Stratford Visit 2023

I'm just back from a short trip out to Stratford.  It's been many, many years since I actually stayed overnight, but this is the only practical way to see three plays, so that's what we did.  Also, my wife came along, though she only saw two of the three: Tremblay's Les Belles-Soeurs and Di Filippo's Grand Magic.  I saw Richard II by myself.  I've read that there is some additional material inserted into Richard II, but it felt pretty seamless unlike some of these productions where the directors feel they need to improve Shakespeare.  Still, I'll want to sit down and read Richard II soon so I can pinpoint if possible what was added.  If I had to guess, I would assume it is this scene where one of the characters sneaks into the House of Priapus (basically a gay bath house) and then possibly later on when he is struck down by a sort of plague (meant to be the equivalent of AIDS).  That said, some of this might well be in the original.  While Derek Jarman definitely played up the homoerotic elements of Marlowe's Edward II, the bones of it were in the original.  I can definitely understand why a fair number of audience members feel that this is too provocative a take on Richard II (with Richard portrayed as a raging disco queen), but I thought it worked well, adding an additional element (an incipient Puritanism) into the mix for why it was so easy to stir up opposition to the king's rule and have almost all the nobles switch over to Bolingbroke's side. 

This post is already all scrambled up, kicking off with a review rather than the start of the trip itself.  We took the Stratford bus.  It was fine, though I was definitely nervous about missing it (if the TTC let me down again).  In the end, the driver held the bus 10 minutes waiting for a late-comer.  I think he would only have waited another 5 to 10 minutes, and then the missing traveller would have just been out of luck.  There was construction-related congestion just outside of Cambridge, but generally the ride was fine.  I had agreed at the last minute to take a work call and had, in fact, run over to the mall the night before to get knock-off iPhone headphones which worked pretty well overall.  It's good that I had done that.  The call lasted about an hour and a quarter(!), though most of the time I was just listening in.  I read a little bit of Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence after the call wrapped, though of course much less than I had planned for.

It was raining slightly when we arrived, so we had to run into a thrift shop and buy my wife an umbrella.  We found that a couple of lunch places were too full, so we headed over to the main drag and went to an Italian place (not Fellini's, though perhaps I should have held out for that...).  Then we checked in at the bed and breakfast.  Overall, we liked it a lot and the location was amazing: a 5-10 minute walk to the Tom Patterson Theatre and roughly 15 to the Festival Theatre.  (Here is the website for where we stayed.)  While I don't typically stay overnight at Stratford, I would definitely stay here again, particularly if going with my wife.

I then went and saw Richard II at the Tom Patterson, which I lead off with.

The rain stopped around 5 or so, though it was still overcast.  We went out to Thai for dinner.  One place was very full but the other had a few tables open.  Then we walked over to the Festival Theatre to see Les Belles-Soeurs.  The balcony was close to empty and about five minutes before curtain, they let everyone move to front row centre!  There is a lot of (Canadian) star power in this production: Lucy Peacock and Seana McKenna.  The set is amazing.  But the play itself is such a crabbed vision of the lives of working-class women in Quebec prior to the Quiet Revolution.*  There is no female solidarity at all (or at least Germaine Lauzon is such an unpleasant person at heart that she inspires none).  And then the elder abuse being played mostly for laughs is all but unwatchable now.  The truth is that I enjoyed the semi-amateur production in Peterborough so much more, perhaps because it was a higher energy production, and I think one section on Bingo was turned into a musical number.  I do know that I will skip the Irish version of this play that the Toronto Irish Players are putting on later in the season.

The next morning was clear though crisp; fall is nearly here...  We enjoyed the breakfast, and while I am not an outgoing person, particularly at meals, we chatted with the other guests and found out they were from Hamilton, Ottawa and just outside Detroit.  The breakfast was so filling we skipped lunch, though I did grab some snacks at the snack bar for the final play.  We walked all over downtown Stratford (not that that takes very long) and stopped in at a small art gallery near the Stratford tourism office.  Then we walked along the river.  It had warmed up a fair bit by this point.  (It isn't very clear, but there is a swan just to the left of the bridge in this photo.)

Art in the Park was running, so we took a look at the pieces.  I enjoyed these hand-crafted robots from Triple R Robots.

There was also an artist (Kim McCarthy) that did encaustic work (mostly found items embedded in coloured wax).  My wife picked up a postcard based on this work.  

 

This was quite nice.  We still had close to an hour to kill, so we walked over to Gallery Stratford, which is just to the east of the Festival Theatre.  Because we were skipping lunch, we still had plenty of time to get back to the Tom Patterson for the matinee.  Time does seem to slow down a bit in Stratford.  While I enjoy my annual visits (with my partial exception of watching Hamlet last year, which I thought was a waste of my time), I would probably be crawling the walls in a couple of weeks if I actually moved to Stratford...

Anyway, then we went to see the final play -- De Filippo's Grand Magic.  Stratford is starting to specialize in De Filippo.  They did Napoli Milionaria! a few years back, which I thought was good, though not a comedy at all.  Grand Magic is closer to a true comedy though there are plenty of dark moments, and it doesn't really resolve properly as a comedy should.  Geraint Wyn Davies plays a washed up illusionist who makes a meagre living playing European resorts and gets embroiled in a scheme to separate a man from his wife by means of a magic vanishing act.  The lover who races off with the wife in a motorboat is played by Jordin Hall, a Toronto actor whom I know very slightly.  This is actually a tiny part, and he doesn't turn up in the second or third acts, while the wife does reappear at some point.  (Jordin has a much meatier role in Richard II playing Bolingbroke who becomes King Henry IV.)  The play focuses entirely on the magician and the cuckolded man.  It's definitely an interesting play, and I enjoyed it.  As I alluded to above, two out of three ain't bad.

The ride home was not as nice as the ride in.  Congestion was moderately bad on the 401 and was just terrible on the Gardiner (maybe because of CNE traffic?).  I tried not to stress about it and just read my Rushdie novel (and ended up reading most of it, with only 100 pages left).  I also was able to play music on my iPod (still working!), though I had run the battery down to almost nothing by the time we got to Spadina.  Of course, we still had to hop on the TTC to get home, making it back just around 9 pm, roughly an hour later than we had planned.  But I still had Sunday off, which I guess is the advantage of leaving work on Friday.  (And I'll try to cover that in a shorter post soon.)  All in all, a very nice trip.

* Les Belles-Soeurs remains an important play, but I just like Albertine in Five Times quite a bit more.  I would definitely see that again.  In terms of more uplifting plays about working class women, I certainly prefer Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters, which I saw at Stratford in a very good production back in 2021.