The Buddha in an English Garden

I pray you all give your audience,
And hear this matter with reverence,
By figure a moral play:
The Summoning of Everyman called it is,
That of our lives and ending shows
How transitory we be all day.
This matter is wondrous precious,
But the intent of it is more gracious,
And sweet to bear away.
The story saith: Man, in the beginning,
Look well, and take good heed to the ending,
Be you never so gay!
Ye think sin in the beginning full sweet,
Which in the end causeth thy soul to weep,
When the body lieth in clay.
Here shall you see how fellowship and jollity,
Both strength, pleasure, and beauty,
Will fade from thee as flower in May;
For ye shall hear, how our heaven king
Calleth Everyman to a general reckoning:
Give audience, and hear what he doth say!
– The Summoning of Everyman, in Everyman and Mankind, Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen, ed. (London: Methuen, 2009) 181-183.

The Buddha in a Bright Russian Glade

I picture Count Leo Tolstoy sitting at a portable writing desk in the garden of his ancestral home at Yasnaya Polyana on a summer afternoon in the 1870s. A few rustic men sit about him, emancipated serfs and their sons, also residents of the estate at Yasnaya Polyana, until quite recently in the scheme of things, slaves of the Count. There is a visitor or two among the group, wandering monks of the sort so common in Imperial Russia. The sun glints off Tolstoy’s greying beard (he has survived a half century now) and off the shiny black beards of the young men around him. The Count listens to the young itinerant starets as he speaks, in his way, about the existential questions with which Tolstoy has himself been struggling.

In his Исповѣдь (Confession), Tolstoy begins to describe just such a conversation as I imagine, but he abruptly turns from the living people around him to the books he has been reading. Then he casually remarks on something that may seem odd to a modern reader and certainly was surprising to a younger version of myself:

Слушал я разговор безграмотного мужика странника о боге, о вере, о жизни, о спасении, и знание веры открылось мне. Сближался я с народом, слушая его суждения о жизни, о вере, и я всё больше и больше понимал истину. То же было со мной при чтении Четьи-Минеи и Прологов; это стало любимым моим чтением. Исключая чудеса, смотря на них как на фабулу, выражающую мысль, чтение это открывало мне смысл жизни. Там были жития Макария Великого, Иоасафа царевича (история Будды), там были слова Иоанна Златоуста, слова о путнике в колодце, о монахе, нашедшем золото, о Петре мытаре; там история мучеников, всех заявлявших одно, что смерть не исключает жизни; там истории о спасшихся безграмотных, глупых и не знающих ничего об учениях церкви.
– Исповѣдь автор Лев Николаевич Толстой (мой акцент)

I was listening to an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, talking about God, faith, life, and salvation, and a knowledge of faith was opened up to me. I grew closer to the people as I listened to their reflections on life and faith, and I began to understand the truth more and more. The same thing happened to me when I read the Martyrology and the Prologues; they became my favorite reading. Taking exception to the miracles and viewing them as fables that expressed an idea, these readings revealed to me the meaning of life. Among them were the lives of Macarius the Great and Prince Ioasaph (the story of the Buddha), the writings of John Chrysostom, the story of the traveller in the well, of the monk who discovered gold and of Peter the Publican; they included the / histories of the martyrs, all of whom proclaimed that life does not end with death. These were tales of illiterate, stupid men who found salvation though they knew nothing of the teachings of the Church.
– translated by David Patterson, (Norton: New York, 1983) p. 83-4. (Emphasis mine)

Ignoring for the moment Tolstoy’s slighting of the “illiterate, stupid men” in the learned literary histories who had found salvation despite their stupidity and illiteracy –

What is this?: “Prince Ioasaph (the story of the Buddha)”?; The Buddha in a European Martyrology, a Book of Saints Lives rooted in the most widespread genre of Medieval Literature? Nobody mentioned this to me in grad school when I was studying – what was it again? – oh yeah: Medieval Literature!

