Sara Topham and Ben Carlson in The Misanthrope at Stratford.

Two or three years ago, Robert Brustein took back the notorious position he had sketched out in his 1967 call-to-arms, "No More Masterpieces," with a wimpy apology titled, aptly enough, "More Masterpieces." (For some reason, he forgot the "please.")  In it, the former artistic director of the A.R.T. - who had given the go-ahead to one desecration of the Western canon after another for something like two decades - finally whimpered that he was "ready to concede that the postmodern movement may have gone too far."

Okay - thanks for sharing, Bob!  We'll file that under "Far Too Little and Twenty Years Too Late," as we trip off to see Diane Paulus's Happy Meal re-write of Porgy and Bess at the theatre you founded!

But what recently called Brustein's pathetic essay(s) to my mind was the sad response to a genuine masterpiece that's unfolding right now at the Stratford Festival in Canada.  David Grindley's sparkling production of Molière's The Misanthrope - in Richard Wilbur's brilliant translation, of course - will be lighting up the Festival's main stage through October 29, and if you're in Toronto or Detroit, or on the East Coast, or really anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere during that time, you may want to make the journey out to Stratford to catch it.  If you love Molière, you really owe yourself the trip.

For I promise you will never see a better production; indeed, this is the best version of the great French playwright I've ever seen - even the best I've seen at Stratford, which has a long tradition of exquisite success in Molière. The idea for this mounting was originated by Brian Bedford - fresh from his triumph on Broadway with The Importance of Being Earnest - and was clearly chosen as a showcase for two of the Festival's leading actors, Ben Carlson and Sara Topham (at top), both of whom have made reputations for themselves as exponents of articulate theatre for thinking people. Bedford himself has a curiously similar rep, only with a twist.

This distinguished actor is, I'd argue, also the most versatile and successful director at Stratford (which makes him one of the best in North America); I always schedule his production on the roster of my annual visit, and frankly I've never been seriously disappointed, even though the variety of his output has been stunning (everything from Waiting for Godot to Private Lives to King Lear - yes all of them strikingly good). But Bedford's method makes him an outlier in our current theatre; over the years he has known everyone and been in everything, and so clearly bases his productions on his own well of experience from past versions he's had first-hand knowledge of; indeed, I'm not sure I've ever seen Bedford direct a script that he himself hadn't already been in, years before.

This makes him the last exemplar of an oral tradition which is dying in the theatre - he is clearly passing down how things are done to the next generation of actors, just as parents pass down their religious and cultural customs to their offspring. Indeed, when you watch a Bedford production, you sometimes wonder if you aren't also watching the ghosts of Michael Langham and Tyrone Guthrie moving across the stage behind the actors. Bedford is, in short, the personification of everything that Robert Brustein was trying to destroy with "No More Masterpieces."

Alas, due to illness Brian had to step down from The Misanthrope (he had also hoped to play Oronte - as he often manages smoothly the double trick, as in Earnest, of directing a sterling production while also shining as its star). But the ailing actor left the production in good hands - director David Grindley is also an old hand at Molière, and he has replaced Bedford with the able Peter Hutt (whom we usually see at the Shaw). The rest of the cast, which included Stratford mainstay Juan Chioran and another Shaw alumna, the great Kelli Fox (the more-talented sister of Michael J.) left one with little doubt that the production would be splendid.

Still, I was slightly surprised at just how splendid it turned out to be. John Lee Beatty's set - all chandeliers and Boucher - was ravishing, and Robin Fraser Paye's costumes would have seemed almost too scrumptious if they hadn't also been so sly - Célimène floated in a cloud of cream and cherry, below, while Alceste stewed in a vat of pale green.  For the record, the production wasn't entirely "traditional" - it was subtly updated by a century, from Molière's own era to the decades just before the "deluge" that Louis XV predicted, when rococo manners had reached their absolute zenith. Thus the usual brittle chorus of seventeenth-century harpsichords was replaced by the mournful calls of eighteenth-century viols, and a melancholic, twilit mood always seemed to be almost in the offing.

A perfect cast in perfect costumes on a perfect set . . . but sorry, the critics aren't buying!

