Bard's Cymbeline - The Thing Itself
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
My knowledge of Shakespeare until 1984
consisted in having read Romeo & Juliet and Julius Caesar in university. Previous
to that I had lived for one year in 1955 on Calle Guillermo Shakespeare in the
Nueva Anzures neighbourhood in Mexico
City.
Sometime in the late summer of 1984 I saw
my first Shakespeare play, Richard III in what was called the Vancouver
Shakespeare Festival. I had been previously assigned by Vancouver Magazine to
go to a an office (it was dingy and dark) on Richards Street
to meet up with a young man, 32 years old, called Christopher Gaze who was
playing Richard. I decided that I needed a genuine broad sword for the picture
so I borrowed one from the collection of Joseph Cohen. Gaze had a crown, a ring
and a purple cape. He was pleasant and I was impressed by his voice and accent.
To mimic the cape and to suggest blood I back lit him in red/purple.
 |
| Christopher Gaze - Richard III 1984 |
Everything was pleasant until I told Gaze
to look into my camera’s lens. It was at that moment that I first experienced
the talent of a good actor to fall into a part (perhaps adopt is a better word). Gaze
scared the hell out of me. He was crazed and capable of multiple murder.
Going with my Rosemary to the tent in Vanier Park
(it would seem that the Vancouver Shakespeare Festival was a prototype for our
present Bard on the Beach) I watched as men who were killed came back in other
roles. I was not aware of this Shakespeare tradition and I was most confused. Worse
still I felt disgusted when this hunchbacked monster with a withered hand
managed to woo and seduce the women whose husbands he had murdered. It was then
that I first learned of the power of Shakespeare’s words.
The play over the company came forward for
our applause. I was then that I first learned of a an actor’s ability to go
back in forth into roles. Gaze would bow and he would come back as the fiend
Richard III. He would bow again and Richard III was now Christopher Gaze.
That day, that afternoon, I fell in love
with theatre, Shakespeare and good acting. At first in those years good plays
and good actors were not the norm. Many plays seemed to be glorified high
school events. But that changed and I believe that some of us might take the
quality of theatre in Vancouver
for granted. Bill Millerd the Artistic Director of the Arts Club Theatre
Company, a friend of Bard on the Beach Artistic Director Christopher Gaze, has
amply contributed to our thriving good theatre. While the Gaze taught me to
appreciate Shakespeare, Millerd, slowly but surely, made me enjoy a North
American Art form, alien to this Latin American, the good musical.
 |
| Bill Millerd & Christopher Gaze |
Success sometimes breeds a comfort in
theatre goers to attend a performance, laugh and enjoy and then go home.
That may have been the case with Bard’s
Cymbeline whose opening performance my Rosemary and I saw this Sunday.
The 6 person cast of Bill Cain’s
Equivocation Anousha Alamian, Rachel Cairns, Bob Fraze, Anton Lipovetsky,
Shawn Macdonald and Gerry Mackay had only the addition of one more player,
Benjamin Elliott for Cymbeline. These seven played multiple rolls to such quick
perfection that the audience was in rapt laughter.
There are six players in a basketball team. The bench can be long. In the case of Cymbeline the bench was not that long but it was plainly visible so that actors, not up, were sitting in wait. With the putting on of a pair of glasses Elliott (also the sound designer) became the evil queen’s (Shawn Macdonald in over-the-top funny) doctor. With just a throw rag on shoulder Lipovetsky was the evil Cloten or Posthumus, Imogen’s secret husband.
There are six players in a basketball team. The bench can be long. In the case of Cymbeline the bench was not that long but it was plainly visible so that actors, not up, were sitting in wait. With the putting on of a pair of glasses Elliott (also the sound designer) became the evil queen’s (Shawn Macdonald in over-the-top funny) doctor. With just a throw rag on shoulder Lipovetsky was the evil Cloten or Posthumus, Imogen’s secret husband.