Well, it turns out all those non-mentioners might be excused by the fact that the Middle English life of the Buddha in the Cambridge Peterhouse manuscript was not published until 1986, two years after I retreated from formal Academia. And I suspect my interlocutors were, as was I, largely ignorant of Count Leo’s Confession. Certainly the connection of the Christian saints Barlam and Josaphat to the Buddha has been known to a small set of philologists since the early nineteenth century. But, since 1986, it has become more widely known that the narrative wisdom of Buddhism has been a huge influence on literature and thinking of the Arab and European world since long, long before the New-Age-California-Buddhism that seemed a fellow-traveller of the Beatles-Hindu-British-Invasion I remember from my early years.   As an aside – in what is rapidly becoming more of a free-form collage of reference than what might be termed an essay – I also remember feeling like that other Medieval piece of wisdom, The Cloud of Unknowing, had a kind of mystical, Eastern vibe – and the Middle English Barlam and Josaphat hints at that cloud:

þauʒ he woulde nat as at þat tyme perfitly receyue þe ful knowynge of Criste for þe derke clowde þeat was aboute his soule.
– Barlam and Iosaphat: A Middle English Life of the Buddha, (London: Early English Text Society, 1986), p. 132.

That is perhaps a discussion for another day.

The Buddha on the Road to Xanadu

Unknown to many then and now, the Life of the Buddha was a very popular narrative throughout the Middle Ages in Europe and the Arab world. It was passed along and rolled around the Muslim world and through an Armenian telling and finally a Georgian version before bursting into Western Europe as the story of Saints Barlam (or Barlaam) and Josaphat (or Ioasaph). It came to Count Tolstoy through Byzantium and the Eastern Orthodoxies, quite probably from Georgia.   The life of the Buddha came to Medieval and Renaissance theatre through retellings in the widely and wildly popular and ever mutable collections titled the Gesta Romanorum and the Golden Legend, perhaps the Star Trek and Star Wars of an earlier, more sophisticated age. And, more clearly, the Life of the Buddha was told and retold in every European language, in churches and abbeys, in monasteries and nunneries, in the various lives of Barlam and Josaphat until it was so much a part of the European understanding of world history that according to one of the two Venetian (Vb) versions of his Travels, Marco Polo (or his prison amanuensis, Rustichello da Pisa) seemed surprised to hear on his travels the story of the Buddha’s life because it was so much like the familiar one of Old Saint Josaphat:

Questo asomeia alla vita de san Iosafat lo qual fo fiolo del re Avenir de quelle parte de India, e fo convertido alla fé cristiana per lo remito Barlam, segondo chome se legie nella vita e llegende di santi padri . . . .  –  Pamela Gennari, «Milione», Redazione Vb: Edizione Critica Commentata, (Venice: Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 2009) p. 214.

“This is similar to the life of Saint Josaphat who was the son of King Avenir of that part of India, and who was converted to the Christian faith by Barlam the Hermit, according to what may be read in the lives and legends of the Holy Fathers . . . .” (my translation)

Times have changed: nowadays we can google “Barlaam and Josaphat” and find all sorts of “information”. One of my favourite bits of “knowledge” comes from the wonderfully detailed but flawed Wikipedia entry in which (at the moment – someone will edit it soon enough) we can learn that Shakespeare lifted the three box test in The Merchant of Venice from Caxton’s translation of The Golden Legend and also that he lifted the three box test in The Merchant of Venice from the Gesta Romanorum and that, in the end, he lifted it from Barlaam and Josaphat and, I suppose, from the Life of the Buddha. The actually convincing argument, based on surviving texts and printed records, is that Shakespeare lifted the test from the Gesta Romanorum, not from Caxton, and that, when all is said and done, Portia lands herself, by whatever route, in a Buddhist apologue as well as in a Venetian courtroom.

