The Stratford Shakespeare Festival: Classics

André Sills and Krystin Pellerin in Othello. (Photo: David Hou.)

The question up for grabs in any production of Shakespeare’s Othello is why Iago sets out to destroy Othello and those he loves. In the 1995 movie with Laurence Fishburne, Kenneth Branagh’s motivation for Iago’s actions was straight off the surface of the text: he was angry at his general for selecting Cassio rather than himself as his lieutenant and devised a revenge that would punish both of them; Othello’s wife Desdemona, whom he convinced the Moor had been cheating on him with Cassio, is merely collateral damage. It wasn’t an especially interesting choice but Branagh was still the best thing in the picture. When Frank Finlay played it in the famous National Theatre production opposite Laurence Olivier (with Maggie Smith as Desdemona), which was filmed in 1965, his hatred of the Moor derived unmistakably from the fact of Othello’s race. But the best Iago I’ve ever seen was Andre Braugher in a splendid 1991 production at the Shakespeare Theater in D.C.. His Iago caught Othello, Desdemona and Cassio in his web – to quote the character’s own metaphor – for amusement; he was a sociopath. Braugher was the first Black Iago in my experience, and there were also clear nods to the men’s race: you sensed his shock that Othello would prefer a white guy to a brother. That element was prominent in Iobal Khan’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015, which contained a number of Black characters, some African, some Caribbean, one Indian, and depicted a complicated hierarchy where culture determined class in ways that weren’t immediately apparent. Nicholas Hytner’s version at the National Theatre in 2013 was also about class – Rory Kinnear played Iago as distinctly working-class, and his racial discomfort with the Moor was mixed up with his perception that privileged men, one Black and one white, were looking down on him.

In the current Othello at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario (at the Tom Patterson Theatre), Evan Buliung plays Iago as something creepier than a sociopath. He appears to be allied with the forces of evil. Haysam Kadri’s mounting of Shakespeare’s most terrifying tragedy – that includes Macbeth – keeps hinting at the intervention of dark powers, through Siobhán Sleath’s lighting, Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design and especially Brian Dudkiewicz’s set, which places curved slabs of wood painted the red of dried blood onto the stage floor and hangs them from the flies, evidently to embody the jealousy Iago triggers in Othello. They take on a life of their own when Iago’s poison starts to work on the Moor and Sleath edges them with fiery red. It’s a good show overall, but these visual effects have the temporary result of moving the play closer to melodrama. (I felt the same way about the interpolation of moments when we suddenly see the other characters through Iago’s or Othello’s point of view – as stick figures Iago can manipulate at will, or as distortions of Othello’s jealous mind.) Still, Buliung is truly frightening. At the end, when Othello, Desdemona and Iago’s wife Emilia, Desdemona’s waiting woman, who dares his wrath by revealing what she knows, all lie dead and Iago, caught in his villainy but having vowed to remain mute, smiles inscrutably, you really have the sense that you’ve come face to face with the devil in the flesh.

On one of my first visits to the Shaw Festival, more than twenty years ago, I saw Buliung play Stanhope in a gripping revival of R.C. Sherriff’s World War I drama Journey’s End. As far as I can remember, it was the only time I saw him act until this summer, but I’ve never forgotten his complex, moving portrayal. Buliung’s physical choice for Iago is a stumbling military masculinity. He’s like a boxer who walks awkwardly through the world, as if he hadn’t yet reconciled himself with his own strength outside the ring. But when he’s alone on stage for one of his remarkable soliloquies or when he plays a scene with Roderigo (Rylan Wilkie), he drops the act and is clearly in complete command of his body. Roderigo, Desdemona’s rejected suitor, is Iago’s prime dupe, whom he absorbs into his schemes by promising to get him into her bed. Gillian Gallow has outfitted Wilkie to look like a dandy out of a Dumas swashbuckler, and Wilkie plays Roderigo as a man who really thinks of himself as a handsome dude who would charm the woman of his dreams if she’d only look his way. (It’s a nicely judged piece of acting.)

André Sills has a fine presence as Othello, despite an unflattering costume that constrains him and makes him look uncomfortably bulky, tucked-up. He’s impressive when he’s striding across the stage, and in the second of the two pivotal scenes between him and Iago, when Iago’s poison has begun to work on him and the first target of his anger is Iago himself – the moment when he commands Iago to “prove my love a whore.” But it’s in the last act, when his agony erupts out of stillness, in the scene where he smothers his wife, that Sills is magnificent – fascinating, richly lyrical. And torn apart: you really feel he’s killing some part of himself.

