Foot It Featly Here & There
Saturday, June 28, 2014
From my Shakespeare Bible, Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human I found out two, for me, important facts. One is that The Tempest, Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer’s Night Dream are the only Shakespeare plays pretty well written from scratch and with little borrowing from other sources.
Two in that Bloom has had mostly bad
experiences in witnessing productions to date. He writes:
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, the two
visionary comedies – A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and The Tempest – these days
share the sad distinction of being the worst interpreted and performed.
Erotomania possesses the critics and directors of Dream, while ideology drives
the bespoilers of The Tempest. Caliban, a poignant but cowardly (and murderous)
half-human creature (his father a sea devil, whether fish or amphibian), has
become an African-Caribbean heroic Freedom Fighter. This is not even a weak
misreading; anyone who arrives at that view is simply not interested in reading
the play at all. Marxists, multiculturalists, feminists, nouveau historicists –
the usual suspects – know their causes but not Shakespeare’s plays.
Of last night's opening performance at Bard on the Beach of The Tempest I can comfortably assert that director Meg Roe (who has read Shakespeare!) has kept the politics of the play in the dialogue where it should remain and tweaked the play with gender, just so nicely as so many have from inception. After all in Shakespeare’s time boys were girls, men were women and all that was reversed in time until all we need now(and probably already performed) is a female Lear.
Of last night's opening performance at Bard on the Beach of The Tempest I can comfortably assert that director Meg Roe (who has read Shakespeare!) has kept the politics of the play in the dialogue where it should remain and tweaked the play with gender, just so nicely as so many have from inception. After all in Shakespeare’s time boys were girls, men were women and all that was reversed in time until all we need now(and probably already performed) is a female Lear.
In The Tempest, Ariel (described as an airy
Spirit by Shakespeare) is performed by Jennifer Lines. But there is a tradition
in female Ariels. But startling (to me!) are Trinculo, a jester, and Stephano,
a drunken butler. They are played as Trincula by Luisa Jojic and Stephana by
Naomi Wright. These two wonderful women inject into the play the second part of
Blooms epithet for the play “visionary comedy”. These two are uproariously
funny in their costumes, Christine Reimer, the Costume Designer (which are
pristine in the beginning and they, little by little fall apart) and their two
spiked hairdos complete the picture. Their shenanigans with foot fetish “monster”
Caliban played by Todd Thomson (who crawls most of the time and will surely
need relief soon for his poor back) are exquisitely done.
The buzz during the interval was about
Miranda, Lili Beaudoin and Ferdinand, Daniel Doheny who both have the joy of
youth oozing out explosively to the point that surely the powers that be at
Bard will mount a Romeo and Juliet next year for this pair.
 |
| Lois Anderson, Colin Heath, Manon Beaudoin |
Beaudoin has talent to spare which obviously
may have been inherited by her extremely funny parents Manon Beaudoin and Colin
Heath who before they moved East were the funny element (with Lois Anderson) of
Leaky Haven Circus. I will never forget the swings and the dogs.
Daniel Doheny may have inherited his
dramatics from his grandfather Uno Langman. Witness my portrait of the
grandfather.
But the play belongs to Allan Morgan’s
Prospero and Jennifer Lines’s Ariel.
Throughout this play, which is straightforward
and you really need not read notes to figure out what is happening, I was
mesmerized by these two. Morgan made a noticeable but almost seamless change
from the vengeful deposed Duke of Milan to the almost kindly forgiver. Morgan
combined body language and the diminishing of that assertive voice he is so
good at projecting. For me this was an acting tour de force paralleled by
Jennifer Lines.
 |
| Uno Langman |
Line, who has a beautiful soprano voice,
physically put her right foot up on its toes most of the time. She combined
this studied unbalance with an almost unnoticeable vibrato/shimmer. She was an apparition not quite here or there. She was
perfect.
As for the foot fetish shenanigans you
might find this interesting. I might want to sit down some day with Meg Roe and
compare notes.
I enjoyed the musicians (one was missing from what I can tell) who were very young. The violist, Marcus Takizawa I know from the Turninng Point Ensemble.
A Midsummer's Night Dream
I enjoyed the musicians (one was missing from what I can tell) who were very young. The violist, Marcus Takizawa I know from the Turninng Point Ensemble.
A Midsummer's Night Dream