At the center of all this corrupting luxury, Ben Carlson's unhappily honest Alceste and Sara Topham's delectably flirtatious Célimène were clearly a match for each other intellectually - and a match romantically, too, which brought to the comedy's bitter finale a surprisingly poignant tinge of tragedy; I've never felt more for these two, or for the loss of their mutual love. Perhaps this was because Carlson proved a surprisingly humane Alceste - he was more exasperated than disgusted with mankind's hypocritical follies, an approach which generally worked wonderfully, although perhaps at the finish Carlson lacked the inner, puritanical rigidity which makes sense of his final ultimatum to poor Célimène. Meanwhile Topham - who has never looked more beautiful - was far more than just a vivacious coquette; she had a taste for snark, it's true, but her Célimène was also a brilliant wit as well, and one both rebelling against the strictures of her social role while understanding that at twenty she was still allowed a little room for child's play.

These two lead performances were wonderful enough - I'd even go so far as to say that Topham's was definitive - but Grindley's work with the milieu of these two mismatched romantics was what really made the production memorable. Generally Molière's misanthrope must make his way through a gallery of simpering fops - but here, he was swimming in a tank of sharks. Kelli Fox's Arsinoé - a would-be moral puppetmaster with her claws only barely in her gloves - was truly chilling in her hauteur, and for once her conversations came off as the calculated duels they truly are. And even Peter Hutt's Oronte - often played as something close to an idiot - was here a scheming climber, with an angry taste for brutality sometimes peeking out from under his silks. Given this environment, the weary gentility of Juan Chioran's Philinte and Martha Farrell's Eliante truly charmed - although it must be said that with an exquisitely attentive irony, director Grindley allowed even his villains their own heartbreaks and disappointments.

Indeed, perhaps the intellectual balance of this production was what made it most remarkable; sometimes Molière's brilliant point-counterpoint structures seemed to almost float in space before us as the characters conversed.  I confess I've never really felt that Molière, great as he is, was quite in Shakespeare's league; but this production made me almost change my mind (at least in the case of this particular play).

But alas, few of the Canadian critics were so persuaded - because, rather obviously, they'd never gotten Brustein's second memo, and were still in thrall to the first.   Their reviews were in a way heartbreaking, however, because they could tell how wonderful a show this was, but somehow they just couldn't admit it to themselves.  The erratic Richard Ouzonian, of the Toronto Star, for instance, confessed that the acting was "flawless" and the production "beautifully designed and carefully staged." But that wasn't enough, he carped - because there was no concept:

Except for some hats and scarves that Celimene tries on at her first entrance, there are no props. None. No one sips a coffee or drinks some wine. There’s no texture, nothing to tell us more about the world these characters live in other than that they’re well-dressed, bitchy and chatty.

And finally, in a line that might have been lifted directly from Brustein:

Before our eyes, it turns into a classy evening of museum theatre, something from long ago we look at and revere, but never really understand.

Ugh. One wonders, then, why costume dramas like The Tudors flourish on cable.  Meanwhile J. Kelly Nestruck, of the Globe and Mail, likewise half-believed his own eyes, and wrote:

"David Grindley’s production of The Misanthrope dares to let an audience find the modern resonance in Molière’s masterpiece, rather than thrusting it upon them with camera-phones and references to Twitter."

But then in an abrupt reversal he added:

"It neatly illustrates both the pleasures and the perils in such a straight-forward approach, however, as its solidness is matched by a stuffiness – and actors stuck in gorgeous, but stifling costumes that seem to wear them rather than vice versa."

Sigh.  Almost schizophrenic, no? Yet those were both typical of the press's scarily anhedonic reactions: "This is a marvelous production," the critics agreed, "only it's not, really, because it's traditionally costumed." It's enough to make you wonder at the superficiality of these people, and perhaps muse at the lock-step orthodoxy of the supposedly "revolutionary."

So please, somebody send around Brustein's latest to the Canadian papers! Then maybe theatres can continue to keep what's best about our theatre alive - until that happy day when Brustein himself is long forgotten, and we'll once again be allowed to have more masterpieces.

