Stratford and other wonderful things

Stratford, Ontario, is a fairly small city well out into the farmlands of central Ontario. Nonetheless, it's home to one of the premier theatrical festivals in Canada, and a fun place to visit, especially on a cool crisp autumn weekend, and especially with the right company. And "Fiend" is most certainly the right company!

Despite the Attack of the Overly Friendly Feline (who apparently thought that any human interlopers in his/her territory were fair game for frantic, neurotic leg-rubbing and lap-crawling), we managed to make it to two plays.

The authorship of Henry VIII seems to be disputed. Current scholars seem to think it's the result of a collaboration between Shakespeare and a certain John Fletcher. It's a somewhat melodramatic history play, which portrays a few tumultuous years of the reign of its namesake king. Notably, it portrays only the first two of his famous eight wives, and ends with the birth of Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VII and Anne Boleyn. (Jane Seymour, wife number 3, makes a brief, nonspeaking appearance at the very end, but this doesn't seem to be part of the original script.) It's quite clearly intended to glorify the father and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I, and promote the virtue of Elizabeth, the ruling monarch in Shakespeare's time, and her Protestant rule. The very existence of Mary, Henry's fanatically Catholic daughter by his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, is ignored totally; the Catholic archbishop Wolsey is presented as a scheming, corrupt manipulator who tricks the king into divorcing Katherine in order to promote a marriage to a French princess, thus conveniently absolving the King of responsibility for his divorce. Incredibly, for anyone familiar with the history of the time, Henry's historic split with the Catholic church is completely ignored except for a few oblique references, by very unsympathetic characters, to "spleeny Lutherans" and "heretical" beliefs on the part of the King's eccleciastical supporter, Thomas Cranmer. The closing speech, praising the newborn infant Elizabeth in terms more suited to the birth of a demi-goddess, is such blatant flattery that I could hardly suppress myself from laughing out loud during it.

In short, the plot is politically-motivated melodrama that makes hash of history. But it's tasty hash, full of delicious intrigue and the spice of danger. The actress playing Queen Katherine almost steals the show with her spirited reaction to the shabby treatment meted out to her by the King and Cardinal, and the actor portraying the Machiavellian Cardinal Wolsey is a worthy villian indeed, full of smooth words and sharp dealing.

My favorite moment that didn't happen: a cell phone went off, somewhere in the audience, while the King was summoning a couple of intimidating-looking Guards to the stage, and I found myself wishing that, with a snap of the royal fingers and a commanding sweep of the royal hand, he had ordered them to summarily drag the offending churl out of the theater to be cast into Outer Darkness.

The other play was a fresh interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the human characters in modern dress and the denizens of the faerie world attired in form-fitting, jungle-inspired costumes, climbing and dancing with wild abandon and occasionally cavorting in mid-air. (The fairies' trapeze and bungee-cord maneuvers were reportedly developed in consultation with Cirque de Soleil.) Even so, I got the biggest laughs from the clever comedic acting of the actors portraying the confused human lovers, the bumbling amateur actors, and the much-put-upon rational ruler Theseus and his court. There are a few elements that aren't strictly Shakespearean, but I have to imagine that if acrobats flying through the air on bungee cords had been available in his time, he'd have happily used them. Perhaps he would even have found a use for those irritating cell phones.

Of the two plays, I preferred Henry VIII by a small margin. (Sorry, Fiend!) But that may be only because it was entirely new to me. Both were good. I enjoyed the unfolding, unfamiliar plot of Henry VIII, and I enjoyed the spectacle and witty dialogue and broad physical comedy of Dream.

For the bibliophiles among us, Stratford holds a number of decent bookstores to browse. Nothing near the level of Larry McMurtry's monument to bibliophilic obsession out in Archer City, but acceptably interesting. I picked up a book of medieval castle plans and several SF novels by Iain M. Banks which, so far as I know, are not officially "in print" on this side of the border. Fiend managed to score a copy of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, which should serve her well in trying to figure out just what I mean when I refer to the latest place my imagination has wandered off to.

And, of course, Stratford has a railroad yard and depot. Fiend will no doubt be utterly fascinated to find out that that mysterious green-and-yellow locomotive on the grain train we saw appears to belong to the Virginia Southern Railroad. (Right? Right? *grin*)