Stratford and the Shaw Festival I: Shakespeare

From left: André Sills as Polixenes, Sara Topham as Hermione, and Graham Abbey as Leontes with members of the company of The Winter's Tale. (Photo: David House.)

Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale is one of the three or four plays I cherish most, and the Canada’s Stratford Festival hits a high mark with Antoni Cimolino’s production at the Tom Patterson Theatre. Cimolino has announced that he will step down from the artistic directorship of the company after one more season, and his Winter’s Tale is so beautiful from start to finish that you can’t help thinking this is the show he would like to be remembered for. He’s staged it on a simple set that the designer, Douglas Paraschuk, has enriched, scene to scene, with lyrical details and Michael Walton has lit exquisitely. One of the most poignant examples is the famous final scene. Paulina (Yanna McIntosh) leads the King of Sicilia, Leontes (Graham Abbey), who has been reunited with his childhood friend Polixenes (André Sills), his former ambassador Camillo (Tom Rooney) and his long-lost daughter Perdita (Marissa Orjalo) into a secret room. There, she tells them all, she has had a sculptor create an astonishingly lifelike statue of Leontes’s queen Hermione (Sara Topham), supposedly dead these sixteen years while Leontes, under Paulina’s guidance, has done penance for the grievous wrongs he committed against her, Polixenes and Perdita (then just an infant). The stage is unilluminated except for three handheld lanterns, so the statue is revealed suddenly, the lantern light painting the darkness. When Paulina works her magic and Hermione moves, the effect is so subtle that at first you wonder if you really saw what you think you saw.

All Shook Up: Grooving on the Elvis Presley Jukebox

Ryan Mac and the company of All Shook Up. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

The current production of All Shook Up, Joe DiPietro’s parodic jukebox musical, at the Goodspeed Opera House is a homecoming of sorts, since the original version, directed by Christopher Ashley, began there in 2004 before opening on Broadway the following year. It never really caught on in New York; it ran for five months and then toured the country in 2006 and 2007. Seeing the show for the first time in its revival at the Goodspeed, I honestly can’t imagine why it wasn’t a hit from the outset. I can’t say, of course, what the current director and choreographer, Daniel Goldstein and Byron Easley, have brought to the show, but the material is charming and the production is inspiriting. The twenty-five songs were all recorded by Elvis Presley (I recognized most but not quite all of them). The musical revamps the low-budget rock ‘n’ roll movie musicals of the fifties like Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock starring Alan Freed, the DJ credited with popularizing rock. (Freed is also the main character of the vivid 1978 film American Hot Wax, where he’s played, memorably, by Tim McIntire.)

Rarely Revisited: Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love

Vincent Randazzo and Avanthika Srinivasan in The Triumph of Love. (Photo: Liza Voll.)

Pierre de Marivaux was the most important French playwright of the eighteenth century – that is, of the second half of the Neoclassical period; Molière and Racine ruled the French theatre of the first half. Yet whereas Molière has never been out of fashion and Racine’s Phaedra has been kept alive (though more in the form of revisions and adaptations than through productions of the actual text), theatre companies stopped performing Marivaux almost entirely for many years. Rare as productions of English Restoration comedies are, until perhaps thirty years ago they were more frequent than revivals of The Triumph of Love and The Game of Love and Chance, Marivaux’s most famous plays. (He was, in fact, extremely prolific.) The translators and directors who rediscovered him were struck by how modern these hybrids of high and romantic comedy are, as was the marvelous English filmmaker Clare Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci’s wife, who made a magical movie version of The Triumph of Love with postmodern touches in 2001 starring Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw. But that doesn’t mean that Marivaux has exactly returned to the repertory. It’s still unusual to find a theatre with the courage to attempt his explorations of the tension between love and reason, which play with ideas from both Shakespeare and the Restoration masters Congreve and Wycherley and are witty, cerebral and demanding in their use of language. The movie of The Triumph of Love is the only version of the play I’ve ever seen, so I was sure not to miss the one that just opened at Boston’s Huntington Theatre. (It closes April 6.)

