My last Stratford show this season was also the one I most eagerly anticipated: Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart in the recently-new translation by Peter Oswald. It's gotten excellent reviews (so I am told -- I try to avoid reading reviews before attending any event!). Even more to the point, the show has consistently sold out, leading to no less than four extensions of the performance schedule, a feat I can never remember any Stratford show achieving before.
There are many factors contributing to this success, and some of them may be extraneous to the production at hand. It's a play about a very well-known corner of British history, probably better-known to most Canadians than the home turf of any of Shakespeare's histories. Unlike the Shakespeare histories, this one has several major parts (including the two leads) for women. It's not a very commonly staged play in Canada, either.
More to the point, this production was directed by the Festival's new Artistic Director, Antoni Cimolino, a fact which weighed heavily with me as I am a confirmed admirer of his work as a director. Furthermore, the show stars two of the current leading ladies of the Stratford company, Lucy Peacock as Mary Queen of Scots, and Seana McKenna as Elizabeth I.
Maybe my anticipation was built up too high. I felt less excited after the show than before it. My playwright's sixth sense was inclined to attribute this to the script, and that raises another issue. If that is indeed the difficulty, was it the fault of the original author (Schiller) or of the translator? Since I am not overly-fluent in German, I doubt if I will ever know for sure. I just felt that some of the scenes in the latter part of the play became overly-repetitive and needed tightening.
The concept is fascinating: the author creating a scenario which brings about a face-to-face meeting of the two queens, a meeting that never took place in real life. This meeting happens in the third of five acts, and since there was to be only one intermission I couldn't for the life of me guess if the break would be before or after that third confrontational act. The eventual answer was "neither". The intermission came as a literal interruption, a sudden freeze and blackout at the exact moment when Mary turned around to face her cousin and royal captor, Elizabeth. Was this the express intention of the translator/adaptor? Perhaps -- it's certainly a very modern, film-inspired conception. The strobe flash and sound effect of drawn daggers which accompanied that moment was theatricality raised to the nth degree, and for me was chillingly effective. I would only suggest that it is unnecessary to go back and repeat the 45 seconds or so of preceding action after the intermission. Top-flight actors are quite capable of taking it again from the exact moment after a freeze-frame effect like this.
Other events in the play also tinker with or elide together actual historic happenings and people, and this statement is probably true of every historic play ever staged, and every historic movie ever filmed. That's why I describe it as "a fantasia on history".
As Mary, Lucy Peacock gave a very subtle reading of a woman who had lost much, but not all, of what gave her greatness. It was very clear from the outset that this Mary had lost none of her indomitable will and spirit, however much they might disappear under her surface preoccupations from time to time. Dressed in the plainest of clothes she was still every inch a queen. The very rare times when her will temporarily cracked were among Peacock's most telling moments.
Seana McKenna had perhaps the harder task. As depicted in the script, Elizabeth is as changeable as the wind -- first coy and flirtatious, then merry and ironic, suddenly freezing into a human iceberg, and as suddenly erupting in a volcanic rage. McKenna's great achievement lay in making all these sudden transformations both believable and appealingly human. This queen was driven above all by the uncertainty underlying her every action, an uncertainty that truly reflected her uneasy and tenuous hold on the English crown. In an age where uncertainty is the nature of life for so many people, this was an Elizabeth of very direct emotional appeal -- an appeal grounded in our recognition of her as a reflection of some essential part of ourselves.
Among the other characters, Brian Dennehy displayed a range of subtlety which I had never seen from him before as the Earl of Shrewsbury, the last courtier to walk away from Elizabeth at the play's end. James Blendick made the most of several key moments as Mary's jailor, Sir Amias Paulet. Patricia Collins was the very picture of Mary's devoted, grieving servant and confidant as Hanna Kennedy (the real servant's name was Jane, but this was presumably rendered to Hanne in German and not switched back again in the adaptation). And Ian Lake was magnificent as the fictitious Mortimer, handling the complexities of his dual-personality role with finesse and sliding perfectly into terrified determination in his suicide scene.
My only complaint in the casting was that Dylan Trowbridge went too far over the top playing William Davison's scene with Elizabeth where he tries to get clear instruction about what to do with the signed death warrant, instructions which Elizabeth is determined not to give him. Trowbridge was simply too fussy-fidgety for the situation, whining in agitation like a fearful schoolboy.
Lighting designer Steven Hawkins came up with a splendid light-and-shadow maze which appeared on the floor during two scene changes, and which was carefully negotiated (including wrong turns) by Mary's serving women as they cleared away her furniture to make room for the next scene -- a powerful and inspired metaphor indeed.
Antoni Cimolino's directorial vision welded the show into a firm and coherent whole, pulsing with life and energy from start to finish. If it came across as a bit less than the transcendent experience I was anticipating, it was still a gripping and effective night of theatre at the highest level, and I am very glad I got to experience it!
No comments:
Post a Comment