Festival follies, or, if all the world's a stage, what am I doing in standing room?

For over 25 years, we've turned the perennial trek to the Stratford and Shaw festivals into a kind of Pilgrimage. (Mohammedans had their Mecca; Newfoundlanders, their Boston; Torontonians, their summer theatre.) Ritual is important, even in the 1980s, and for this reason we present the following: how to get there, what to do on the way and plot summaries of the major offerings to help you respond to an almost religious experience.

DESTINATION ONE: Stratford

How to get there: Take Highway 401, aka
the Macdonald-Cartier, west to Highway 7/8, bypassing the 138,000 "antique shoppes" that line the route. Your arrival in Shakespeare, Ontario, with its "must-see" Renaissance gas station, indicates you're getting warm.

Sidetrips: Another hour's drive will get you to Paris and London. Scotland is only a few kilometres south of Paris, Vienna can be reached via highways 24, 3 and 19, and Dublin is a mere 25 kilometres along Highway 8. Kitchener used to be called Berlin, but you can't have everything.

The Festival stage: It's to be hoped you'll attend a performance in the main Festival theatre, one of the few "open" or "thrust" stages in the world, and with good reason. Experiencing a play in this auditorium is a deeply personal thing. Why? Because thanks to the design of the stage, only a handful of people in the audience can hear what an actor is saying and see the gestures that accompany his speech.

The quest for novelty: Theatre-going at Stratford heightens one's sense of surprise: With the Festival, one never knows what century a play will be placed in. Will Macbeth occur in the 2500s, a la Buck Rogers, with three visitors from outer space in lieu of the witches? How about an 1800s version of The Taming of the Shrew, with Kate as a suffragette, fighting for her rights against a sexist Petruchio? The Stratford Festival has it all: The two gentlemen of Verona may be gay lovers, or Romeo and Juliet might burst into "Tonight" from West Side Story.

A warning: Do not complain if you cannot understand what's going on during a given
play. Shakespeare never meant to be understood, or else he wouldn't have written in such anachronistic language. Bring along a set of Coles Notes and leaf through them studiously during the long, boring speeches. You can always look up when there is a battle scene. (A helpful hint: A "soliloquy" means a speech heard only by those in the $20 seats.)

A final suggestion: Listen carefully. The mixture of British, American, Canadian and mid-Atlantic accents in Stratford productions has been known to create hours of rollicking laughter, even in the most solemn of tragedies.

But now, to the least important aspect of your journey to the Stratford Festival -- the plays:


TWELFTH NIGHT (Festival Stage, June 9-October 25)

Plot synopsis: Orsino, Duke of Illyria, loves the Countess Olivia and sends his page Cesario, who is really. Viola, to plead his case. Cesario/Viola actually loves the Duke, but Olivia falls for the page, who thanks heaven she was born 350 years before Anita Bryant. Viola/Cesario's twin brother, Sebastian, happens along, marries Olivia, leaving his sister to marry Orsino. In Shakespeare's time, all these marriages were considered a happy ending. A puritanical kill joy named Malvolio will remind you of your Grade 11 English teacher, if you went to the same collegiate I did.

Comments to make:

Vulgar: "Twelfth night? I thought this was opening night!"

Philistine: "You call this a comedy? Give me The Ropers any day."

Intellectual: "You know, Twelfth Night was written the same year as Hamlet, and you can see the same bleak weltanschauung in the treatment of Malvolio and in the utterances of the clown, Feste."

Sincere: "I had hepatitis and missed school for the four months we took Twelfth Night."

HENRY V (Festival Stage, June 10-October 26)

Plot synopsis: King Henry unites the dissident factions in the English army and invades France, crushing them against heavy odds (Jimmy the Greek gave IX to IV) at Agincourt. Henry marries the French. King's daughter, uniting the two lands and assuring the
succession. (Would that modern politics were so easy.) Fluellen, Jamy and Macmorris will insult every Welshman, Scot and Irishman in the audience (respectively), and such beguiling rogues as Nym, Pistol and Bardolph provide constant humorous diversion for every Ph.D. in English and 400-year-old cockney in the audience.

Comments to make:

Philistine: "Agincourt? That's less than three miles from my office, and I had to drive two hours to Stratford to hear about it?"