London Tide: Dickens and Brecht

The cast of London Tide at the National Theatre, London. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

As I think is often the case with the iconic nineteenth-century realists, Charles Dickens’s style has never fitted snugly into the official definition of realism. It’s realism embellished, realism plus. In his characters, especially the most memorable ones, the qualities that delineate them, like Miss Havisham’s desire for vengeance against the male sex in Great Expectations and Mr. Micawber’s eternal optimism in David Copperfield, are so exaggerated that the characters become metaphors for those qualities. Dickens’s genius for inventing imaginative visual symbols that sit alongside the characters – for Miss Havisham, the stale, mice-ridden wedding cake and the clock stopped at the moment when her intended groom abandoned her at the altar – enhances the process, lending the stories the aura of enchantment, which goes along with the author’s predilection for moral fables. What situates him in the realm of realism is a combination of his abundant love of detail and his psychological insight, particularly in the passages that elaborate the experience of a feeling or the nature of a behavior. Those are the moments in his novels when the abstract is transformed into the specific, which is the way realism works. That transformation is the midpoint between abstraction and universality: if the writer has rendered the general as an image so precise and layered that we can recognize it from our own experience, then we can see straight through its replication of real life to a profound truth. If you try to boil down Dickens’s approach to simple caricature, you can make him sound like it’s linked to what Brecht did later in his plays, but it’s the opposite – he’s not using exaggeration to distance his readers but to draw us in.

This distinction occurred to me while I was watching Ian Rickson’s Brechtian production for the National Theatre of London Tide, which Ben Power has adapted from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Our Mutual Friend is one of the writer’s more obscure works and one of the most fascinating. It showcases common vices that take up residence in our blood: greed, jealousy, ambition and pride. We struggle against them, unless we succumb to them and become their agents, as do a number of the novel’s characters. It’s also about the corrupt values of an entrenched class society that reinforces those vices. When it appears that John Harmon, the estranged only son of a London rubbish magnate, has been drowned in the Thames River, the fortune he would have inherited goes instead to the millionaire’s loyal servants, the Boffins. They are generous enough to invite the heir’s intended bride, Bella Wilfer, who comes from a poor family, to move in with them and share their wealth. She is happy to do so; she never met her fiancé – their marriage was arranged by the millionaire – but now she feels abruptly disenfranchised, and she loves the idea of being rich. The complication is that Harmon isn’t really dead; the corpse that has turned up in the tide is of another young man bearing Harmon’s identifying papers. Liberated from the manipulations of an unkind father, Harmon takes another name, John Rokesmith, then secures the post of secretary to the Boffins so he can observe Bella. And he falls in love with her. So he sets a test to see whether she can get past her attraction to money if she sees at first hand how damaging it can be.

Clare Peploe: All for Love

Mira Sorvino and Jay Rodan in The Triumph of Love (2001).

“One can do almost anything for love,” the aging art historian Basil Sharp (Sebastian Shaw) tells his dearest friend, the émigré English photographer Katherine (Jacqueline Bisset), near the end of Clare Peploe’s 1987 film High Season. Katherine is living on a Greek island with her thirteen-year-old daughter Chloe (Ruby Baker), but she’s broke and in danger of losing her house. Her one chance of achieving solvency is to sell a vase Sharpie gave her some years ago to a Greco-English art dealer, Konstantinis (Robert Stephens), who knows he can sell it at an exorbitant price; the trick is to get it out of Greece, which has famously declared a moratorium on the removal of national treasures. So Katherine begs Sharpie to betray his professional ethics and certify the vase a fake. The line I’ve quoted above is his justification for agreeing to do so – though, as with everything else in this vibrant, hilarious farce (which Peploe wrote with her brother Mark), there’s more to it than meets the eye.

“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you”: Our Town and Another Day’s Begun

Eric Stoltz and Penelope Ann Miller in Gregory Mosher's production of Our Town, 1989.

