Riotous Youth

Other than providing Vancouver residents with performances of great Shakespearean plays for the last 25 years, Bard on the Beach also runs an active educational programme, to give young people the skills and the confidence to speak on stage, as well as an appreciation of the beauty and drama of the great dramatist.

Riotous Youths is a new initiative of Bard whereby “graduates” of the Young Shakespearean programme could continue to participate in workshops and hone their acting skills. To mark the end of this new endeavor, the group of young artists put on a show with brief scenes from some of Shakespeare’s most well know works. To add an element of chance to the performance (a la John Cage?), the names of the plays were put in a hat, and audience members were asked to draw from the hat to determine the scene to be performed.

This was a remarkable hour of theatre. Musicians and actors, who set out to recreate great works of art, should have only one goal in mind: to ensure that whatever he or she is doing, no matter how “original”, is to be true to the spirit of the creator, be it a Shakespeare or a Mozart. These young artists gave us their “take” on scenes from the plays they had chosen, and performed them with conviction, verve, and a youthful enthusiasm undiminished by “experience”.  At no time during the performance did I feel that they were trying to be different for the sake of being different. Unlike certain professional directors, they did not try to use Shakespeare to further their own political or personal agenda. And at the end of the performance, I was convinced that they had stayed true to the spirit of Shakespeare.

Funding for the arts in today’s society is often tenuous at best, and becoming more and more so. In North America, there appears to be unlimited funds when it comes to sports. Bard’s Riotous Youth programme has shown us that when we invest in the arts, we are investing in the future of our young people. Let’s hope that this very worthwhile initiative will continue to thrive and grow.

A Less Than Magical Dream

It is difficult to think of summers in Vancouver without Bard on the Beach, our annual Shakespeare festival. Twenty-five years ago, Bard began its history in the city with a modest single production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Since then, the festival has grown bigger and, in most cases, better. It seems entirely fitting, then, for Bard to celebrate its 25^th summer by revisiting this divine comedy yet again.

From the outset of the performance, it seems clear that director Dean Paul Gibson and costume designer Mara Gottler are aiming for maximum silliness and raunchiness in effect. Hermia and Helena appear in tight-fitting corsets, and Puck dresses throughout in ballet tutu, complete with punk hairdo. A friend remarked that this is a reference to A Rocky Horror Picture Show. Indeed, there are numerous pop culture references throughout the evening. Laughs were milked by slapstick antics that became outdated even in Hollywood decades ago with shows like I Love Lucy and The Three Stooges. Moreover, the production was saturated with sexual innuendoes and double entendre, which would have been acceptable, even funny, if they are done with taste, with cleverness, and if they serve the play.

Rather than using Shakespeare’s immortal and oh-so-beautiful words to elevate us from our everyday existence, the production appears to be aiming at the lowest possible common denominator. If the director thinks that dumbing-down Shakespeare would make the play appeal to a younger audience, he has seriously underestimated what young people are capable of.

Regarding the female characters, I believe the director is aiming to portray these women with assertiveness. However, Gibson seems to have mistaken assertiveness with vulgarity. In the confrontation between Hermia and Helena in Act III, the actors were shouting their lines like men and women in the fish market haggling over the price of the latest catch. Shakespeare, like Mozart in his operas, has always endowed his female characters with wit, with cleverness, and with confidence. The concept of the current production has, to me, robbed the female characters of their true beauty and, more importantly, dignity.

This attempt to update this, probably Shakespeare’s most timeless play, has robbed Midsummer Night’s Dream of all its magical elements. By the time the performance reaches Act V, the play-within-the-play - the “tragedy” of Thisby and Pyramus - feels very tedious with even further attempts at slapstick humour more appropriate for a Christmas pantomime by an amateur theatrical company.

At the end of the performance, I did not feel a sense of wonder, or of joy. I did wonder what, if any, is the director’s concept for the production? Surely there is more to this great Shakespeare play than just to elicit a few laughs from the audience? By the time the performance reaches Puck’s beautiful final monologue, I could not wait to escape into the beautiful summer evening.

Just a few days later, on the same stage, I witnessed a production of Twelfth Night, given by the young players of Bard on the Beach youth programme (“Young Bard”). For me, the enthusiasm and earnestness of the young actors make the performance a much more joyful and joy-filled experience than what the professional players had accomplished a few nights before. Personally, this performance of “unadulterated” Shakespeare is closer to what the playwright had in mind.

In this 25^th anniversary season, Artistic Director Christopher Gaze should feel justifiably proud of what the festival has accomplished. I do hope, however, that Gaze would also carefully examine the future direction for the festival. Rather than using Shakespeare to further whatever personal or political agenda of the director, should they not be directing their talents toward bringing us, the audience, into new and wondrous discoveries and insights into Shakespeare’s heart and soul?

Summer Night With Will

The summer months in Vancouver are slow when it comes to Classical music. We out in the wilds of Vancouver do not have major summer music festivals like Tanglewood or Ravinia. What we do have, for the last 23 years, is a wonderful Shakespeare festival, presenting four of the bard’s masterpieces every season. Other than the plays we have come to know and love, we also get to see the more unfamiliar plays by Shakespeare, like Timon of Athens and this year’s King John.

Last evening, we saw The Taming of the Shrew, a play I often thought of as potentially controversial.  Kate, the older daughter of a wealthy citizen of Padua, is famous for her fiery temper. Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, attracted by Kate’s large dowry, resolves to take her as his wife. After much verbal jostling between the two and “psychological warfare” on the part of Petruchio, he succeeded in “taming” Kate, who became in the end the most obedient wife among all the female characters in the story.

Other than superb acting by all the players of the company, the director, Meg Roe, managed to make the play not only entertaining but a moving experience at the end. In her notes, the director wrote that the play is about belonging. In her eloquent words:

We see people disguise and plot and scheme to belong to one another. We also see two people who categorically do not belong. Who fit with no one. Who rail against the norm. And then who, suddenly, unexpectedly, find a match in one another. A perfect fit. And miraculously, after pushing and fighting and resisting: they belong. They enter into a bargain and a partnership based on trust. True obedience. And fun.

Indeed, the way the play was presented made it a commentary not only on human nature, but on marriage. In the process, Kate finds not only true love, but rediscovers a sense of her womanhood, and the marriage between the two becomes one of mutual self-giving. To me, Kate’s beautiful final monologue, her views on the relationship between husbands and wives, almost parallels the passage from Chapter 5 of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, where the evangelist asks wives to be “submissive to their husbands as if to the Lord because the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of his body the church.” In almost the same breath, and before the men become too giddy, Saint Paul admonishes husbands to “love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.” It takes a Shakespeare and Saint Paul to remind us, in the 21^st century, that the concept of love is far deeper and much more than a mere sharing of physical space, finances and, perhaps, chores.

Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew reminds me of Mozart’s opera Così fan Tutte, another work of art accused of being politically incorrect, even immoral. Two young men decide to put their lovers to a test. They tell their lovers that they are going off to war. In actuality, they came back in disguise as two Albanians (only in opera!) to woe their respective lovers, who soon surrendered to their amorous advances. In the end, everything is of course forgiven, and everyone lives happily ever after. Or do they? In Così, Mozart is revealing to us the changeable, or impermanent, nature of life, and that nothing in life, least of all human nature, ever remains the same.

We should remember that in Shakespeare as well as in Mozart, the female characters are very often far cleverer than their male counterparts. What the playwright and composer give us, in works like Taming of the Shrew and Così fan Tutte, are glimpses of human nature, something in ourselves that perhaps we are not even aware of, once we see pass the superficiality of the plot line, and gender differences.