A big, eager crowd gathered last night for the annual presentation of a Shakespearean play at High Park. The first un-sweaty day in a long string of sauna-nights probably had something to do with it. It was going to be a good show, the audience and actors were mutually excited by each other.
The Framing
I think the most notable aspect of the direction was the framing of the play. It opened with contemporary characters as tourists at a train station in Verona. The station master opens her copy of the eponymous play and the trunk that says, 'Romeo and Juliet Players' (or something like that) and distributes the costumes within to the travelers. They reluctantly or with ironic expressions or giddy eagerness don the period clothes and start to riff off lines from play--the players play. Thus presenting the entire play as a play within a play.
This device--play-within-a-play--is one that Shakespeare himself used (the players in A Midsummer Nights Dream acting out Pyramus and Thisbe, for instance, or the acting troupe in Hamlet performing Claudius' treachery before the court.) The plot significance of this device in Hamlet is to draw out Claudius' admittance of guilt. But it's the metaphoric significance that is more interesting. The play-within-a-play makes self-conscious the audience to its role as audience--they are watching the play's audience being an audience. At the same time, by making the players themselves an audience, the off-stage audience become the on-stage audience too, both looking at the play-within-a-play together. Real life and stage life circles into each other, thus making manifest the idea "all the world's a stage" (Shakespeare's As You Like It.)
For the first quarter of the performance, we were reminded through ironic on-stage changes of costume and moments of actors coming out of character to wink conspiratorially at the audience (the most obvious and naive display of this being the conductor looking for the right page in her copy of the play to read from) that the players themselves know that it's a play, that they are hip to the whole make-believe nature of play-acting.
This trendy sophistication of turning the finger towards one's self and chuckling, as if to preempt any derisive laughter from any audience, is familiar (I see this on TV a lot) and frankly tiresome. Of course we know it's a play, and we know it's make believe. Why do artists, especially actors, feel the need to be sardonic and ironic about their work? Why must art cow and apologize for itself, fairly begging through self-directed laughter to be allowed a bit a space in the realm of the serious and important? We, the audience, are there voluntarily, after all, to enjoy the show. The flattery of acting as if the players are ingratiating themselves to us, was something I found unappealing, sycophantic, like watching a grown man go down on all fours and bat his lashes at me like some canine school-man-girl. It was a bit gross.
But all was not lost
And this has partly to do with the direction, but mostly, I think, to do with the play itself: it demands seriousness and a mature capacity for feeling. The story of two lovers, young and impetuous and fearlessly passionate, the familial pressures, death of children--these are real sources of conflict. The performance stopped being self-mocking and too-cool-for-school, and started to take itself seriously by forgetting the audience.
It's only in this way that the audience can also forget itself and become immersed in the story. Self-consciousness prevents people from giving over to the narrative, putting themselves into another's shoes. If all you can think about is yourself, you can't think about anybody else. That's why the finger-pointing irony, the "seeing through the fiction" device, deployed at the start of the play is destructive to the purpose of the play, which is to draw in the audience so that they may live out the lives of the characters vicariously, and experience the catharsis enabled by the (fictional) tragedy.
By the half way mark, I was all in. Knowing what was going to happen, as did everyone else, made the scenes between the lover more poignant, heartrending. I don't know why, but I never really believed the love between Juliet and her Romeo when I was younger. It just smacked of adolescent idealism and fantasy to me. But now an older and hopefully more mature and experienced person, I found that their undiluted passion true, honest. They never laugh at their feelings for each other or make light of it or try to dismiss it as a passing fancy.
The director, however, attempted to be hiply ironic about it for first balcony scene, which bugged the hell out of me and Diana, by making the characters seem naive and awkward. Audience members were laughing during the "O Romeo, Romeo. Wherefore art thou Romeo?" monologue. "Wherefore" here means "why," not "where." So there is double meaning in Juliet's plaintive questioning: why Romeo instead of another man, and why does Romeo have to be Romeo (Montague).
And haven't we all asked questions like this during and after a failing or failed relationship? Why is he or she like this or that? Why do I love him or her? Why couldn't he or she be different? Why isn't this working or why didn't it work? Etc. These are the not-funny questions about relationships, arguably the most important thing in life, really.
So I wasn't laughing and I don't think it should have been directed in order to illicit laughter. There's nothing but cynicism in laughing at the only thing that redeems life: human relationships (the major theme of King Lear according to, I believe though I may be mistaken, Tony Tanner. And admittedly a topic of the best jokes and scenes of comedy in my own life. Hmm.)
Back to the frame
Back to the frame: the play ends as is written with the death of the two lovers. But then the director chose to have a actors break out into an ensemble dance. Now dancing is a metaphor of order and harmony, used in comedies with their happy endings to symbolize the idea that All's Well That Ends Well. Tragedies do not end well. That's sort of the point.
So the abrupt rise of the dead lovers and the upturning of the sorrowful visages of the grief stricken parents and friar in the Capulet crypt, was, well, abrupt. And then bizarre.
What did the director mean by ending the tragedy in comedy? It's either boldly Absurdist or a pandering to the audiences need, or the perceived audiences' need, for happy endings to the point where she tacked on this spin and twirl backed up by samba melodies. Or perhaps it was not so badly and bad-tastely calculated.
(The director was Vikki Anderson, Dora award winner and founder of her own theatre company. She's no rube.)
The play opened with the play-within-a-play device, with the actors as nonchalant and mostly happy tourists on the stage. It closes with a light hearted dance. Tragedy ensued within these bookends of levity. Is she suggesting a sense of life? That life sucks sometimes but that sad stuff should be view as being sandwiched between happy stuff? That whatever crap storm happens, life should start and end well . . . and start and end well again, presumably, because, after all, the audience will pack up their picnics and go back to their real lives, and the show will start all over again tomorrow night and the night after that.
This is probably a more generous line of thinking. But I fear--and it might just be my cynicism rearing its knowing and ugly head--that she felt the need, in light of it being summer and Shakespeare in the Park theatre series almost exclusively putting on comedies each year to keep the mood sunny and balmy and seasonal, to squeeze Tragedy into Comedy's pied costume. The effect was less pied and more splotchy and messy at times.
She tried to do too much at once and created this sort of multi-phyla creature. I feel that the play's successes were in spite of her attempt to be everything and cool rather than because of a developed and sophisticated aesthetic. The play shone through in the end, the ill-conceived framing notwithstanding.
Despite all that, I really enjoyed myself. I felt the catharsis, and the al fresco wine drinking and la vache qui rit eating and friends meeting and friends chatting, it was, as it is every year, all part of the Dream in High Park experience. I would recommend it to all Torontonians to check it out.
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