I’ve been living with Our Town for more than half a century, so I was startled to discover, in the interviews Howard Sherman conducted with (mostly) actors and directors for his new book Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, that so many theatre people were unfamiliar with the play when they signed on to participate in contemporary productions of it. I encountered Our Town in a literature class during my senior year of high school, and I recall vividly sitting in the front row, rapt, as my teacher read the third act out loud – and struggling, probably pathetically, to hide my tears as Emily, who has just died in childbirth, returns to relive her twelfth birthday but, overcome with the anguish of seeing her precious past from the perspective of one who knows the future, begs the Stage Manager to take her back to her grave on the hill. I fell completely in love with the play – and with Thornton Wilder, who had recently published his penultimate novel, The Eighth Day, which I subsequently devoured. (I reread The Eighth Day a couple of years ago; it really is the masterpiece I took it for at seventeen.) Wilder won the National Book Award for that book, four decades after he’d taken the Pulitzer Prize for his second book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He also won Pulitzers for Our Town and for The Skin of Our Teeth, and he had considerable success with The Matchmaker, which most people know in its musical-comedy adaptation, Hello, Dolly!. Plus he penned the screenplay for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best movies, Shadow of a Doubt.

Blacks and Whites: Slave Play, Hansard, and Michael J. Pollard

James Cusati-Moyer and Ato Blankson-Wood in Slave Play. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

This review contains spoilers for Slave Play.
 
Slave Play, written by Jeremy O. Harris and directed for Broadway by Robert O’Hara (who also staged the professional premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop last season), begins with three broadly satirical vignettes about interracial couples copulating on pre-Civil War southern plantations: a white overseer with a black female slave, a black male slave with the white mistress of the house, and a black foreman with an indentured white male servant. The style is familiar, especially to anyone who lived through the downtown theatre of the sixties and seventies; only the gay content of the last sketch and the racial reversal, as well as a few outré details (like the huge black dildo the white woman useson the black buck and the fact that he serenades her with his violin after coition), seem fresh. But then two contemporary characters appear above the stage to halt the proceedings for a Brechtian effect and we wonder if we might be watching a rehearsal. They turn out to be not stage managers, however, but therapists, Teá (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio), another interracial couple who are running a program called Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy – which, they assure their clients, has had tremendous benefits for their own relationship. Each of the pairs we have just seen performing in the sketches is a couple that has enrolled in the group because the black partner has been unable to respond sexually for some time. The idea of Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy is that the source of the problem – the reason these African Americans have closed down – is that any sexual connection with a white lover invariably evokes the legacy of slavery and these farcical re-enactments are intended to break through the block. The reason the two therapists stop the exercise is that it turns out to be so startlingly effective with Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood) that he has an orgasm and then dissolves in tears, while his partner, Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer), not only is caught off guard but feels superfluous, even though he knows he’s supposed to be happy for Gary. The subsequent group discussion gives rise to turbulent emotions for all six of the participants.

Tootsie: In Name Only

 Julie Halston, James Moye, Santino Fontana, Lilli Cooper, John Behlmann in Tootsie. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The new musical of Tootsie, with a book by Robert Horn and music and lyrics by David Yazbek, has “smash hit” written all over it. It’s slick and rapid-fire. The veteran director, Scott Ellis (who’s also represented on Broadway this season by the revival of Kiss Me, Kate at Studio 54), and his expert cast build the farce perfectly, so that the more complications that are piled on top of the premise – actor Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana), whose temperament has made it impossible for his agent (Michael McGrath) to land him jobs, finally gets one by presenting himself as a woman, Dorothy Michaels – the funnier it is. Rather than set the story in the period in which the movie was made, the early eighties, Horn has contemporized it. There are #MeToo jokes – Michael’s wry aspiring-playwright roommate Jeff Slater (Andy Grotelueschen) quips that in an era when women are literally seizing power from between the legs of men, Michael is risking infuriating everyone by pretending to be female. There are jokes about sexual fluidity – when Michael, forgetting momentarily that he’s in drag, kisses his co-star, Julie Nichols (Lilli Cooper), whom he’s fallen for, instead of scaring her off since she’s not gay, she likes him so much that she decides to try to be gay. It’s all very up to the minute, and the audience at the Saturday matinee I attended screamed with laughter. I would be dishonest if I said that I didn’t have a pretty good time, too. But I haven’t the slightest idea what the hell this Tootsie is about.

