Shakespeare in the Theatre: The Stratford Festival

By Christie Carson
London: The Arden Shakespeare, 249 pp.

Reviewed by Don Rubin*

Given the fact that so many histories of Canada’s prestigious Stratford Festival have already been written, it would be really nice to understand what this recent volume in the Arden Shakespeare Series — Shakespeare in the Theatre: The Stratford Festival – is actually trying to accomplish. The preface says it is part of a series that will focus on people or companies world-wide that “have made a significant contribution to Shakespeare production, identifying the artistic and political/social contexts of their work.” Unfortunately, this volume winds up as pretty much a hodge-podge of simply names, dates and cherry-picked quotes, material and mythologizing that already exists more interestingly and more completely in many previous volumes about Stratford.

Written by Royal Holloway Shakespeare Professor Emerita Christie Carson, herself the daughter of one of the original members of the Festival’s acting company, the series itself is clearly an attempt to place Shakespeare companies and those artists specializing in Shakespeare production into some sort of international context. Where do they all fit, in relation to Shakespeare in the Mother Country? Immediately one senses an inherent colonial bias in the project, the exact opposite of what the series editors are seeking. Or perhaps this is just another case of Theory in search of a Subject.

As for the volume itself, right from the get-go we are told that the Stratford Festival “is an institution which holds a great deal of cultural capital….[and which] like the Royal Shakespeare Company has a government-funded mandate to maintain cultural standards for the nation.” (2). I am not sure what Canadian document is being referred to here but I’ve never been aware of any such government mandate for this company.

Prof. Christie adds a few pages later that the Festival “has fought valiantly for many years, been battered by criticism locally, while being largely ignored by the international critical debate about Shakespeare in performance.” (6) Perhaps the first two suggestions are somewhat defensible but as for the Festival being ignored by international critical debate, Canada’s Stratford Festival is and for many decades has been reported on regularly not just by Canadian but by UK and US press and gets a really significant share of space in international academic journals, many of which are liberally quoted from in this volume.

Essentially a retelling of the history of the Festival from its founding in 1953 and its relationship to the growth of professional theatre generally in Canada, the volume looks at Stratford’s four theatres in some detail noting that with three thrust stages and one traditional proscenium these days the Festival is “in an unparalleled position of flexibility to experiment with the relationship between the stage and the text” (14).

Carson appropriately gives director Tyrone Guthrie and the Canadian artists who early on worked with him (like Dora Mavor Moore) much credit for the Festival’s creation and gives huge credit to the people of rural Stratford itself for help in its creation. With summary looks into the reigns of Stratford’s various artistic directors, she credits Michael Langham’s 1956 production of a bi-lingual Henry V with French-speaking actors from Montreal as indicating “a rising sense of what it was to be Canadian” (52) though she later quotes both Guthrie and Langham who felt at the time that “there was no distinctively Canadian way to produce Shakespeare” (57).

If distinctive approaches can’t be found at this still early point, symbols do abound in many of these productions for Prof. Carson. She notes, for example, that the birth of the Festival took place at almost the same time as the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II and somehow the coronation led to a reassessment of Canada’s place in the world. It meant a looking back at “the sacrifices made at home and abroad, and looking forward with optimism for a new beginning as part of a united project to improve the cultural life of those who had returned from the war, but were changed by it” (p. 43-4).

Mythmaking is often the word that comes to mind as one reads through Carson’s study which never quite makes up its mind as to whether it is history or critical analysis as it rummages through the minutiae of each.

On the positive side, there are some splendid evocations of specific productions and some very good contextualizations between the Festival and the wider Canadian theatre. Despite these flashes, however, this is very much Canada and Shakespeare as seen through British binoculars.

For example, though production criticism tends to mostly come from Canadian reviewers theoretical analysis comes heavily from foreign scholars, most often writing in focussed journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly.

Specific comments are from a range of Canadian sources with a lot from Jamie Portman and John Pettigrew’s 1983 volumes on the Festival’s first 30 years, from Robert Cushman’s 2002 volume Fifty Seasons at Stratford and Richard Ouzounian’s 2002 Stratford Gold. The work of these mostly positive commentators dominate along with occasional statements by a few others such as enthusiast Martin Hunter (author of another fiftieth season tribute volume Romancing the Bard). On a few occasions, editors of the Canadian Theatre Review such as Ric Knowles and Alan Filewod are allowed to chime in though one has to wonder why there are no words at all from the most authoritative of the early Canadian critics, the Toronto Star’s Nathan Cohen, a very critical voice in the Festival’s history, whose writing covered the Festival’s first quarter century.

Stratford has, of course, long attracted critics from around the world as well as great directors and actors, from Irene Worth to Maggie Smith, from Alec Guiness to Christopher Plummer (one of many home-grown stars such as William Hutt and Martha Henry. Indeed, Stratford still holds the place of honour in Canada’s theatrical firmament but throughout its 70 years it has also been the most polarizing place in terms of the development of a truly Canadian voice (if such can ever exist in a multi-cultural land). Nevertheless, it was in the early 1970s when the Festival began calling itself the “national theatre” of Canada during its first European tour. That was when critics at home and abroad began asking why Canada’s national theatre was dedicated to producing the works of a dead foreigner.

To be sure, the Festival changed somehow at that point but we never really find out in this volume how and how Canada’s take on Shakespeare truly differed from that of the rest of the world, specifically from England’s approaches. The closest we get to the answer is Carson’s sense that there is a distinction “between stately British acting and the emergent Canadian style, which depended on movement and passion” (169). That is, “a British focus on text” compared to “a Canadian approach to physical action and emotion” (173). Maybe.