The Buddha in a Venetian Courtroom

The story of Barlaam the Hermit is told in volume 7 of Caxton’s Golden Legend and it does contain a scene involving four chests. But the story of the three caskets which was used by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice more obviously comes from the Gesta Romanorum (which is not a Caxton piece) and, probably, from Wynkyn de Worde’s translation published in the second decade of the sixteenth century and published again in London in a revised version in 1577 by Richard Robinson. It is unclear where the Gesta Romanorum three casket version originated, but an origin in a version Barlam and Josaphat, seems likely.  The Middle English version, which clearly derives from the four-casket Greek version traditionally attributed to John of Damascus (do I need to quote the Greek?), has four caskets:

Afterwarde þe kynge comaunded four chestis to be made of tree, and tweyn were kouered al aboute with gold, and put þerin ful of deed mennys bonys, and shett hem fast with lokkis of gold. That oþer tweyne were al dawbyd aoute with pych and terre, and fylde hem ful of precious stonys and noble oynementis and swete bawmes, and bonde hem aboute with cordis. Than he bade to come before hym all þo lordis and gentiles þat made his broþer to reproue hym for his humylite, and sette tofore hem þes four chesis, and bade hem deme whych of þo chestis weren most ryce and precious. Anon þei demyd þe two chestis of gold to be richer þan þe oþer tweyne, for þei supposed þat in hem was grete tresoure of diademys and of oþer precious iewellys. And þe oþer chestis þat were dawbyd without with pich and terre, þei seide þat þei were foule and abhomynable, and no good þynge worthy to put þerin . . . .
– Barlam and Iosaphat: A Middle English Life of the Buddha, (London: Early English Text Society, 1986), pp.23-24.

There follows the opening of the boxes and both the sickly and the sweet smells and the moralizing which Caxton repeats:

. . . And after this he did do make four chests, and did do cover two of them with gold withoutforth, and did do fill them with bones of dead men and of filth. And the other two he did do pitch and did do fill them with precious stones and rich gems. And after this the king did do call his great barons, because he knew well that they complained of him to his brother, and did do set these four chests tofore them, and demanded of them which were most precious, and they said that the two that were gilt were most of value. Then the king commanded that they should be opened, and anon a great stench issued out of them. And the king said: They be like them that be clothed with precious vestments and be full withinforth of ordure and of sin. And after, he made open the other and there issued a marvellous sweet odour. And after, the king said: These be semblable to the poor men that I met and honoured, for though they be clad of foul vestments, yet shine they withinforth with good odour of good virtues, and ye take none heed but to that withoutforth, and consider not what is within. And thou hast done to me like as that king did, for thou hast well received me.
– The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, Compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, 1275 First Edition Published 1470, Englished by William Caxton, First Edition 1483 Volume Seven. From the Temple Classics Edited by F.S. ELLIS First issue of this Edition, 1900 Reprinted 1922, 1931.

And now compare this, from Wynkyn de Worde’s translation of the Gesta Romanorum (emphasis mine):