Bigoted: "I'm glad to see the English beat the French. It's been too bloody long the other way round in this damned country. Have you read Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow?"

Intellectual: "The king certainly has made a miraculous transformation upon his ascension to the throne, from the madcap Prince Hal of the early Henry plays, to become a 'mirror of all Christian Kings,' hasn't he?"

Sincere: "Oh, shut up."

Ignorant: "You told me there was some funny fat guy in this play."

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA by John Gay (Avon Stage, June 9-September 13)

Plot synopsis: Thieves and whores make 18th-century London look like today's Yonge Street (or Bay Street, if you're NDP). Macheath, a dashing highwayman, is secretly married to Polly Peachum and wanted by the police and half the women in London. Polly's parents, greedy for the reward, arrange his capture, giving new and deeper significance to in-law jokes. Macheath agrees to marry Lucy Lockit, the prisonkeeper's daughter, if she'll help him escape, something Ken Taylor did not demand of the Americans in the Canadian Embassy in Iran. Macheath's plan goes awry, and he is led off to the gallows; and, if you want to know the ending, see the play.

Comments to make:

Vulgar: "Some beggar's opera. What beggars could afford $15.50 a ticket?"

Philistine: "Didn't Bobby Darin have a hit about this?"

Intellectual: "It's a remarkable political satire, when one recalls that the author John Gay was carrying on a Tory campaign against Sir Robert Walpole's Whig administration, with its notorious methods of controlling elections."

Sincere: "If you'd mailed in the order form when I told you to, we could have had better seats."

TITUS ANDRONICUS (Festival Stage, June 11-July 27)

Plot synopsis: Titus defeats the Goths, which is more than the Maple Leafs could have done, and agrees to the religious sacrifice of the captive Queen Tamora's eldest son, which engenders her hatred and the audience's revulsion. But they ain't seen nothin' yet: The Queen's sons, Demetrius and Chiron, murder Bassianus, then rape Titus' daughter, Lavinia, cutting off her hands and cutting out her tongue. Titus cuts off his hand to save his sons, and gets their dismembered heads in return, proving that life wasn't fair in ancient Rome, either. The Queen eats a pie made of her own sons, is stabbed by Titus, who is stabbed by Saturninus, who is killed by Lucius. In all, it might be the Conservative caucus on a long lunch hour.

Comments to make:

Philistine: "If I wanted to see violence like this, I could have stayed home and watched TV."

Frank: "If I wanted to see violence like this, I could have stayed home and looked out my front window."

Intellectual: "It's basically a revenge tragedy, in the fashion of Kyd, although I detect a number of classical influences, particularly Seneca and Ovid."

Nostalgic: "I haven't seen such treachery since Jack Horner joined the Liberals for a cabinet post."

KING LEAR (Avon Stage, September 14-November 8)

Plot synopsis: The headstrong Lear divides his kingdom among his three daughters, banishing the honest Cordelia and awarding the realm to the treacherous Goneril and Regan, who turn him out into the cold. (This was centuries before Parent Effectiveness Training.) Lear goes mad, while his friend Gloucester has his eyes gouged out, thanks
to his son, Edmund, who is a bastard in more ways than one.

Comments to make:

Pseudointellectual: "I liked Ustinov better in Topkapi."

More intellectual: "I liked him even better in Death on the Nile."

Intellectual: "Out of the physical and mental darkness of Lear and Gloucester certainly comes a spiritual light, eh?"

Cynical: "So the director placed the action in the 19th century. Why not go all the way
and make it in the 20th century and have Lear howl outside a singles bar?"

Sympathetic: "If my kids acted that way to me, I'd break their necks."

Concerned: "If I wanted to see violence like this, I could have gone to Titus Andronicus."

Stunned: "I thought this was Titus Andronicus."

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT by Eugene O'Neill (Avon Stage, October 4-November 8)

Plot synopsis: James Tyrone is a cheapskate, his wife is a dope addict, their elder son, Jamie, is cynical and dissipated, and younger son, Edmund, has TB. The then get drunk, the mother gets stoned, the audience gets depressed.

Comments to make:

Sensitive: "If I had a family like that, I'd drink; too."

Knowledgeable: "O'Neill did, and he did."

Philistine: "Give me Little House on the Prairie. Now that's a family I can relate to."

