something unnerving about the way this turbulent prince inveighs against the “remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless” villainy of the uncle who has murdered his father and married his mother. If he could smash the Festival Theatre stage apart with his fists, he probably would. …

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Photo: David Hou

STRATFORD, Ont. — There’s a moment in the Stratford Festival’s new production of Shakespeare’s seldom-performed Pericles when actress Deborah Hay blows out the candles on a cake.

It’s a simple moment, but Hay — in the role of Thaisa, the young woman who becomes the title character’s doomed bride — gives it a softly luminous rapture that speaks volumes.

There’s a later moment when Hay reappears as a young maiden named Marina. Shakespeare’s melodramatic plot has placed her in a brothel where she is in imminent danger of losing her virtue if her keepers have their way. The latter include a gravel-voiced Randy Hughson revelling in his character’s scrofulous awfulness, Brigit Wilson as a flame-wigged madam named Bawd and the always dependable Keith Dinicol as a fastidious fop named Pander. The scene becomes a comic set piece as we watch Hay’s cunning Marina adroitly and amusingly preserve her maidenhood from the increasingly frustrated machinations of this scheming trio.

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Photo: David Hou

Let’s give the Stratford Festival the benefit of the doubt and concede that it was motivated by the purest of intentions when it decided to remount The Diary Of Anne Frank this summer. Unfortunately, the treatment that lurched onto the stage of the Avon Theatre Thursday night is wrong-headed and misconceived. It renders a profound disservice to a powerful and affecting story.For this, director Jillian Keiley must be held accountable. It’s on her watch that the evening begins with smiling cast members lined up on stage. They’re there to introduce themselves and the characters they play, to crack a few jokes and offer some more solemn observations on the material they will be performing. It’s all a bit lovey-dovey. It’s also misguided because its chief effect is to remind us that what we’ll be seeing is essentially make-believe theatre — as though we must to be cocooned in advance from the terrible realities inherent in The Diary Of Anne Frank.

So before the play even begins, the “fourth wall” which normally exists between actors and audience is systematically being broken down. Why?   But wait — Keiley is still not ready to allow us into the world of playwright Wendy Kesselman’s text. It’s now time for cast members, led by actor Joseph Ziegler, who will be playing Otto Frank, to invite us to inspect the “home” that designer Bretta Gerecke has concocted for these eight Amsterdam Jews forced into hiding from the Nazis. And again, it all feels wrong.

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Photo: David Hou

STRATFORD, Ont. — One thing is clear about the Stratford Festival’s revival of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s morbidly funny Cold War satire, The Physicists. It features a bouquet of outstanding performances. There’s a sly and knowing Graham Abbey, in a foppish display of bewigged and embroidered elegance, picking his way with cat-like tread through the role of an asylum inmate who claims to be Isaac Newton.

Then there’s Mike Nadajewski who cuts his own distinctive figure,courtesy of his rat’s nest mop of hair and the violin on which he keeps playing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. He thinks he’s Albert Einstein.Thirdly, we have the enigmatic figure of one Johann Wilhelm Mobius, a patient who can be reduced to trembling fear at one moment and driven
to murderous rage at the most. He’s the most troubling figure in the play, a man tormented by visions of King Solomon. He’s portrayed by Geraint Wyn Davies in one of the best performances of his career. There is also the smoothly malevolent presence of Fraulein Doktor Mathilde von Zahndm, the humpbacked, fright-wigged psychiatrist who has charge of them. Closer inspection reveals this to be actress Seana
McKenna relishing the opportunity to make like Richard lll. She also invokes James Bond territory, reminding you rather of Rosa Klebb, the lethal villainess of From Russia With Love; indeed all that’s missing are the knife blades springing from the toes of her shoes.

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