And whan he hadde thus sayd he lette brynge forth thre vesselles. The fyrste was made of pure golde couched well with precyous stones without and within full of deed mennes bones and there vpon was this poyse wryten who soo chieseth me shall fynde that he deserueth. The seconde vesselle was made of fyne syluer fylled with erthe and wormes and thus was the superscrypcyon who soo cheseth me shall fynde that his nature desyreth. The thyrde vessell was made of lede full within of precyous stones and therupon was wryten this poyse who soo cheseth me shall fynde that god hathe dysposed for hym. These thre vessels the Emperour shewed to the mayden and sayd. Loo here doughter these ben noble vessels yf thou chese one these wherin is profyte to the and to other than shalte thou haue my sone. And yf thou chese that wherin is no profyte to the nor to none other sothely thou shalte not wedde hym whan the mayden sawe this she lefte vp her handes to almyghty god & sayd. Thou lorde whiche knoweste all thynges graūte me grace this houre so to chose that I may receyue the Emperours sone. And with that she behelde the fyrste vessell of golde that was lorged and graued royally and redde the scrypture. Who cheseth me. &c. saynge thus. Thoughe this vessell be full precyous and made of pure golde. Neuerthelesse I woote neuer what is within. Therfore my lorde this vessell wyll not I chese. And thenne byhelde she the seconde vessell that was of clere syluer and redd. the superscrypcyon who so che¦seth me shal fynde that whiche his nature desyreth. Thynkynge thus within her selfe yf I chese this vessell what is within knowe I not but well I wote there shall I fynde that nature desyreth and my nature desyreth the luste of yflesshe and therfore this vesselle wyll I not chese whan she had seen those two vesselles and gyuen an answere as touchynge to theym she behelde the thyrde vessell of lede and rede the superscrypcyon who soo cheseth he shall fynde that god hathe dysposed. Thynkynge within her selfe. This vessell is not passynge ryche ne precious without for∣the. Neuerthelesse the superscrypcyon sayth who choseth me shall fynde that god hath dysposed and withouten doubte almyghty god neuer dysposed ony harme. Therfore as as nowe I wyll chese this vessell whan the Emperour sawe this he sayd. O good mayden open thy vessell for it is full of precyous stones and see yf thou haste welle chosen or none whan this yonge ladye had opened it atte the Emperours commaūdement she founde it full of golde and precyous stones lyke as the Emperour had tolde her before and than sayd the Emperour O my dere doughter bycause thou haste wysely chosen therfore thou shalte wedde my sone. And whan he had soo sayd he ordeyned a maryage and wedded theym to gyder worthely with moche Ioye & honoure. And so they contynned to theyr lyues ende bothe in Ioye and solace.

Which is more like The Merchant of Venice? The caskets, or chests, and the inscriptions, are so woven through Shakespeare’s version that it were almost pointless to make quotation. Go see the play. But . . .

in Act II, scene ix the Prince of Aragon gives us the inscriptions (emphasis mine):

And so have I address’d me. Fortune now
To my heart’s hope! Gold; silver; and base lead.
‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.’
You shall look fairer, ere I give or hazard.
What says the golden chest? ha! let me see:
‘Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.’
What many men desire! that ‘many’ may be meant
By the fool multitude, that choose by show,
Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach;
Which pries not to the interior, but, like the martlet,
Builds in the weather on the outward wall,
Even in the force and road of casualty.
I will not choose what many men desire,
Because I will not jump with common spirits
And rank me with the barbarous multitudes.
Why, then to thee, thou silver treasure-house;
Tell me once more what title thou dost bear:
‘Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves:’
And well said too; for who shall go about
To cozen fortune and be honourable
Without the stamp of merit? Let none presume
To wear an undeserved dignity.
O, that estates, degrees and offices
Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honour
Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!
How many then should cover that stand bare!
How many be commanded that command!
How much low peasantry would then be glean’d
From the true seed of honour! and how much honour
Pick’d from the chaff and ruin of the times
To be new-varnish’d! Well, but to my choice:
‘Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.’
I will assume desert. Give me a key for this,
And instantly unlock my fortunes here.

Clearly Shakespeare drank from the font of the Gesta Romanorum, likely ladled out by (the marvelously named) Wynkyn de Worde, with its three inscribed chests and their inscriptions (and then Shakespeare made it all his own), not from Caxton’s Golden Legend and it’s redundantly paired four caskets that have nothing to do with matrimony.

And all of this is variations and elaborations on a theme from Barlaam and Josaphat.