Farinelli and the King: Identity as a Straitjacket

Mark Rylance (with Melody Grove) in Farinelli and the King. (Photo: Marc Brenner and Simon Annand)

Farinelli and the King, currently on Broadway, marks the seventh time I’ve seen Mark Rylance on stage. In the play, written by his wife Claire van Kampen, he plays Spain’s King Philippe V – bipolar according to historical record but mad as a hatter in the stage version – who is cured, more or less, when his second wife, Isabella (Melody Grove) persuades the gifted castrato singer Carlo Farinelli (Sam Crane) to abandon his London career and move to the Spanish court in Madrid. Rylance may be the funniest comic actor I’ve ever seen live (in the all-male Shakespeare’s Globe production of Twelfth Night, where he played Olivia, in David Hirson’s La Bête, and especially in Matthew Warchus’s 2008 production of the farce Boeing-Boeing), but I’m not always as enthusiastic when I see him in straight roles. He was certainly effective in a supporting part in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, for which he won an Oscar last March, but the problem with his grandiose, scenery-chewing “straight” appearances, as Richard III (which he played in rep along with Twelfth Night) or as Philippe V, is that if you see several of them you get hip to his trademark affects – the stuttering, the interpolated “uhs” and “ums,” the brusquely cut-off phrases, the flattening out of questions so they sound like statements of fact, the deliberate end-line drops, and so on. Part of Rylance’s vocal genius is that he’s witty enough to employ for ironic effect what would be merely bad habits in most actors, like the end-line drops and refusal to put question marks at the end of questions, but what can be endlessly amusing in a comedian can become tiresome in a dramatic actor. And I’m afraid that, early in Farinelli and the King, I ran out of patience for his bag of tricks.

Richard Wilbur, 1921-2017: Molière’s Emissary

Richard Wilbur passed away on October 14, 2017, at the age of 96.

Among the many achievements of the poet Richard Wilbur, who died in October, perhaps his least recognized is the work he did as a translator of neoclassical French playwrights – Racine, Corneille and especially Molière. Wilbur translated ten of Molière’s plays, originally written in Alexandrine couplets (six beats to the line), into iambic pentameter, which is a more natural meter for English speakers, as my wonderful undergraduate Shakespeare professor, Alan Levitan, liked to illustrate with the spontaneous iambic line, “Give me a chocolate ice cream cone with sprinkles.” In his introduction to his first interaction with Molière, The Misanthrope (1955), Wilbur argues, “The constant of rhythm and rhyme was needed, in the translation as in the original, for bridging great gaps between high comedy and farce, lofty diction and ordinary talk, deep character and shallow. . . . [W]hile prose might preserve the thematic structure of the play, other ‘musical’ elements would be lost, in particular the frequently intricate arrangements of balancing half-lines, lines, couplets, quatrains, and sestets. There is no question that words, when dancing within such patterns, are not their prosaic selves, but have a wholly different mood and meaning.” By way of example, he offers a prose translation of one speech from the play, adding, “Even if that were better rendered, it would still be plain that Molière’s logic loses all its baroque exuberance in prose; it sounds lawyerish; without rhyme and verse to phrase and emphasize the steps of its progression, the logic becomes obscure . . . not crystalline and followable as it was meant to be.”