Shakespeare at Stratford

For the American theatre-lover, the Stratford Festival right now feels like some sort of theatrical Promised Land, just across Lake Erie, where huge casts (with live music!) perform complicated, challenging versions of the canon almost entirely free of the various strains of cant emanating from New York, Chicago, and the academy. None of the three Shakespeare productions I saw - As You Like It, The Tempest(at left), and The Winter's Tale - were among the very best I've seen the Festival do (all the greatest Shakespeare I've ever seen has been either in Britain or Canada). But all three kept me engaged with their ideas, emotion, and, to be honest, old-fashioned staging prowess - and I left seeing at least one of the plays (As You Like It) in a new light. I'm not sure how America lost its way, but after this and my recent trip to London, I'm beginning to wonder why, exactly, Americans have such a problem producing classical theatre.

Part of that problem, of course, is that in the States we think of classical theatre as "a problem." How are we going to save it? is the constant cry, which of course inevitably leads to surgical solutions which flirt with killing the patient.

Compare to Stratford, where over and over again, I was struck by how the actors - speaking lines that are literally four hundred years old - easily connected with the audience as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As if that connection were a simple thing - obvious, even.

I suppose the reasons for this miracle are myriad. In Canada, the connection between acting for the stage and acting for the screen was never severed, as it was here. The Canadian educational culture likewise hangs onto the rudder of tradition - kids still learn Shakespeare in Canada; I'll never forget watching The Taming of the Shrew with 1500 high schoolers in the Festival Theatre and realizing they were catching every joke, following every line.

And somehow Canadians aren't paralyzed the way Americans are in the cross-hairs of puritanism and prurience, and thus are more easy-going about the body (and their own humanity); in the Stratford A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, for example, the Roman statues sported hilariously huge schlongs, and I remember in a Molière production a decade ago, a woman nonchalantly breast-fed her baby in the background; bare bums, bare boobs, and full frontal have crossed Stratford stages, and in an earlier Tempest, Caliban even completed his self-humiliation (on the line "Come, kiss!") by burying his face in Stephano's butt. (The audience just went "Ewwww!" and the show went on.) Even this year, Touchstone groped Audrey (to her bemusement) in As You Like It, and various nookies were tickled in Dangerous Liaisons without anyone batting an eye; the evil Diane Paulus would have no sway over these people.

Of course a deeper factor at work is simple experience; Christopher Plummer, who essayed Prospero this season, tore through several Shakespearean leads at Stratford in the 60's. Ben Carlson, this year's Leontes, has already done Brutus and Hamlet; when Lucy Peacock galumphed onstage as Audrey, I suddenly realized I'd first seen her at Stratford in 1988, as Helena (she's been there most years since). Other veterans abounded, including Tony-winner Brent Carver (one of the few actors ever to triumph as Hamlet, Tevye, and the Pirate King), Martha Henry, the great Seana McKenna, Tom McCamus, John Vickery, and Geraint Wyn Davies, while a "new" (or at least "newish") generation - including Dion Johnstone, Sarah Topham, Yanna McIntosh, and Bruce Dow - began to take pride of place in leading (or larger) roles. That's another joy of attending Stratford, btw - unlike in the tiny, faux "repertory" company at the A.R.T., you can actually see actors arrive, mature, achieve greatness, and move on at Statford.



Ben Carlson sees the errors of his ways too late in The Winter's Tale.

But back to the productions themselves. All successfully integrated what you might call "mass appeal" with sophisticated insights. Marti Maraden's Winter's Tale was the most traditional of the three. Maraden didn't try to "solve" the play's central problem - how to explain the sudden, psychotic jealousy of its protagonist, Leontes - but instead focused on subtly tying together the tragic and comic touches of this famously experimental play into a tone that pretty much worked throughout (believe it or not). She was helped by strong performances from Yanna McIntosh as the victimized Hermione, Seana McKenna (of course) as a subtly funny Paulina, and a consummately wry turn from Tom Rooney as the thieving Autolycus. I didn't quite buy lead Ben Carlson (above) as the haunted, vulpine Leontes of the first half - but his repentance in the second half proved quite moving; this was one Winter's Tale in which the restoration of the hero's happiness felt truly earned.


Brent Carver as Jacques pops right out of As You Like It.

Des McAnuff's almost-overstuffed production of As You Like It, by way of contrast, took a strikingly new perspective on its text: McAnuff seemed to approach the play not as a roundelay of romantic engagements but rather as a study in disengagement. Indeed, the avatar of the production was not Rosalind at all, but rather Brent Carver's Jacques, who at one point popped right out of the set design (above) as if to impress on us his importance. And Carver was an unusual Jacques, to boot - hardly dyspeptic or even particularly depressed, he was instead an utterly disinterested intellectual, as well as a dead ringer for René Magritte's famous Son of Man (at left - that apple made an appearance in the production, too).