And, just for fun, the Greek:

Ἐκέλευσε δὲ γενέσθαι ἐκ ξύλων βαλάντια τέσσαρα. καὶ τὰ μὲν δύο περικαλύψας πάντοθεν χρυσίῳ, καὶ ὀστᾶ νεκρῶν ὀδωδότα βαλὼν ἐν αὐτοῖς, χρυσαῖς περόναις κατησφαλίσατο: τὰ δὲ ἄλλα πίσσῃ καταχρίσας καὶ ἀσφαλτώσας, ἐπλήρωσε λίθων τιμίων καὶ μαργαρίτων πολυτίμων καὶ πάσης μυρεψικῆς εὐωδίας. . . .   – St. John Damascene, Barlaam and Ioasaph, Chapter VI, section 42

The Buddha in a Cloistered Garden

And there is another English play, earlier than Shakespeare, in which the Buddha speaks. Everyman, sometimes called, as it is self-described, The Summoning of Everyman is, in large measure, a variation of the “Man with Three Friends” parable in Barlaam and Josaphat. (pp. 57-59 in Hirsh’s Early English Text Society Edition). In a nutshell, a man is summoned by authority to account for himself. The man calls upon two kinsmen two vouch for him and they both turn away. In desperation, the man calls upon an acquaintance he has neglected, and that true friend stands by his side. While the narrative details are disparate, the moral is the same: the deeds we do, the friends we cultivate, without investment or expectation of profit, will be the ones who give us the greatest return.

It is strange that Bruster and Rasmussen in their recent edition of Everyman in the Arden Early Modern Drama series (referenced above) include in their “Appendix 4” (pp. 260-262) two analogues, one from the Gesta Romanorum and the other from “the Buddhist tradition in a text from before the Christian era” ( p. 260), but they do not mention by name Barlaam and Josaphat, the conduit connecting Buddhist tradition and the Gesta Romanorum. They do, however, offer that “This story of the ‘faithful friend’ draws on a parable found in Buddhist literature as early as the third century BCE, and which appears in the literature of many Eastern and Western nations” and, furthermore, was available “in various European versions” (p. 260) the most obvious of which, Barlaam and Josaphat, they leave unmentioned.

Curious.

The Buddha in my Winter Garden

John C. Hirsh, the first modern editor of the Middle English Barlam and Iosaphat, who’s tremendous work underlies everything I am mumbling here, writes in his preface (Early English Text Society, 1986, p. viii):

. . . I have been struck too by how arbitrary the line is we draw between East and West. I do not mean to minimize cultural differences – the text itself stands against any such simplification – but merely to record my sense that the final pattern here does not associate the work with one culture, or with one tradition. The changes, many of them substantive, which it has undergone, may fix one version – but the narrative itself seems always to invite another. If there is a final cause for the extraordinary distribution of the text, that cause seems to me at once deeply religious and profoundly human – very like the text itself.

As I have casually jumped and slithered and tumbled down this source-critical rabbit-hole over a number of years and more concertedly over the last few weeks, I have come to realize quite clearly that the narrative of human understanding is unparsable, indivisible, uncategorizeable. There are no genres. No human story or history is an island. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, tragedy, comedy, history, and advertising all share and depend upon the vast anthology of human tales. Jains and Sikhs, Druze and Daoists, Maya and Catholic, DC and Marvel, depend on our common stories. Our shared foundational moral narratives unite us in historical fact and should unite us in sentiment. But somehow we are desperate to find division and to seek stories that let us feel justified in killing each other or in cheering on others as they kill in the name of that story or another.

All falls to tragedy or terribly black comedy, and sadly, tragically the centre cannot hold.

I’m not certain of the answer to this dilemma of shared fact and divided sentiment, or that there even is an answer, but I’m willing to bet that if there is a solution, it is to seek honestly and with heart-bursting humility to acknowledge and so begin to disperse the vast cloud of unknowing, and to tell to every person you meet, and to yourself, the right story, the true human narrative, the resoundingly resonant tale:

We are one.