Illyria: Stage Folk

John Magaro and Fran Kranz in Richard Nelson's Illyria. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Richard Nelson must be the most prolific playwright in America. Within the last several years he wrote the four Apple Family plays and the three Gabriel plays; the published texts of his work take up most of a shelf at the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. And though I haven’t liked everything of his that I’ve seen or read, much of his work is first-rate, including some – like Nikolai and the Others, his 2013 portrait of the community of émigré Russian artists in New York after the Second World War, with Michael Cerveris and John Glover as Balanchine and Stravinsky – that deserved much more attention than it received. There hasn’t been much chatter about his latest, Illyria, which received a fine production at the Public, directed by Nelson himself, that closed a couple of weeks ago. Illyria is about the young Joe Papp, struggling to keep his first Shakespeare festival, in Central Park, alive in 1958 despite poor houses, fading finances and the menacing political climate: when the play begins, Papp (John Magaro, in a gruff, vivid performance) has just been fired from his job as a TV producer because the House Un-American Activities Committee has shown an interest in him. It’s a good play – well constructed, with a stage full of interesting, articulate characters whose conversation is well worth tuning into. And for theatre buffs, this glimpse into the scrambling, scrapping lives of young, idealistic, would-be-world-beating thespians of six decades ago has a special appeal and a special charm.

Fleetwood Mac, the Time Ghost: Rumours Turns 40

Fleetwood Mac (circa 1968): John McVie, Danny Kirwan, Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green Jeremy Spencer.

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” – William Faulkner

“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.” – Christine McVie

The recent release of a new duo album by Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie is a good opportunity to re-examine the long strange trip of the phenomenal pop band they belong to. Fleetwood Mac was originally formed in 1967 by Peter Green, but Christine Perfect-McVie had already been on the scene in her own remarkable British blues band, Chicken Shack, even before her talented husband became the stellar bass player for one of the most successful rock outfits in music history. 

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been ten years since I published my book on the weird evolutionary leaps of Fleetwood Mac from gritty British blues to shiny Californian pop and yet, incredibly, it’s true. Back then, in 2007, it was the band’s 40th anniversary, hence my title 40 Years of Creative Chaos, and now suddenly I’m having to try and convince my publisher that they definitely deserve a 50th-anniversary update to their twisted saga. I suspect my editor can barely believe that they’re still together, despite the fact that Stevie Nicks has made one of her frequent departures to pursue her solo muse (herself) and Lindsey Buckingham has released an eponymous duet with the other sultry blonde in the group, my far-more-favourite British blues chick turned pop-diva, Christine McVie.

Even more incredibly, or at least ironically, Fleetwood Mac is being given a special award next year which cements their acclaim in even more glowing terms: the Recording Academy’s 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year, an honour that will be extended to the veteran rockers in conjunction with the 60th Grammy Awards. Amazingly, the Grammys themselves are only ten years older than this stalwart but grizzled crew of pop wizards. The award singles out musicians both for their artistry and for their frequent philanthropic contributions, with previous recipients including Dylan, McCartney and Stevie Wonder.

Didacticism and Virtue at the Shaw Festival

Shawn Wright and Jeff Irving with the cast of Androcles and the Lion at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: David Cooper)

At every performance of the Shaw Festival’s production of Androcles and the Lion, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 dramatization of the Aesop fable, a member of the audience is picked to play the lion. Other theatregoers who have been handed colored balls before the play begins are invited to throw them onto the stage at will, interrupting the dramatic action and prompting a variety of responses from the actors, who have to tell an anecdote or recite a section of Shaw’s preface to the play or share any thought that pops into their heads. This process is in the service of what Tim Carroll, the Shaw’s new artistic director, calls “two-way theatre,” which is intended to break down the barrier between the actors and the audience. Carroll directed Androcles, but his mission is visible in the productions he didn’t stage, too. In Wilde Tales, the lunchtime show, adapted by Kate Hennig from four Oscar Wilde fairy tales and directed by Christine Brubaker, children from the audience sit along the sides of the Court House stage with signs and other props; their participation is encouraged at certain points in the action. In Alan Bennett’s The Madness of King George, directed by Kevin Bennett (who trained with Carroll during his tenure as associate director at Shakespeare’s Globe in London), the house lights remain on during the performance and the cast interacts with members of the audience – especially those who are sitting right on the stage of the Royal George – just as actors at the Globe play up to those groundlings who have found standing room right below the thrust, within easy reach of the performers. Five of the six plays I saw at the Shaw began with a member of the staff – an assistant stage manager or head dresser or what have you – addressing the audience and providing some tidbits of information about his or her job.