Intellectual: "One can, see why O'Neill chose to let the play be produced only posthumously, when one considers the uncommonly moving revelations of his family's character and relations."

Honest: "I need to be cheered up. Let's catch tomorrow's matinee of Titus Andronicus."

BRIEF LIVES (Third Stage, July 19-September 6)

Plot synopsis: Douglas Rain performs in a one-man show, based on the observations
of London in the 1600s made in the diary of John Aubrey, which was a kind of People magazine without the photos.

Comments to make:

Gossipy: "I hear that Rain is sleeping with the director of this thing."

Knowledgeable: "I should hope so. It was directed by Martha Henry, and he's married
to her."

Crude: "For, $6.50 a seat, I wanna see more than one guy on that stage."

DESTINATION TWO: Niagara-on-the-Lake

How to get there: Take the Queen Elizabeth Way west and south, pausing briefly to admire the steel mills of Hamilton, a town that possesses a sports team owned by Harold Ballard, its only claim to fame.

Exciting stop: The Burlington Skyway, which cancelled its toll after more than 1.5 years, probably the only example of a deliberate removal of a toll since the Rome Aquaduct built in 185 BC.

Hot tip: A detour west along Highway 3, and then south on 24 will take you to Turkey Point, where the national Progressive Conservatives developed their foreign policy in
1979. And stay on 3 for another, few kilometres to arrive at Nixon, a town that most visitors don't kick around any more.

The theatre: The Festival Theatre of the Shaw Festival is a handsome, luxurious place, radiating all the warmth, intimacy and attractiveness of the O'Keefe Centre on a slow
night. With prices up to $13.50 for orchestra seats and $10 for balcony, Torontonians
should feel at home in more ways than one.

And now, to the least important aspect, of your journey - the plays:

MISALLIANCE by George Bernard Shaw (May 28-October 5)

Plot synopsis: Mr. Tar1etox, like Robert Stanfield, a wealthy underwear manufacturer, gets no respect, like Rodney Dangerfield, from his wife and children. A Polish aviatrix,
Lina Szczepanowska, crashes through the conservatory roof, recalling Joe Clark in
Question Period. Everyone tries to make love to the woman, even though, they can't pronounce her name. Tarleton's illegitimate son tries to kill him, and everyone ends up
happily: There's amoral here somewhere.

Comments to make:

Sincere: "This would make a great musical."

Thoughtful: "You told me it was a musical."

Intellectual: "Although hardly major Shaw, one can see his same concern with eternal questions of love and human relationships shining through."

Impressionable: "Crashing through a conservatory roof? Now that's what I call making an entrance."

THE CHERRY ORCHARD by Anton Chekhov (May 29-August 10)

Plot synopsis: The Ranevskayas fear that their beloved cherry orchard might be sold and naturally do nothing to raise the money to cover the payments which will speak to hundreds of thousans of Canadians in 1980 who are paying 18%. Madame Ranevskaya lives in the past, her brother, Gayev, thinks only of billiards, and a wily freed serf, Lopakhin, buys the orchard, which is a wonderful, example to struggling young Canadian entrepreneurs.

Comments to make:

Philistine: "They call this a comedy?"

Knowing: "This is the most unfunny comedy I've ever seen."

Vulgar: "You want comedy? Give me Mork & Mindy any day."

Intellectual: "What a delicate, nostalgic and yet ironic portrait of Russian landowners in the 19th century!"

Critical: "A Russian play, eh? Now I'm sure that Canada shouldn't go to the Moscow Olympics this summer."

A FLEA IN HER EAR by Georges Feydeau (May 30-October 5)

Plot synopsis: People married to each other and not married to each other meet, mate and try to escape discovery in a hotel, recalling the Companions Wanted column in The Globe and Mail. There are more beds than in the Eaton Centre, and they are put to better purpose.

Comments to make:

Cynical: "If I wanted to see sexual highjinks like this, 1 could have stayed at the office today instead of driving all the way down here."

Curious: "What did you just say, Harold?"

Intellectual: "The complications are far richer in Feydeau than in the earlier plays of
Sardou, Labiche or Beaumarchais, aren't they? And his mockery is so unsparing!"

Thoughtful: "This play reminds me of the Companions Wanted column in The Globe and Mail."

And you still want to go???