At first I resisted this conceptual gambit, I admit - Magritte's imagery makes for rather a chill Forest of Arden - but it grew on me as the play progressed; for Magritte, that great questioner of all appearances (including, of course, the appearance of love) is not so far in spirit from the questioning spirit animating almost everyone in the play at some point. If McAnuff had managed to somehow conjure a real tension between his vision for Jacques and Shakespeare's vision of Rosalind, he might have come up with an As You Like It for the history books. But alas, he had a bright, clever, but somewhat mechanical Rosalind in Andrea Runge, and if no one in Arden is believably in love, there's not much to really question, is there. Still, there was good character work around the edges of the show, not just from Carver but also from Lucy Peacock (a definitive Audrey, frankly), Cara Ricketts (a mischievous Celia) and Randy Hughson (a delightfully droll Corin). And the design team had clearly gone into overdrive on this one, producing one striking image after another (below).


A cold, but beautiful, Forest of Arden in As You Like It.

Finally, there was the production that probably was responsible for bringing the crowds back to Stratford this year (the weekend I attended, virtually everything was sold out): The Tempest, starring the eighty-year-old Christopher Plummer as Prospero. And I'm here to report that, yes, Mr. Plummer is still a consummate stage magician, although on the night I attended he was clearly husbanding his energies for his big moments (which including a memorable "Ye elves of hills" and a quietly heartbreaking "Please you, draw near"). Elsewhere, a deft touch was consistently in evidence - his was a crustily witty Prospero, and one designed to make light of the role's latterday revision into colonial oppressor, even though director McAnuff seemed most interested in the political aspects of the play (his Miranda, Trish Lindstrom, was a kind of sturdy, knockabout utopian).

This dodging of political correctness was all the more unusual in that McAnuff had cast an African-American, Dion Johnstone (one of a rising number of actors of color at Stratford these days) as Caliban (right), and an Asian woman, Julyana Soelyistyo, as Ariel (at top). These choices didn't seem to translate into an aesthetic of identity politics, however - as they would almost inevitably in America. Instead, Johnstone's Caliban was depicted not as sentimental colonial victim but as something close to Shakespeare's terrible vision - a flawed creature both power-hungry and yet eager to serve somebody as slave. (Today we often forget that Caliban has no vision of "freedom," as Ariel does; he simply wants to trade Prospero for Stephano.) Johnstone was close to an ideal Caliban, I thought, and while Soelyisto was hardly a musical Ariel, she was a dazzling acrobatic one; her opening gambit - "swimming" some thirty feet straight down from the top of the Festival Theatre to the stage, to retrieve Prospero's magic book from the ocean floor - was one stage image I will always remember.

Other moments of literal magic dotted the show (although the design was otherwise almost too restrained), but there were gaps in the acting among the courtiers that held the production back from greatness. And while Bruce Dow made a rather originally simpering - and obviously gay - Trinculo, Geraint Wyn Davies offered only a solid, rather than an inspired, Stephano (he didn't seem quite sure how to play off Dow, who therefore simply chewed the scenery, albeit with consummate skill). Still, this was a Tempest of uncommon clarity and depth - in which McAnuff delineated cleanly and beautifully the recurrent motif of power struggle that serves as the spine of this exquisitely meditative play. I'm not sure when I'll see its like again.

A year to remember at Stratford

I'm back from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, which is enjoying its strongest season in years. The six productions I caught were all good to very good, although it was Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (above), and a splendidly-produced Peter Pan that brushed greatness rather than the widely-touted Christopher Plummer Tempest (its most stunning image - Ariel retrieving Prospero's book from the depths of the sea - at left). What was clear from the eight productions my party saw was that new artistic director Des McAnuff was, indeed, the right choice to head the festival; to be honest, I can't remember Stratford ever being quite this consistent (but then we missed its apparent high point - a new play by Michel Tremblay - as well as its two bombs, King of Thieves and Two Gentlemen of Verona). Even the productions which I disagreed with (like McAnuff's As You Like It, at top) left me thinking seriously about their texts; more to follow later this week.