Scholar’s take on the Bard
This retrospective tries a little too hard to live up to itself
Goodnight Desdemona, (Good Morning Juliet) The Great Canadian Theatre Company At the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre Reviewed Nov. 28 As if Constance Ledbelly, dressed in the drabbest outfit ever and nibbling at a cheese slice in her office as she labours over esoteric academic pursuits and dreams of true love, didn’t have enough problems.
Then her creator, playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald, tosses the hapless assistant professor of English down a rabbit hole that lands her in the middle of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet. There Constance, against her will, becomes a character in the plays, getting swept up in everything from old-fashioned sword fights involving doublet and gown-wearing folks to equally old-fashioned romantic dilemmas and inadvertently changing the course of the two plays in the process.
No wonder the poor lady looks a little out of her depth.
Constance, played by Margo MacDonald (no relation to the playwright), is the centrepiece of this clever and funny 25-year-old play about a voyage through a time warp. “I’ve only ever gone on package tours,” says the academic at one point, as fearful as she’s intrigued by what’s happened to her.
The play is also about self-discovery, about re-emerging from the rabbit hole a fuller and more self-aware person.
Alas, this production of MacDonald’s play never quite discovers its potential.
Directed by Ann Hodges, it tries too hard to live up to the play’s own reputation as a witty, shape-shifting standout of Canadian theatre that’s won a Governor General’s Award and other prizes.
That trying too hard applies especially to Margo MacDonald. A veteran of unexpected takes on Shakespeare, thanks to her long involvement with A Company of Fools, she has a great sense of comic timing but allows the desperation of Constance to seep into her acting.
That blunts our natural sympathy for this underdog who’s convinced that Othello and Romeo and Juliet were not only written by an unknown author but were also intended to be comedies not tragedies. Proof of the latter rests in the absence of the archetypal “wise Fool” in either piece: if he’s not there, he must have been removed and the tragedies must therefore have been originally comedies, all of which makes sense in an academically convoluted way.
This production’s strenuous effort to live up to expectations also means the play’s few flaws — principally its author’s tendency to pack too much into it — stand out more than they might otherwise.
Underdog or not, Constance heroically saves Desdemona (Sascha Cole who, like all cast members except MacDonald, plays multiple roles) from her fate at the hands of her jealous and non-too-bright husband Othello (Geoff McBride) and the conniving Iago (Zach Counsil, who just looks like too nice a guy to be conniving).
Cole’s bloodthirsty, sword-wielding Desdemona — Cole overdoes it more than once — could be an ancestor of Mary Walsh’s Marg Delahunty, Princess Warrior. Like Pippa Leslie’s alternately sulky and frisky Juliet, whom Constance also saves from a premature demise, Desdemona is not just a drama queen but also a strong, modern woman in old-time clothing, underscoring the feminist theme of MacDonald’s play.
The play also ventures into samesex territory with some very funny scenes involving Romeo (Counsil), Juliet and Constance herself whose secret longing for passion has, it turns out, been aimed down the wrong gender path. Still, the play is a quarter-century old, and MacDonald’s venture down these sexual pathways is, by today’s standards, innocent.
And experience, as Constance discovers, inevitably succeeds innocence.