What Edmonton Theatre Could be in this Year of Plague

Four hundred years ago, the theatres in London were closed by Royal Decree as plague ravaged the city. For two years the theatres remained shuttered. But the theatre companies did not remain idle. They got creative, travelled to the provinces, the rural areas. They performed shortened versions of their plays. They performed whatever they thought would entertain an audience. They got creative and kept themselves ready for the day things got back to a new normal. They did not remain idle.On August 22, 2020, I did something quite unusual for these pandemic days: I went to a play, to live theatre, with a live audience and live actors. There was even a talk-back with the actors and playwrights afterward.At the precise time that the Edmonton International Fringe Festival would have been joyfully crowding people into Old Strathcona in an alternate, non-Covid reality, in a year when virtually all live theatre world-wide has been shut down due to the pandemic, I sat at a table with my partner, suitably socially-distanced from the eighteen-or-so other audience members, in the perfect, tiny RuminariLive Arts venue in Beaumont, a small city on the edge of Edmonton, and thoroughly enjoyed Soror Cara, performed by members of Edmonton’s Tiger’s Heart Collective as a part of the second annual Beaumont Fringe Festival.And I saw what the Edmonton Theatre Community could actually be in this time of pandemic, and it was a really, really exciting vision.But first I’d best explain some details about the Beaumont Fringe experience at RuminariLive. This Fringe Festival is still very small — just a half-dozen performers this year. And the RuminariLive venue is an ordinary store front in a strip mall on the southern edge of Beaumont. We waited outside for the doors to open and had our temperatures checked before entering. Everyone was required to be masked until seated at the tables reserved for our respective parties. The two actors in Soror Cara were separated by well over two metres, one on the floor, the other in the balcony. Absolutely everything was conducted according to Alberta Health Services pandemic guidelines and the result was a tremendous success. These elements — the venue, the smallness/intimacy, and the stringent adherence to pandemic guidelines — together with an amazing script and performance such as we saw in this staged-reading of Soror Cara — are the keys to the Pandemic Theatre I can now imagine.It must be noted that Soror Cara is an amazingly polished — more amazing for being so young — script of a two-woman play about sisters and all the sweet and bitter complications of sisterhood. These particular sisters are living in Roman Britain, about 100 AD, but they could be anywhere, anytime. Danielle LaRose and Harmonie Tower (who also perform the script), sisters both, though not of each other, have written this text as a sensitive riff on a tiny handwritten piece of Latin discovered in the 1970s in northern England, the voice of one woman writing a heartfelt note to her sister. LaRose and Tower performed their play as a staged reading, scripts in hand, but in simple costume, with simple props, and with overwhelming power. Soror Cara is, I’m certain, a piece we will be seeing much more of when the pandemic’s done, and very likely before then.Tiger’s Heart Collective, lead by Danielle LaRose, has, like her husband Benjamin Blyth’s Malachite Theatre Shakespearean collective, been vigorously using Zoom performance both to keep Edmonton (and global) theatre artists working through the pandemic and to keep those artists connected with their audience. As well, both before and during the pandemic, they have been pioneering the staged reading as a viable (ticketed) live-performance mode in Edmonton, first at the Malachite’s Winter Shakespeare Festival with The Witch of Edmonton and The Merry Devil of Edmonton, then with Tiger’s Hearts’ Troilus and Cressida at the Skirts Afire festival and now with the amazing staged reading of the all new script of Soror Cara in Beaumont.We had left early for our evening in Beaumont, wandering down Edmonton’s 50th Street, which becomes Beaumont’s 50th Street as one moves farther south. We explored the industrial area east of 50th street, around the old newspaper plants of The Journal and The Sun, now sitting largely empty, like so many industrial areas and buildings in Edmonton. After enjoying Soror Cara, I mentioned these empty buildings in conversation with Benjamin Blyth, planting the seeds of this pandemic theatre idea in my own mind and, I hope, in his.Edmonton (and the world) is hungry for live theatre. There are several hundred theatre artists in Edmonton who were preparing their shows for the 2020 Fringe when the plug was pulled by a virus. There are venues sitting empty. There are a great many empty industrial and commercial spaces whose landlords would love to see activity in their spaces, if only for one night. It doesn’t need to be a full production, people! A staged reading of any of the aborted Fringe shows, with a minimum of props and costumes, like the Witch of Edmonton, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Troilus and Cressida, or Soror Cara would easily fill a space with twenty or thirty or more socially distanced, ticket buying theatre goers. The Grindstone Comedy Theatre and the Sewing Machine Factory are bravely getting their toes back into live performance with the Re-Set Festival, but there are so many more that could be doing so much more. The Fringe’s own Westbury Theatre could probably seat 50 or more in accordance with pandemic guidlines. At $15 a seat, that’s $750 just waiting for the Fringe and the artists to divide at virtually no cost. The Citadel has four theatres, plus the amphitheatre above the MacLab Theatre. These venues and all of Edmonton’s other venues sit largely empty, but could host a socially distanced, safe, marvelous theatre event every single night that people would joyfully pay to attend. And think of the points you would win with granting authorities when you mention these creative efforts on your next grant application!But, hosts have to work with artists. Landlords, for lack of a better term, must be willing to give the theatre companies a break on rents. And the City of Edmonton, and the Province must be willing to see the value of these events and streamline (or eliminate) permit requirements, including temporary licenses to serve liquor. And the artists themselves have to realize that every production doesn’t in any way need to be a full production: staged readings, from the simplest table-read to up-on-its-feet with props and costumes are worth more than the price of admission. The audience doesn’t mind the script in your hand: we get it. We totally get it.So, Edmonton business owners, property owners, property management companies, landlords: are you ready to try something a little different to get people into your spaces, to get your name out to the public as community minded? That space is sitting empty anyway: there’s virtually no cost and you’ll be paid with positive exposure and maybe a little bit of cash.And, Edmonton theatre people: you say that you’re “creatives”; are you up for the challenge of finding creative ways to bring live theatre back to us? You don’t have to travel to the provinces (although that would be a darn good thing to try: small town Alberta is hurting far more than the cities. Spread the love!) How about an open rehearsal that we can buy tickets to and sit and watch? Have a new play you needing a read-through? Why not sell us a few tickets to listen? Maybe some community leagues would like to have some voices in their empty halls. Why not get ambitious and pack eighty or a hundred of us into a big empty industrial space off 50th Street, 20 of us into a community hall, or three of us (masked) into your living room for the theatre experience of a pandemic lifetime?It’s time to imagine a creative, safe, very live theatre, Edmonton.

