This is not a review, just assortment of points, mostly personal.
While I didn’t enjoy this production, it did give me much to consider.
I have read published reviews and comments and am surprised by the favorable ones. I think what I am reading is people sensitive to and commenting on the excellence of Sophocles’ play. I guess what I have is a sense of what is can look like staged by this company, and I feel there were opportunities missed.
Was looking forward to this for these reasons: enjoyed the Stratford Elektra a couple years back, have never seen Oedipus live, and because Daniel Brooks was directing. I knew Daniel briefly when we were undergraduates at U of T, and performed in a play with him. Thought we’d see all kinds of inventive staging applied to this classic. Further excited by the involvement of Camellia Koo whose work I’ve admired for her way of serving the play and not just providing a strange design for the sake of looking interesting. She also does a full design, not just set.
In attendance for the opening that I could see from my seat were: Globe critic Kelly Nestruck; Festival AD Antoni Cimolino; and actor Colm Feore. I now know, based on Antoni’s location, which is the choicest seat in the TP theatre.
I bought a last minute discounted ticket and drove (2 hours each way) to the opening. Lesley didn’t want to go. On the way to the theatre I listened to the audio of the 1950’s Stratford production starring Douglas Campbell, by way of review and preparation. Mannered, old fashioned and stuffy, it did the job reminding me about the script.
The five minute hold didn’t seem necessary, but one sound effect, lx dim, and we were off. Auspicious beginning. Character in clad in red robes, a shade of red that I think of as Cardinal Red, “incensed” (distributing smoke about) the playing space with a modern smoke machine. Those machines are now shoe box size. It was beginning both ancient and contemporary. O enters in a cream suit and asks the audience simply “Why are you here?” A couple of lines later it becomes clear that these words are Sophocles’, and that we are being addressed as though we were the chorus. (Who are suppliants to O). It also becomes clear that this translation has been de-poetrified, it is very pedestrian prose. O paces some, because we don’t answer, and then sits to listen to the Priestess (also seated) who is now incensed (very angry) about the plague and wants O to do something. It is not clear why she is so angry about this because that is not what Sophocles wrote, and there is no other business to explain her ire. Perhaps in this productions yelling will indicate intensity. God I hope not.
Well, O seems a bit miffed about this treatment and explains that he’s already on the task. He’s almost sarcastic, and does this speech pacing I believe. He does a lot of pacing around the rectangular perimeter of the TP stage. (BTW-I thought Daniel Brooks attended the same lecture on Oedipus by Margaret Visser that I did while we pursued our Drama BA’s. She explained at great length about the importance of the circle as the central image in Oedipus. This was over 35 years ago and I still remember parts of it). I begin to notice that this prose translation, besides being rhythmically benign, is also longer than verse versions, as the translator wishes to convey so much of the original, compressed verse.
About 20 – 25 minutes into the show, the fellow two seats from me began to snore. Fortunately he woke himself up and he managed to fight off the zzzz’s the rest of evening.
Creon returns and seems ready to leave again immediately. He doesn’t want to say what he’s learning in front of us (we’re the Chorus, remember?) He lays it out, and the plot of course takes off.
The on stage Chorus entrance was dramatic and ritualist in its slowness. Each person approached a silver platter and laid paper money in it. While consistent with the notions of sacrifice and offerings paid to gods, this isn’t in the text, and the I was wondering if Brooks intended some kind of dig at Christianity or at modern Greek economics. The Chorus leader looked unreasonably like Angela Merkel to me. Chorus members then self-applied some clown white to their faces in a ritualistic manner to …. to… I don’t know why they did that. When completed, the Chorus was easily identifiable by these markings, but it was awfully abstract. Anyways, they were already identifiable by their grey business attire.
Periodically, at least three times, the lights flickered as though a distant thunderstorm threatened. It was a small detail and I found it more distracting than anything else. I recalled Theatre Centre type electrics (some of which I was responsible for at 666 King St. location) and how questionable the lighting grid can be in alternative spaces. Also distracting were the regular drum thuds that persisted throughout: this was the most consistent part of the soundscape. When it started I was glad because I thought it signalled a rhythmic ground against which the play (and especially the chorus). No, it wasn’t. I found that I tuned it out after a while.
Loved the entrance of Tiresias and his costume and performance. Here it made some sense for an actor to be seated, but he didn’t stay so.
The Chorus was behaving with a reduced set of techniques. Very little choral speech, because odes were turned into solo speeches made into a microphone. (Note to visiting directors at Stratford: your actors have trained for years so they can be heard clearly in all settings and situations. They do not need to be amplified.) I’m not sure what Brooks intended, but to me, they looked like audience members posing questions at a public meeting. That made all the involved invocations to the gods seem ridiculous. On the whole, very still and non-descript, sometimes in prolonged freezes. Some of these performers were the same ones who’d energized last year’s Mother Courage, and here they were seated, staring into the middle distance. Here I felt the director’s creativity was missing: give these great performers something to do. It was akin to watching finely tuned sports cars in stop and go city traffic. Frustrating.
Jocasta’s (Yanna McIntosh) performance energized every scene she was in, from her entrance right through her final exit. She seemed perfectly at home with the task of mingling a non-realistic text with a realistic emotions. I don’t think anyone else in this production came near to her in this.
Lally Cadeau’s messenger entered with a pail and I thought “charwoman.” She sat herself down and spoke one of the most compelling speeches in western literature in some kind of accented English. It may have been English as spoken by someone whose first language is Greek, but I couldn’t be sure. I thought it sounded more like one of Luba Goy’s crazy Ukranian ladies. Honestly, while I listened, I took nothing in, because I could not answer these questions: why a charwoman, why the accent, and what actor in her right mind elects to sit for a speech like this?
Nigel Bennett’s shepherd used a modified dialect too, and he elected the old British standby for rustics: west country. Arrgh, he be’s a roight Summerzet shep’erd, he be. Oh yah, character is seated.
Messenger from Corinth: seated for much.
We had to wait until about the 90 minute mark to find out what the plastic sheet was for. O, buck naked and much bedaubed in stage blood, crashes through it and it falls to the ground. It is a great effect. Not so great is watching our naked O unpack his thoughts. It’s an uncomfortable duration until he is covered with Creon’s coat. I looked over at Colm Feore a couple of times and he was very rapt. I imagined that he was very taken by the total nakedness of the performance; he more than most of us knows what Gord Rand was going through–centre stage and absolutely no tricks possible.
Ismene and Antigone entered weeping and I found their huddled grief very affecting.
At times, O’s intonation and cadence put me in mind of, and this is going to seem weird, Eric Peterson. I think of him as possessing an unmistakable Canadian accent, and Gord Rand, at times, sounded like him, I thought, right down to raspy-harshness of some upward inflections.
Two omissions I noted: The messenger from Corinth reminds the Theban shepherd of their shared time together. This was cut. I thought it an essential point, in terms of the plot and their relationship. Also, speeches were snipped from the end, including the all important “call (or “judge”) no one happy who is still alive”
Tags: Daniel Brooks, Gord Rand, Oedipus, Stratford Festival
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