Krystin Pellerin, as Desdemona, is earnest, and competent with the verse, which is not a negative virtue, but her acting doesn’t have much color. Among Shakespeare’s virtuous women who are ill-treated by their men, these women we fall in love with, I think this is the trickiest one to play. Hero in Much Ado About Nothing is only the linchpin of the play’s ancillary plot. Hermione in The Winter’s Tale has so much dignity and grace that her maddened husband Leontes’s attempt to pull her down finally can’t touch her essence. Ophelia has somewhere to go – she descends into madness. But Desdemona just takes her husband’s unjust insults, never ceases to offer him her love, and finally dies at his hand. I’ve seen only a few really good Desdemonas (Maggie Smith’s is one). Jordan Hall is touching as Cassio, especially in the scene where Iago, knowing he can’t handle alcohol, gets him to drink and he winds up in a (not very well staged) brawl that loses him his lieutenancy. Jessica B. Hill is first-rate as Emilia, whose willingness to steal her mistress’s handkerchief at her husband’s insistence – even when she suspects his reasons – because she’s in thrall to him haunts her; in the end it’s Desdemona she chooses over Iago (and that choice seals her doom).

Othello is firmly ensconced in a patriarchal society, so gender-switching Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, is a very odd directorial decision. Chick Reid is a good actress, but another woman would understand instinctively that Desdemona’s love for Othello isn’t the result of some spell he cast on her, and would be more sympathetic. So that whole opening scene, where Roderigo and a disguised Iago wake Brabantia in the middle of the night to report that her daughter has been stolen out of her house by the Moor doesn’t read. Kadri does the same with Lodovico (played as Lodovica, by Irene Poole); but Venice wouldn’t have been run by women. This is one of those cases where the current trend runs up against the logic of the text, and it’s the text that ought to win out.

Sara Topham and André Sills in A Midsummer Night's Dream. (Photo: Ann Baggley.)

Stratford’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Tom Patterson Theatre) begins in muted elegance in the court of the Duke of Athens, Theseus (Evan Buliung), bordered with soft, cream-colored curtains upstage that ripple subtly in the summer breeze. But a globe spins lazily above the action, hinting at the intervention of both natural and supernatural forces: it will become the moon that oversees the amorous lunacy in the forest outside the city. Egeus (Tim Campbell) has dragged his daughter Hermia (Vivien Endicott-Douglas) into the court on the eve of Theseus’s wedding to Hippolyta (Ijeoma Emesowum) to lodge a complaint against her for ignoring his command that she marry Demetrius (Thomas Duplessie) rather than the man she loves, Lysander (Jordin Hall). Demetrius was formerly attached to Hermia’s best friend Helena (Jessica B. Hill), who still dotes in vain on him. The director, Graham Abbey, emphasizes the youthfulness of the four lovers: they sound like high-school seniors. The boys are belligerent to each other, but unlike in most versions of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy, this Demetrius isn’t cruel to Helena; he’s intimidated by her, which adds a new color to his continual efforts to get away from her after she reports that Hermia and Lysander have run into the forest to escape Egeus’s wrath. It also belies his threats to do Helena harm in the forest if she sticks to him and makes him as easy to like from the outset as the other three. Of the four, I’ve always thought Shakespeare gave Demetrius short shrift; he’s also the one whose head isn’t cleared at the end of the play of the love juice Puck, at the insistence of Oberon, king of the fairies, has administered to enforce a happy ending on the two young couples. So his love for Helena, unlike Lysander’s for Hermia, is imposed on him by white magic. (I assume we’re supposed to think that’s okay because he was in love with Helena before he changed his mind.)

I’m a fan of both the Max Reinhardt-William Dieterle Midsummer that came out of Hollywood in 1935, with a cast of Warner Brothers stock players headed by James Cagney as Nick Bottom, and Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film with Kevin Kline as Bottom, Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, Rupert Everett as Oberon and Stanley Tucci as Puck. But Abbey’s production is as sheerly joyous and as gorgeous to behold as any I’ve seen on a stage. The designers – Lorenzo Savoini (set), Joshua Quinlan (costumes), Kevin Lamotte (lighting) and Normal Studio (projection and video) – have given the forest scenes a Technicolor fullness that’s intimately linked to the idea of the fairyland magic. That is especially true in the bower where Titania (Sara Topham), queen of the fairies, entertains Bottom (Michael Spencer-Lewis), the “rude mechanical” who has been hidden under an ass’s head – her lord Oberon’s revenge on her for refusing to give him the Indian child she promised a dying devotee she would raise on her behalf. And also true when Puck (Mike Nadajewski), the mischief-making servant to Oberon (André Sills), leads the enchanted lovers through the forest in the dead of night, creating illusory obstacles for them that prevent Lysander and Demetrius from brawling before he puts all four lovers to sleep. This Midsummer is, among other things, a tribute to what the art of projection can achieve to enhance the visual qualities of a stage play.

