The town of Stratford, Ontario, shares a name with Shakespeare's birthplace, and it leans into that hard. In 1952, it became the home of the Stratford Festival, which has grown into a Canadian institution. It runs April to October every year, and puts on a number of Shakespearan productions as well as other plays and musicals.
I've been to the English Stratford, a long time ago, but I'd never been to the one here in Ontario, even though I was born very near it, and even though it’s a half-day's drive down the highway from where I live now. So last month, I made a road trip of it with my 14-year-old. We did a tour of the enormous warehouse and archives, full of costumes, sets and props from decades of productions.
And we saw two plays: Romeo and Juliet and Cymbeline, both fairly traditionally staged. Well, it's not very traditional for Cymbeline to be staged at all, which is one reason I chose that one; how often do you get the chance to see Cymbeline? It's not a play I even know very well; I might have read it years ago, but I couldn't have told you the plot if you asked me a few weeks ago.
Romeo and Juliet is on the other end of the spectrum for me. I know it so well, I can mouth the lines to the whole thing along with the actors. I'm about three-quarters of the way through the first draft of Mercutio, my novel about one of the play's characters, but even before I started that project, this was a play I knew well. I rehearsed to play Juliet in an amateur production when I was 13 (it was never staged, but learning the part is one of the things that gave me my lifelong love of Shakespeare's language.) I've watched the 1968 movie many times (as I talked about in another recent newsletter), I've studied the play in both high school and university, and I've seen the play performed in various interpretations.
I don't think I'll ever get sick of it. Every performance shows you something different. Andrew Iles plays Mercutio in the current Stratford production, and I was so taken by his way of standing on the outskirts of the action, leaning against a pillar, an outsider looking in. Graham Abbey was one of the most charming Capulets I've seen, and one of the most terrifying. The audience seemed genuinely shocked during the scene when he berates and abuses Juliet; it was real and immediate.
As for Cymbeline, it was a revelation. Most of the time, when I see Shakespeare performed, it's a play I already know well as a text. I often find myself wondering what it would be like to first encounter Shakespeare's words and stories, as moments on stage, rather than moments on paper. Cymbeline gave me the chance to do that! It's a fairly complicated play with a lot of characters, plots and misunderstandings, so I was able to experience exactly how Shakespeare's speeches work as exposition, how his jokes and references do double duty as reminders. It was brilliant, and gave me a real sense of fellow-feeling as a working storyteller. And the staging was so cool–Cymbeline is one of the pulpiest of Shakespeare's plays, complete with a decapitation and a visit from the gods, so it was a thrill a minute.
My kid loved both performances, but especially Cymbeline. Although the theatres were nearly full both times we went, we were both really struck by how few people there were in the audience without grey hair, especially for Cymbeline. (Even as a 47-year-old, I was bringing down the average age quite a bit, and my kid was an aberration.) Maybe it was a consequence of going on weekday afternoons during the summer. The tickets can be pricey but there are frequent flash sales when the prices go way down; we got ours during the "Shakespeare's birthday" sale in April, and they were really affordable–and the hotels and B&Bs in Stratford are also surprisingly inexpensive. (It cost us twice as much to stay in Kingston, Ontario, in late January, as it did to stay in Stratford in July.) It's a lovely little town, with shops and restaurants, live music and even swans on the river. So if you can make it to southern Ontario for a show or two, I definitely recommend it, and hey, it's also got at least one teenager's recommendation too. He's already making strategies for "next time we go."
We've been (very slowly) reading Patrick Stewart's autobiography together, too, which has been full of interesting insights into the mind of a Shakespearean actor.
I've also started listening to The Man Who Pays the Rent, a conversation about Shakespeare with Judi Dench (by Brendan O’Hea). It’s a good one for audio, narrated by O’Hea and Barbara Flynn (with some appearances by Dench.) I love the way actors talk about the verse in Shakespeare, the way they use the length of the lines as cues to know whether and how long to react, how the rhymes (or lack thereof) suggest attitudes and relationships for the characters.
The first play the Judi Dench book discusses is Macbeth, which is this summer’s Shakespeare in the park production here in Ottawa, put on by A Company of Fools. My kid and I go every year, and Macbeth, which is always a great one to see outdoors. So I hope to catch a performance, although August is going to be busy for us.
If you've read or seen any great Shakespearean work lately, I'd love to hear about it!