Which leads us to what seems to be the volume’s real issue — productions of The Tempest which “have largely avoided any real engagement with the issue of the suppression of Indigenous culture” (p.192). She notes that these days, all Stratford performances begin with “a land rights statement {which] illustrates that the Festival has begun a process of acknowledging Canada’s colonial history” (193). But does this, as she suggests, really show that the Festival is now speaking “to issues of social, cultural and political usurpation, forgiveness and redemption both within the organization and beyond it” (193). Not sure about that. To some, it might speak more to what is currently trendy in the Canadian zeitgeist.

In terms of the Festival’s real relationship to Canada, it was in 1970 that the company appointed its first Canadian director, Quebecker Jean Gascon. That was a major step forward to be sure but four years later it took a step back with the appointment of Robin Phillips, a young but essentially unproven British director, handing the reins of the theatre back to Europe during an increasingly nationalistic time, a time, as Carson says, when “the seemingly elitist Festival was pitted against the developing grassroots alternative theatre movements which aimed to create a native theatre for ordinary Canadians” (78).

Another major part of the issue during this time period was the Festival’s growing reliance on audiences from the US and the Festival’s apparent determination to supply those audiences with popular fare. This expanded under Phillips with the steady increase of American audiences putting more pressure on the Festival to produce shows which foregrounded “entertainment over developing Canadian work” (102).

As Artistic Director from 1986, British-born John Neville began bringing even larger scale musicals to the Festival including The Boys from Syracuse and Cabaret. By the time Canadian-born Richard Monette became head of the festival in 1990, musicals were a regular part of each season and soon the Festival’s account books were more than balanced. As someone said at the time, the Festival had now “abandoned the Bard for the box office” (135).

Which leads Carson to say:

The history of the Stratford Festival up to the beginning of the twenty-first century can be seen to be relatively coherent in that the Festival’s self-conception and its critical reception both oscillated between the seemingly opposing poles of an imposed colonial model and the desire to create something uniquely Canadian (143).

Which is when she goes on to foreground those questions to another issue entirely — the Festival’s approach to representation of race, gender and ethnicity” (144), issues tangential to the core questions of funding, development of actors and directors and the place of new work at Stratford. Under Monette “lavish popular productions…attracted tourist audiences [to] the Festival and Avon stages {while] more challenging work which looked at Canadian identity…was being staged in the [smaller]Patterson and Studio spaces” (149). Indeed, under Monette the Festival’s overall budget doubled and its endowment fund grew to over $5 million dollars. All this was to the overall good and allowed Monette to begin as well the company’s Birmingham Conservatory which has brought into Stratford numerous young artists over the last decades.

Currently, Stratford is being run by another Canadian-born director, Antoni Cimolino, a former actor in the company who will step down in 2026 after more than 20 years at the helm. Under Cimolino, the Festival added into its mandate the videoing of many of its productions and the marketing of them, that is the marketing of the complete works of Shakespeare online. This, says Carson, significantly “established the Festival’s international stature.” (157). Her conclusion: “Through its online platform the Festival now finds itself in a position to influence international cultural movements from a new vantage point” (161).

Mostly quoting the impressions and ideas of others, Carson tries bravely to tell a coherent story of both Canada’s largest theatre and Canada itself. But reading Canada through theatre – even the Stratford Festival, needs more than this volume’s 200 pages. This version just doesn’t cut it. That the Festival, as Carson sees it, has made a significant architectural contribution to Shakespearean production worldwide thanks to the thrust stage created by the Festival’s first Artistic Director Tyrone Guthie and designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch is not new and not really worth the effort that went into this curious volume. And it is ultimately curious because it has all been documented before in more interesting and more comprehensive ways. Stratford’s history is far too malleable to appear here under the guise of some kind of social history. It’s just not a comfortable fit.

Some final notes:

— Curious point. In the index, many people and things that are named in the text go completely unlisted. Not sure why. That said, a technical term like vomitoria is indexed three times. Justification?

— A more curious point. Prof. Carson uses the term “repertory” theatre which refers specifically to companies that keep several productions running simultaneously. Stratford is such a repertory company. No argument. But when she discusses Canada’s regional theatres and its many smaller professional companies, she also refers to them as repertory companies. They are not, by definition, repertory companies. They do seasons of plays one after another over many months. In Canada, only Stratford and the Shaw Festival (along with some of the major opera and ballet troupes) have the financial resources to actually work in true rep.

— Final point. There are numerous typos and misspellings in the volume. Specifically, John Hirsch’s name is misspelled several times starting on p. 73; Bill Glassco’s name is misspelled (92 and 94); Colm Feore’s misspelled (109); Tanya Moiseiwitsch (110), Hermione (114) and even Inuit (157). Where are the proofreaders?

*Don Rubin is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at Toronto’s York University. Founding Editor of the quarterly journal Canadian Theatre Review and Editor of the standard volume Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings, he has studied with Shakespeare scholar Bernard Beckerman, worked at the Shakespeare Institute at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut and has been reviewing productions at the Canadian Stratford Festival since 1967. Editor of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, he is President of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition.

N.B. Prof. Rubin has been Editor of this journal’s Book Review section since its inception in 2009. With this issue, he steps away from Editorship of the book section to devote more time to his own writing. He remains a member of the CS Editorial Advisory Board and will continue to contribute to the journal.

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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