"the performance was wonderful, beautifully cast, magnificently played..."

September, 2004 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

After long absence, this Fall as a reviewer, I was once again at the Canadian Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, a beautiful spot with swans, bridges, rowers on the Avon, and flowers everywhere.

Over the years the festival has grown. Its season runs from mid-April through October, and its repertory group of actors nears a hundred and fifty. This season the schedule includes 14 plays, 6 Shakespeare and the others ranging from musicals such as Guys and Dolls to comedies such as Noises Off, with experimental plays in the smallest of its four theatres.

Many of the big-draw Shakespeare titles such as Midsummer Nights Dream and Macbeth are produced in the enormous festival theatre. The lesser known such as King John seem to be presented on the elegant thrust stage in the smaller Tom Patterson theatre (which has the loveliest location right on the river).

It was there that I saw an unforgettable production of Timon of Athens, that supposedly ugly duckling of a play that Shakespeare seems to have tucked in after he finished Lear and became benevolent in his four romantic plays of lost daughters and redemptions.

Reading Timon one is struck by the almost pedantic structure of the play — the first half with its three flatterers, three betrayers, and a bountiful, loving Timon, open-handed and open-hearted to all.

And then the second half with its disillusioned hero, bitter and alone, with patterns of three repeated in a different vein and ultimately with a dead off stage hero whose self-written epitaph is read amid the ruins of a war-torn Athens.

This is not cheery material, even if Timon does have some marvelous lines.

However, the performance was wonderful, beautifully cast, magnificently played and had the audience in the palm of its hand (and its members loudly applauding with their hands) from the moment it began until the moment it was over and one’s only wish was to be able to see it again in order to appreciate all the nuances of the production.

Peter Donaldson as Timon, on stage in almost every scene (and having probably as many lines as Hamlet does in his play) is so winning a sharer of his bounty, so openly a lover of his friends in the beginning and so bitter a hater of wealth and humanity by the end that the play throbs with emotion as strongly as it voices its ideas.

Set in Athens, but played in modern dress, this production works beautifully.

Three great white curtains at the rear of the thrust stage hang in folds, evoking Athenian columns and establishing the city. But they can also become a huge umbrella over a patio table, or ominously fallen, slanted, half-leaning, become a tragic backdrop to the fallen city in which the play ends.

The numerous scenes played on the thrust stage flow with apparent ease. Waiters can in seconds produce a banquet table seating twelve and replete with elegant dishes and stem-wear, or whirl in a massage parlor where one of the “friends” who has basked in Timon’s bounty, declines to assist him when Timon himself is in need.

In the second part, the pit in which Timon, digging for roots to ward off starvation and finding gold, which he by then identifies with evil and corruption and betrayal, is very functional, and Timon inhabits it with agility, determination and venom.

The cast is enormous, all well chosen, well trained and part of an ensemble that vocally renders Shakespeare’s play movingly while creating characters, everyone of whom, no matter how small the role, acts believably. Director Stephen Ouimette should be as pleased with them as the audience obviously was.

As Timon, Peter Donaldson is magnificent. His ability to create the two very different Timons the play demands, making the first honestly lovable, the second disillusioned to the point of despair, making this play, in which the character never reaches the understanding of others in a way that Lear eventually does, is truly a remarkable feat. He is the play but does not dominate the other actors, letting them too be the play.

The list of expert performances is too long to enumerate but Tom McCamus as the cynical philosopher Apemantus and Bernard Hopkins as Flavius, Timon’s faithful steward, deserve special mention, as do the dancers and musicians.

Unfortunately Timon closes September 26, unless the hearty demand for tickets extends it further. However, the tight scheduling, in which the Timon actors appear in other plays would probably preclude such a move.

The Macbeth I saw, however, runs through October and being presented in the large festival theatre, should still have tickets and is well worth seeing. In it too the director’s over-all guiding hand was apparent and imaginative, working well (except for a mis-guided sleep walking scene for Lady Macbeth).

Director John Wood has set the play in that misty past of Scottish history, evoked by colors of browns, tans, blacks and greys, lit by bright splashes of color when needed. His large cast swirls in and out of stage pictures in which each actor is where you want him to be, dynamically and effectively.

Surprisingly to this reviewer, who has seen innumerable Macbeth productions and has trouble not mouthing the lines, the director made new use of important but minor characters such as using the boy Fleance (Andrew Petker) who as a pantomime character first appears when King Duncan ironically praises the calm beauty of the castle in which he is to die. The child, with the two great globes of glass though which he peers, lets Duncan try them; later the child will briefly be a part of the drunken porter’s scene, and movingly will place the globes on the body of his dead father Banquo. All small but significant uses of a minor character and adding a note of poignancy to the production.

Another small touch to the three weird sisters scenes was the tiny fact that one tall witch was on a rope leash, and only touchingly made up the three.

But most magnficant was the staging of the scene in which Mc Duff’s wife and children were murdered, with an added pantomime child and with Macduff’s wife (Sarah McVie) forewarned of danger, but unable to do anything but wait and reassure her prattling eldest, sing to them a Scottish ballad, as she hides her own fears.

This scene in itself is moving. But at the play’s end, after Macduff has slain Macbeth, the mother, again singing, with all her dead children around her, is grouped center stage facing Macduff who has freed Scotland, but lost all he loved.

It makes such a moving ending that one spontaneously weeps and for me was a better one than Shakespeare asking for Macbeth’s bloody head to be displayed on a pole while the boy Malcolm brings Duncan’s idea of “grace” and “graciousness” full circle. Fine in its way, but this ending I found more moving.

In this production, I found the women and their casting more interesting than that of most of the male roles.

Which brings us to the absolutely marvelous Lucy Peacock as Lady Macbeth, one to rival Judith Anderson whom until now I had considered the greatest in the role. Peacock’s every word and gesture are a joy, her rendering of the “unsex me now” scene a delight.

In her scenes with Macbeth (Graham Abbey) her very presence seems to bring out the best in his competent acting and his strongest scenes were with her, topping his less well handled famous monlologs (“is this a dagger” etc) in which he disappoints in diction and the handling of blank verse.

In diction I found some of the minor male characters more competent than those in the longer roles, and although I enjoyed much that Macbeth did, found MacDuff (Michael McLachlan) better cast than Macbeth.

All in all, this is a competent production, nothing goes astray except the misguided sleep walking scene in which even the marvelous Lucy Peacock goes over the top.

Mainly, revisiting Stratford I found Shakespeare is being treated admirably with ensemble acting in both plays, although stronger in Timon, a production in which I could not find even a tiny flaw.

Stratford is lovely in October and this Macbeth well worth seeing. Midsummer Nights Dream also runs through October. Ontario is only a day’s drive from the Berkshires.

If you can’t fit Stratford into this season, go on line (www.stratfordfestival.ca) and get on their mailing list for 2005. You will be glad you did.