Stratford Festival 2009, part 2

We saw the third play in our set at Stratford today: Phèdre by Jean Racine. This 17th century play has some of the same barriers to overcome as Bartholomew Fair, since the courtly context of the original audience is distant from modern experience. A bigger barrier is language: what words in modern English offer an analog to Racine's powerful French? Phrases that seem eloquent in the original seem overwrought in contemporary English usage. I nearly laughed out loud at the choice of words in one very earnest scene. I wish they had done the performance in French with English supertitles. This is Canada. French is an official language!

The performance almost overcame the language problem, and might really have succeeded if the performance of Phèdre herself had more poise and fewer hysterics. We agreed that if Phèdre had held herself as a person whose bearing bespoke authority the way Aricie did in her final scene with Theseus, then the play would have had more punch. It was not bad, but in the end it was not convincing. ... Phèdre is a tragedy, of course, but during this performance I half expected one last scene where, Thèraméne confesses in the manner of many Shakespeare comedies that his story about Hyppolitus' death was a fabrication to show Theseus his error, and Hyppolitus and Aricie marry and live happily ever after.

Our ranking for the plays we saw this season: 1) Three Sisters (an excellent play done well), 2) Bartholomew Fair (a difficult play made almost accessible by good staging), 3) Phèdre (decent but unconvincing English version of a French classic).

Stratford Festival 2009

Every year since 1993 Joan and I have gone to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. I had also gone with family as a child in the 1960s, so I know the festival well. It now has 4 theaters, one mainly for musicals, one very small theater for plays with a limited audience, the big Festival theater for the most popular productions, and our favorite, the Tom Patterson theater, whose long thrust stage nearly makes it a theater in the round. Somehow most of the plays that we want to see tend to be there.

Stratford is a small city with a lively downtown during festival season (see photo).



This year there were additional visitors because of the dragon-boat races on the Avon river (see photo).



Yesterday we saw two plays: Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and Bartholomew Fair by Ben Johnson. We thought the former overemphasized the tragic side, though some of Chekhov's humor came through too. Nonetheless an excellent production. Ben Johnson is hard to do for a modern audience, since he directs his satire at people and ideas that are unfamiliar to a modern audience. An attempt to perform The Alchemist some years ago was not a success. Bartholomew Fair was, even though it was clear that it was a recreation of a past and not quite accessible world. A few people left at the interval, but (according to the man behind us) the general word on the street was that it was a hit. We liked it.