A Midwinter Midsummer Night’s Dream

The Malachite Company has been doing Shakespeare in Edmonton for four winters now, and what a treat it has been to have Old Strathcona’s grand old Holy Trinity Anglican Church filled up with light and laughter and warmth and a few bits of Elizabethan tragedy each January. Last night the fourth Malachite winter and the first Winter Shakespeare Festival got off to an uproarious laughfest of a start with the first performance of an out-of-season Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was fortunate to go to this perennial Shakespeare favourite with someone who had never seen the Dream before (and to sit a pew in front of “Meg”, who also had never seen the play before, and who somehow became dear to the heart of Nick Bottom over the course of the performance). If this Dream had been my first experience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream what a joy it would have been (instead of that fairly ordinary thing I saw as a teenager with a man named Patrick Stewart playing Oberon).

The Malachite Dream is a joyous party of dance and song, thanks to Musical Director and Titania/Hippolyta Danielle LaRose and a cast of twelve others that put their whole hearts into filling the sanctuary/stage to bursting with happiness.

The Titania/Hippolyta Oberon/Theseus (Brennan Campbell) split rolls are handled economically and effectively with simple costume changes. Campbell’s Oberon very satisfyingly combines an air of noble control over his fairy-pranks with a quiet sense of confusion as he sees Puck’s (Colin Matty) errors send the fairy king’s plans spiralling into (in the end, harmless) chaos (as they both sit watching and eating popcorn).

