Much Ado About Theatrics....

[fajrdrako]

I just saw the most inventive, funny, clever play.

It was Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, but not as I've ever seen it played.

It was theatre in the park, and not the first time I've seen Shakespeare in a park. I remember a rather terrible production of A Midsummer Night's Dream once in Regent's Park, London, and there have been other, less memorable park performances.

This is the first time the park with the performance has been a couple of blocks from my house.

I enveigled Beulah to go with me by promising to carry her chair. (And I did.) The performance was done by A Company of Fools, which has been performing in parks all over Ottawa this month. I'd heard it was good.

I had no doubt: Much Ado About Nothing is my favourite Shakespeare comedy, and it would be my favourite of all if it weren't for Hamlet. I've seen it in Stratford, Ontario; Stratford-Upon-Avon in England (where it was performed as in Colonial India); in London; in movies; at the National Arts Centre - anywhere I could. None of the performances were anything like this.

They call this the Torchlight Shakespeare series. The play had fifteen characters, played by three actors and a set of garden tools, with plastic flowers as props. Costumes converted Beatrice into the evil Don John in seconds; then into a ragtag Dogberry. A wall became a podium and a pulpit. Hero was played by a winsome mop with a Georgian accent and her father was a garden rake with rope hair and mustache. The priest was played by a garden gnome who talked like Porky Pig.

And they were all brilliant. I was particularly impressed by Margo MacDonald, who not only totally did justice to Beatrice, but was the funniest and best Dogberry I have ever seen - and I usually find Dogberry problematic. She was pretty sinister as Don John, too.

Scott Florence as Benedick was Beatrice's equal, and that's saying a lot.

There were between 100 and 150 people watching the show, at a guess - in lawn chairs or on blankets. Many of them were children and they particularly loved it, laughing loudly at all the really funny bits. So much for Shakespeare being difficult to get.

As the metaphorical curtain went up, it started to rain. They carried on bravely, and the rain stopped. Twenty minutes into the show it started to pour. They took a brief break to see if it would stop; it did, and, with the encouragement of the audience, they continued. Amazing that, despite being soaked, only a handful of people left.

From their programme:

We have big plans.... We plan to run shows in repertoire, so that you can come back more than once and see a different show. We envision a travelling wagon that converts into a stage. We dream of a large travelling tent, pennants snapping in the breeze, keeping the inclement weather from our heads. We see forty foot lollipops shaped like the Fools logo being licked by little children at every show....

That tent would have been useful tonight.

Comments

[dargie.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do want to live in Canada. I do, I do.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

So come visit! It's a great place.

[dargit.livejournal.com]

We will be at OLT Saturday night. I've heard about this play. Company of fools is great fun. Do you know their schedule or have an URL pointing to where/when they will be playing this summer?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed! Their URL is http://www.fools.ca/, and they have a calendar of where they'll be and when. parks all over the city, most evenings this month.

As for the OLT play - I wonder what you'll think of it. I found it very odd: surreal, intriguing and old-fashioned all at much. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

[moonchildetoo.livejournal.com]

Some of my earliest exposure to live Shakespeare was at a small open air amphitheatre set in a small city park. It was called Grove Shakespeare. They did four plays from June through September. It was so small there were no bad seats. They encouraged people to come early and have a picnic in the park before the performance (which I did with friends, after we bought season tickets for the ridiculous price of something like $40). About 45 mins. before the performance started, the actors set up a mini-stage in the midst of the picnickers and did impromptu recitings of speeches from that night's play and other plays, also silly stuff and drawing the audience into it. Great fun. I saw my first performances of Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice there. Sadly, they didn't manage their funds very well, and two years after I started going, the company dissolved. :-(

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Don't you hate it when a good company folds? There was a sortlived Shakespeare company in Ottawa which performed in a tent - a large, well-provided one with seats and lighting and so on. They gave excellent performance, but never got their financial act together and failed after a couple of seasons. I still miss them. They were better than Stratford - not because of resources and talent (which Stratford has) but because they didn't try to please mainsteam audiences and were able to be very imaginative.

I miss them.