Ohhhh Canada: Critics At Large Celebrates Canada 150

Celebrating birthdays is complicated enough when you're discussing people, let alone when you start talking about a nation. For a few months, the idea of doing a special series of pieces reflecting the complicated and controversial history of our Confederation was kicked around. But these days there is no one person who is a driving force at Critics at Large to bring consensus and focus to these kinds of ambitious plans. So the notion languished passively and died on the vine. We ended up doing an ad hoc number of random pieces that became part of an informal Canada 150 series. Since my turn to write was coming up today, I had to ask myself if I wanted to do something – anything – about why Canada mattered. But I had too many ideas and none that jumped out as inspired. So while recently culling together some of my own Critics at Large writing for a summer project I've been working on, I began reading a number of other critics who said things in the heat of reviewing that touched on some fascinating aspects of what it meant for them being Canadian. In a matter of moments, I began lifting selections from those reviews dating back to our beginnings in 2010. In those works, Canada was a leitmotif that I had the urge to embroider into a motley quilt of cultural discourse. Not all our writers are included here, as some over the years had little to say about Canada, while others make repeat appearances because some idea of Canada predominated in their work in a way that looms larger than it might have when the piece was once a review. As I was the one to do the writing today, I throw down the first gauntlet with a selection from a book review I did back in 2010.

-- Kevin Courrier, July 1/17.    

Shakespeare on Love: Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Antony & Cleopatra

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High Comedies: Six Degrees of Separation and Present Laughter

Allison Janney and Corey Hawkins in Six Degrees of Separation. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The current Broadway revival of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation begins badly and doesn’t find its feet until its leading lady, Allison Janney, does – about two-thirds of the way through, during her reading of the speech that gives the play its title. The play, a brilliant high comedy, is about the way a young hustler named Paul disrupts the lives of a number of people whose paths he crosses, most (but not quite all) of whom belong to the New York elite of the last decade of the twentieth century. Paul is an outsider in every conceivable way: he’s black (race in this play equates to class), gay and homeless. When a moneyed M.I.T. undergraduate named Trent Conway picks him up on the streets of Boston and takes him home, Paul makes a deal with him – sex in exchange for information about the prep-school classmates in Trent’s address book, now enrolled at various Ivy League colleges. (Trent is delighted to furnish details: not only does he consider he’s getting fair return for the favor, but his sexuality has always made him feel like an outsider too; he fantasizes that he can turn Paul into such an appealing faux aristocrat that when Trent shows up on his arm everyone will just have to accept them both.) Then Paul presents himself at the doors of their parents, bleeding from a self-inflicted stab wound he says he incurred during a mugging, claiming to know their children. He also professes to be the son of Sidney Poitier, and all of the aristocrats whose homes he’s entered on false pretenses are sufficiently impressed to take him in for the night. Paul is a scam artist and a narcissist; he’s also, it turns out, delusional. He starts to believe he really is Sidney Poitier’s son, and then he believes his other invention: that he’s the illegitimate son of Flan Kittredge, the art dealer who, along with his wife Ouisa, shows him the most kindness. Six Degrees of Separation is about connection and imagination as well as class (a theme of all high comedy). But it isn’t centrally about Paul. He’s the catalyst whose interactions with those he comes across – Trent and the aspiring, adventure-seeking young actor from Utah, Rick (Rick and his wife Elizabeth also take Paul in, when they find him sleeping in Central Park) and the Kittredges – act in various ways on their imaginations. The protagonist of the play is Ouisa, who undergoes the most profound change as a result of meeting him.