By contrast, the local troupe of craftspeople who have gathered together under the leadership of Quince (now Rita Quince, played by Sarah Dodd) to rehearse a romantic tragedy they hope to be able to perform at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta are hopelessly literal-minded amateurs working from scratch with the improbable conviction that they can work up some theatrical magic of their own. Their play is called Pyramus and Thisbe, and it’s based on a story by Ovid that helped shape the plot of Romeo and Juliet. (Shakespeare probably wrote both Romeo and Midsummer in 1595 or 1596.) In a good revival of Midsummer like this one, the play within a play is one of the highlights. Abbey adds a piano interlude by Robin Starveling (Michael Man), whose real musical talent is an unexpected bonus to the presentation. Starveling’s official character in the tragedy is Moonshine, which the mechanicals have added to the cast because the script asks for moonlight. When Moonshine appears to the Duke and his entourage, members of the wedding party – which has been plumped up to include the sorted young lovers – keep interrupting his speech with quips, and Man’s Starveling takes hilarious, glaring offense at their rudeness when all he’s trying to do is discharge his acting responsibilities as best he can. Like Sam Rockwell in the Hoffman film, Aaron Krohn as Francis Flute, who is playing Thisbe in drag, plays his character’s final speech for its dramatic value (at least, most of it) rather than as pure melodrama.

Except for Nadajewski, whose clowning as Puck is tiresome, the cast is delightful, including Sara-Jeanne Hosie and Steven Hao as the other mechanicals and Rylan Wilkie as Philostrate, Theseus’s aide, whose judgment that Pyramus and Thisbe isn’t worth the time of the wedding party the Duke sweetly overrides. Spencer-Davis’s depiction of Bottom comes to life when he acquires the ass’s head (and, along with it, buck teeth that make him lisp). Sills and Topham, both of whom I recalled with fondness from The Winter’s Tale (he was Polixenes, she was Hermione), read Oberon’s and Titania’s lines, the play’s most poetic, beautifully. I liked all four lovers very much, but particularly Hill as Helena – I saw Midsummer and Othello back to back, and the quality of her work staggered me. There are two small problems with the lovers’ scenes. Jordan Hall’s occasional party-rocker shtick doesn’t feel right, since Quinlan’s costumes are late-nineteenth-century. And though the altered forest scape Puck has arranged to fox Lysander and Demetrius is an illusion, they don’t know it is, so it seems peculiar that they don’t respond to the sudden appearance of cliffs and rushing water. But these are quibbles; this Midsummer Night’s Dream is delectable.

Joe Perry and Fiona Reid in The Importance of Being Earnest. (Photo: David Hou.)

The Importance of Being Earnest (Avon Theatre) is pretty much a perfect rendition of Oscar Wilde’s delirious high comedy. The director, Krista Jackson, and her flawless cast apply a light hand to the text and honor the intelligence of the audience by taking it for granted that we scarcely have to be reminded that Wilde was a gay man who created the ur-text of camp. Jackson includes only two offhand allusions: the wallpaper in Algernon Moncrieff’s London flat is pink, and when the two butlers – Lane (Sean Arbuckle), who works for Algernon, and Merriman (Liam Tobin), who heads the domestic staff at Jack Worthing’s country estate – collaborate to shift the first setting to the second, they exchange a brief but passionate kiss. Nothing more is needed.

The set designer, Bretta Gerecke, underscores the bewitching artificiality of the play by providing a floral scrim that operates as a sort of frontispiece behind which we can see some of the characters start up the action at the beginning of each act. The costumes by Cory Sincennes are in ice cream colors. When Algernon (Carter Gulseth) shows up uninvited in the country, he wears a lemon jacket with subtle blue checks over a deeper yellow shirt and cream-colored trousers. Whenever Gwendolen Fairfax (Allison Lynch), whom Jack (Joe Perry) wants to marry, and her formidable mother Lady Bracknell (Fiona Reid) appear, their parasols match their gowns. This is one of those shows where you constantly want to applaud the clothes.

Jackson and her two deft leading men physicalize their characters more than the other Jacks and Algernons I’ve seen, and they make tiny sonatas out of the two famous eating scenes (cucumber sandwiches in London, muffins in the country). Ben Carlson and Lucy Peacock show what two veteran performers can do with the ticklish supporting roles of the Reverend Chasuble and Miss Prism, to whom Jack has entrusted with his orphan ward Cecily’s education. I’m sure I know the dialogue between Cecily and Gwendolen off by heart, but its familiarity in no way diminished my pleasure in listening to the playful wit with which Lynch and Marissa Orjalo dance through it. Orjalo, a beguiling Perdita in last season’s magnificent Winter’s Tale, makes a marvelously ebullient Cicely; I’m only sorry I wasn’t able to see her as Ariel in her other 2026 Stratford show, The Tempest. Fiona Reid is the funniest Lady Bracknell I’ve seen aside from Dame Edith Evans in the unforgettable 1956 movie version of the play. There can be no greater compliment.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.