Such was the changing of these roles done
with expertise (sort of like Gaze as Richard III or not as Gaze back in 1984)
that Cymbeline became a raucous comedy. But then Shakespeare did just that, he made
us laugh in tragedies and cry in comedies. Cymbeline seems to be a bit of both.
While watching Cymbeline, the play, as the king, Cymbeline is played with just the right pomp by Gerry Mackay (and I was laughing) I
thought of Bill Cain’s play in a scene in Equivocation
Sharpe (Anton Lipovetsky) is playing Lear
dressed in rags covered in excrement. He objects and wants to be dressed in
purple. Sharp says:
Shag: What’s the problem?
Sharpe: I’m naked, covered in shit, and he
wants to to know the problem. I’ll do it. Just give me a costume.
Shag: Your skin is your costume.
Shag: Sharpe, I’m asking something new. I’m
asking you to go on stage – deprived of character, costume and sanity – to make
a living, breathing, flesh and blood person.
Sharpe: Any whore with her legs open can
make a living – breathing – flesh and blood person. Where’s the art in that?
You want me to play a knight, give me a sword!
Shag: Armor won’t make you a noble. A robe won’t
make him royal. Better jokes won’t make him more or less a fool than he already
is. You already contain everything that is noble, foolish, royal. Have the
courage to be what you already are! The
thing itself.
Sharpe: Which is?
Shag: Human!
Some might consider Cymbeline to be a
little farce, a minor Othello and yet at the end of Act II the milquetoast Posthumus
(played forcefully by Lipovetsky!) says this killer speech that must be read (beyond
being heard as Shakespeare scholar/admirer/apologist Harold Bloom) to be enjoyed.
The
Dian of that time so doth my wife
The nonpareil of this. O, vengeance,
vengeance!
Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd
And pray'd me oft forbearance; did it with
A pudency so rosy the sweet view on't
Might well have warm'd old Saturn; that I
thought her
As chaste as unsunn'd snow. O, all the
devils!
This yellow Iachimo, in an hour,--wast
not?--
Or less,--at first?--perchance he spoke
not, but,
Like
a full-acorn'd boar, a German one,
Cried 'O!' and mounted; found no opposition
But what he look'd for should oppose and
she
Should from encounter guard. Could I find
out
The woman's part in me! For there's no
motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman's part: be it lying, note
it,
The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving,
hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers;
revenges, hers;
Ambitions, covetings, change of prides,
disdain,
Nice longing, slanders, mutability,
All faults that may be named, nay, that
hell knows,
Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all For
even to vice
They are not constant but are changing
still
One vice, but of a minute old, for one
Not half so old as that. I'll write against
them,
Detest them, curse them: yet 'tis greater
skill
In a true hate, to pray they have their
will:
The very devils cannot plague them better.
As Harold Bloom in his
Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human amply stresses, we are who we are
because of Shakespeare. Had Christopher Marlowe not written anything we would
not be different for the lack of it.
Cymbeline must be
enjoyed by also seeing the cast in Equivocation. If you do not like accordions
(that is my case) then you might just want to skip Cymbeline (I would not!). With glasses on
Benjamin Elliott is superb. With glasses off there is, sometimes, that accordion.
And it would seem he has been giving Rachel Cairns lessons as she drones the
instrument ( I do not know if she does it with skill as my knowledge of accordions and bag pipes is limited by choice). But the accordion, with a
guitar and mandolin and I swear (a conga drum) is part of the fun. Do laugh
but read the play.
The thing itself will
hit you.
 |
| Lighting Designer - Alan Brodie Scenic Designer - Pam Johnson |
Addendum: In Equivocation Anton Lipovetsky loses his head. In Cymbeline (and I believe I am not letting the cat out of the bag) he does, too. Whenever I see my favourite Vancouver musicians play baroque music or I watch the Microcosmos String Quartet play Britten or in this case the cast of Equivocation and of Cymbeline, appear at the end with smiles I regret not being a musician or actor. I am unable to share a camaraderie that is so palpable. In playing Shakespeare they must know something that I will never know. I am jealous.
The Tempest
Are melted into thin air
A mole cinque-spotted