Unexpected Treasures: Twelfth Night at the National Theatre

Doon Mackichan and Tamsin Greig in Twelfth Night at London's National Theatre. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

The finest production of Twelfth Night I’ve ever seen was by the Théâtre de Soleil at the Olympic Arts Festival in L.A. in 1984. It was as leisurely as a conversation with good friends that trails late into the night. Visually it was plush: every new scene was signaled with a quilted backdrop that tumbled down in front of the previous ones. The director, Ariane Mnouchkine, embroidered the big comic moments so they were like inspired vaudeville or silent-comedy routines, but the play paused to frame the melancholy ones, too, so the cumulative emotional effect of the evening was rich and overpowering.

I thought of Mnouchkine’s Twelfth Night at several points during Simon Godwin’s staging of the play for the National Theatre, which the invaluable NT Live series has been sending out around the world in HD. It’s a banquet of a production, and startlingly fresh. Godwin has given it a contemporary setting – Olivia (Phoebe Fox) and her female staff, led by Maria (Niky Wardley) and the clown Feste (Doon Mackichan), live in a sort of girls’ club environment, while Orsino (Oliver Chris, whom I admired in One Man, Two Guv’nors) helms what feels like a fraternity for the rich and entitled. One of the rooms in his castle is a gym where he spars with Cesario, the male persona Viola (Tamara Lawrance) has adopted, spar, and Godwin has turned one of his scenes into a fortieth birthday party, complete with balloons and party hats, that points up how slow he’s been to attain maturity. (The emphasis on gender division links the play to Shakespeare’s earlier romantic comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost.) Even Malvolio, Olivia’s steward, is a woman: Malvolia (Tamsin Greig), though unlike the other females in the house, she most emphatically does not party. The twenty-first-century setting allows for her infatuation with Olivia, of course, and it lends a tender quality to the love that Antonio (Adam Best) exhibits for Viola’s twin brother Sebastian (Daniel Ezra), who is so grateful to Antonio for his many kindnesses, after the shipwreck that separated the siblings, that we see how much he wishes he could reciprocate – but he just can’t. It also permits a lightly homoerotic flavor to Orsino’s friendship with Cesario that enhances this comedy of sexual confusion.

The Second Mother: Discovery

Camila Márdila and Regina Casé in The Second Mother, directed by Anna Muylaert.

The Brazilian film The Second Mother (Que Horas Ela Volta?), about how the relationship of a long-time live-in domestic and her employers changes when her college-age daughter comes to live with her, is a quiet and unobtrusive piece of pure naturalism. The writer-director, Anna Muylaert, barely seems to impose a style of her own on the material, an unconventional comedy of manners, but the quality of her observations is uncannily shrewd, and the movie’s treatment of the subjects of class and family is trenchant. The setting is São Paulo, where Val (Regina Casé) has worked for thirteen years as housekeeper for a high-powered socialite, Bárbara (Karine Teles), and her retiring artist husband Carlos (Laurenço Mutarelli) and nanny for their son Fabinho (Michel Joelsas). Val is devoted to the family – especially to Fabinho, who is around eighteen but still likes to be treated (by Val, if by no one else) like a little boy, coddled and cradled in her arms; he sometimes steals into her bedroom at night to sleep there. (She protects him, sometimes even from his parents: when his mother finds his stash of weed and voices her concern that he’s getting high too often, he denies it’s his, so Bárbara tosses it in the garbage. Val retrieves it and returns it to Fabinho on the sly.) Bárbara pays Val well, and she’s convinced that she and Carlos treat her like one of the family, and Val likes to think so too. But we can see the limits of her sensitivity: when Val gives her a coffee set for her birthday, Bárbara makes a show about saving it for a special occasion, but when Val tries to incorporate it into her employer’s birthday party, Bárbara gets annoyed. This is a remarkably layered episode – we note Val’s generosity in using her money to buy a gift for her and the implication that she thinks of Bárbara as more than just her boss, but when she takes Bárbara at her word she’s clearly crossing an invisible social line. Usually Val doesn’t make this kind of mistake: she treats both her employers with grateful deference. And Muylaert refuses to score easy points against them. When Val’s daughter Jéssica (Camilla Márdila) shows up in São Paulo to take her college entrance exams and asks if she can stay with her, at least until she gets settled, Bárbara agrees without hesitation, though she comes to regret it almost immediately.

