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.