Passion and wit share the stage

Shakespeare in Love a delight

Shakespeare In Love The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Avon Theatre, Stratford

Something has happened to Shakespeare in Love on its journey from London to Stratford: it’s gotten good.

When I saw this stage version of the much- cheri shed movie in the West End a couple of years ago, I thought it a spectacularly pointless exercise. The film still exists, its script could hardly be improved upon, and neither could its actors. An ad hoc stage cast could hardly compete; the one assembled in London certainly couldn’t.

The Stratford production has the same director, Declan Donnellan, working with his regular design partner Nick Ormerod. In Stratford, however, he’s working with a company that makes all the difference, especially in a show that is, like the movie, a celebration of theatre.

I won’t pretend that I didn’t still miss the movie performers, and especially the casual yet precise way in which they flicked off Tom Stoppard’s jokes. Stoppard shared credit for the screenplay with Marc Norman, but it seems generally accepted that the original idea was Norman’s while the humour is Stoppard’s: deliciously anachronistic in its appropriation of modern showbiz idioms (“you’re not going to do it that way, are you?”), but somehow fitting right in with this piece about the birth of modern theatre.

Lee Hall’s stage adaptation keeps many of the great lines and moments, but it coarsens them. This affected the London actors and it infects the Stratford ones too: actors mostly playing actors, some of them carry individual rambunctiousness to generalized extremes. As a group, however, they make the story their own. Just the way they huddle when disaster threatens, or the way they cheer when it’s overcome, are enough to put us on their side.

Some of the individual performances are delightful: Tom McCamus as the stagestruck moneylender Fennyman, transformed from tyrant to acolyte at the offer of a walk- on role, and Stephen Ouimette as the manager Philip Henslowe, who historically was a loan- shark, but who figures here as an anxious and committed impresario, confident that the show not only must but will go on.

Above all, we have a central couple with real passion, real wit, and real chemistry. Luke Humphrey’s is a dashing, spirited Shakespeare, released from a writer’s block so severe that his friend and rival Christopher Marlowe, in a balcony scene apparently inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac, has to feed him the words to woo his lady. Shannon Taylor is truly inspiring as Viola, the lady in question, finding temporary release from court life by posing as a boy player.

Through one another, they discover love, changing the course of English drama; he gets to write Romeo and Juliet, she — for one night or afternoon only — gets to play its female lead. Then she sails for America and an arranged marriage as he writes Twelfth Night, naming its heroine after her: the great bittersweet comedy to commemorate a bittersweet affair.

Donnellan’s production is great fun and moves with speed and purpose. Ormerod’s set is cunning and versatile, a theatre within a theatre. One lament: I wish they had found some way of staging my favourite moment from the film. I love the scene in which a Puritan, who had been protesting outside the playhouse with the proph- etic slogan “their business is show,” joins the crowd in throwing his hat in the air at the climax of the world’s first great love tragedy.

Shakespeare in Love is history as fairy- tale. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this year’s children’s play at Stratford, is fairy-tale firmly rooted in history, and it’s a matching success.

Stratford this season is rich in good child actors and equally rich, it seems, in good grown- up actors playing children. Gareth Potter, Ruby Joy, Andre Morin and Sara Farb are not only believable as youngsters; they’re dead- on convincing as English middle-class evacuees in the Second World War. Adrian Mitchell’s stage version of the C. S. Lewis novel gives us an establishing scene in a railway station that sets up Narnia in both an ominous and reassuring fashion.

We reach it, as the four children do, through a world of books. The professor’s house in which they are billeted seems, in Douglas Paraschuk’s set designs abetted by Brad Peterson’s projections, to be made of books: a tribute to a certain kind of imagination, the kind that’s fed by literature. Narnia, on the other side of the wardrobe, is similarly book- bedecked.

Tim Carroll’s production is ceaselessly inventive and imaginative. It’s also excellently acted. Tom McCamus doubles as man and beast, professor and lion, and is actually fiercer as the first than as the second. That’s clearly intentional; as Aslan he projects a regal gentleness from within a magnificent maned shell in the style of the War Horse; he’s its voice and also its front legs. Yanna McIntosh makes a silk- ily, almost campily seductive White Witch, whose menace, when she unleashes it. is chilling. Mike Nadajewski is a charming Mr. Tumnus, and there’s sterling work from good beavers, bad wolves and unclassifiable others.

The songs, which originated in this adaptation’s London production, might have been dispensed with. Or so I thought until we got to the musical assault of the witch’s minions on Aslan’s supposedly lifeless body. It was very effective, and needed the preceding jollier numbers to set it up. The Christian symbolism of Aslan’s sacrifice and resurrection is played down: a relief in many ways.

This show and Shakespeare in Love inhabit the populist wing of the festival; their titles practically guarantee them an audience. This time they both deserve it.