Comedy, Verbal and Physical: The Beaux’ Stratagem, Hay Fever, & The Play That Goes Wrong

Member of the cast of The Beaux’ Stratagem at London's Nation Theatre. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

George Farquhar’s delightful Restoration comedy The Beaux’ Stratagem is about two young men, Aimwell and Archer, described as “two gentlemen of broken fortune,” who arrive at a scheme for setting themselves up, they hope, for life. Touring the English provinces, they trade off, one pretending to be a gentleman of means and wooing a rich lady, while the other playacts the role of his servant. In Litchfield, the setting of this comedy of manners, it’s Aimwell’s turn to be the suitor. He casts his eye on Dorinda, while Archer finds himself falling for her sister-in-law, Mrs. Sullen. Unfortunately, Mrs. Sullen is trapped in a miserable marriage to a drunkard and spendthrift whose only evident reason for making the match was his wife’s money. Farquhar’s play comments on the market society that produces such dismal unions; when Aimwell finds himself actually falling for the target of his “stratagem,” he repents his dishonesty and makes a clean breast of it to Dorinda. The play is lighthearted, though, even in its political background. The English and French are at war and the English are holding the French troops in Litchfield as prisoners, but the bonds they constrain them are silken ones: they’re free to roam about and enjoy the pleasures of the town.

The play was first performed in 1707, but Simon Godwin’s richly entertaining production at the National Theatre seems to be set later – the costumes by Lizzie Clachan are Georgian, perhaps just because the clothes from that period are more lush and the shapes trimmer and more flattering. (No one who sees Clachan’s gorgeous outfits is likely to complain about the shift.) She also designed the triple-tiered set, which is built on four staircases and doubles as the home of Lady Bountiful (Jane Booker), the mother of Dorinda (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and Sullen (Richard Henders), and the inn where Aimwell (Samuel Barnett) and Archer (Geoffrey Streatfield) have put up in Litchfield. This scaffold-like construction is convenient for the frequency of scenes in which characters overhear each other’s conversations as well as serving as a kind of metaphor for the interplay of classes. Archer is playing the part of a servant (though, when Mrs. Sullen observes that his manners are “above the livery of a footman,” he covers the discrepancy by confessing that he was born a gentleman) and becomes friendly with Lady Bountiful’s valet, Scrub (dour-looking Pearce Quigley, who reads his lines in a tossed-off, lightly ironic tone that’s very funny), while flirting, in the early scenes, with the innkeeper’s amiable daughter Cherry (Amy Morgan).

All That Is Old Is New Again: On the Current State of Doctor Who

Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, on BBC's Doctor Who

This past winter, my wife knit a Tom Baker-era Doctor Who scarf as a birthday gift for a friend. It turned out my friend has been wanting one since he was a kid, and could not have been more thrilled with the gift. He proudly wore the 12-foot scarf, its colourful tassels dragging along the streets of Washington, D.C., for the remaining cold days of the year, and even beyond them. Recently he told me a story: while walking to work on one such day, he crossed paths with a young boy (perhaps nine-years-old) and his mother. The boy, on seeing my friend, began jumping up and down and pulling at his mom's coat, yelling with delight: ""Doctor Who Scarf! Doctor Who Scarf!!!"

I tell this story, not only because of the profound pleasure the incident provoked in my friend, but because it reveals something I've long believed about Doctor Who as a televisual and cultural phenomenon. Even after 50 years and over 34 seasons, the show appeals across cultures, continents, and generations. (Tom Baker stopped wearing that scarf more than three decades before that young American boy was even born!) I loved the show as a child, when episodes of Peter Davison's Doctor aired on my local PBS channel, and as an adult the relaunched BBC series has topped my list of favourite shows since the show appeared in 2005.