Emily Howard & Owen Bishop and Sarah Louise & Liam Coady as the two pairs of young lovers, the material of the fairy-made confusion, do a remarkable job of making what are in large measure stock characters into individuals that we remember very distinctly the morning after the play. Very charming, each in their own way.

Of course, the play-within-a-play of the Rude Mechanicals is at the centre of the production, whatever the nobles and fairies may try to do. And, again, each cast member manages to take a very conventional character and bring out a very human individuality and even a bit of pathos. Chance Heck’s performance as Snout playing “Wall” is a surprising piece of dramatic eloquence. And the moment when the Nobles, now a part of the audience, poke fun at Anna MacAuley’s Starveling playing the Man in the Moon — a moment that could be a bit of painful cruelty, is turned around nicely, there is a moment of empathy across classes between Theseus the King and Robin Starveling, the young tailor.

All the above makes the Malachite Midwinter Midsummer Night’s Dream worthwhile, but . . .

Monica Maddaford’s Bottom is absolutely to die for! Clutching a copy of Melvin Bragg’s biography of Laurence Olivier, Maddaford rolls her eyes and chews the scenery and milks each scene both over-the-top and to just the perfect extent. Her performance is —  by itself —  a very worthwhile play-within-the-play-within the play. A fine and winding line between going to far and not going far enough is walked here by Maddaford, and she walks it perfectly without a slip. And on opening night, for goodness sake!

Much more could be written about this opening night, but better to just tell you to get down to Old Strathcona and enjoy the real deal!

The Winter Shakespeare Festival continues until the beginning of February. Julius Caesar will join A Midsummer Night’s Dream on January 9th. As well, the Festival will include two staged readings of a pair of little-known Elizabethan plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, The Witch of Edmonton and The Merry Devil of Edmonton. These readings will occur on the evenings of January 22 and January 29 at 7:30. Full disclosure: I have had the pleasure of adapting the Witch and the Devil specifically for the Winter Shakespeare Festival.

The “Merry Devil of Edmonton” and “The Witch of Edmonton”

The following is adapted from the introduction to my adaptations of The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Witch of Edmonton.

Out of Shakespeare’s Shadow

     That fellow from Stratford casts a long, virtually impenetrable shadow over the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Few today would be able to think of another playwright from the period — I hear a few of you shout “Marlowe”. Fewer still would be able to name a non-Shakespearean play from the period — “Dr. Faustus” one or two yell, as Marlowe peeks out of Shakespeare’s shadow again. But Shakespeare and Marlowe were just two of a multitude of playwrights of the period, and many, many plays of varying quality have come down to us that have nothing to do with Bill the Bard. But how many of those plays ever see a stage today? And how many of those plays have you seen performed? I confess, apart from an occasional bit of trans-Atlantic leakage from the BBC, I’ve never seen a production of a non-Shakespearean Elizabethan play. On the other hand, I’ve lost count of the number of Midsummer Night’s Dreams I’ve tripped over, from Patrick Stewart in a loincloth as Oberon at Stratford in 1977 to Edmonton’s Winter Shakespeare Festival’s production in 2020.

     I don’t think it in anyway diminishes Shakespeare’s genius to suggest that the time is long past for him to yield the stage for an evening or two to some of his illustrious but neglected colleagues. There is so much good and great theatre out there in the world (And I don’t mean just the English Language stage tradition – I dream of seeing a production of Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño !): I can’t help thinking that it is the responsibility of theatre artists to provide, and theatre audiences to demand, a broader view of our shared inheritance of great drama. I am so very grateful that Benjamin Blyth and Danielle La Rose of the Malachites feel the same way and are bringing The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Witch of Edmonton to the place these plays truly belong: a stage in Edmonton.

The Merry Devil of Edmonton

     The Merry Devil of Edmonton first came into my life as an accidental side benefit of my (possibly) pathological book collecting. A few years ago I was walking home from The Bookseller (96^th Street and Whyte Avenue in East Strathcona, hard by the Mill Creek Bridge) examining my latest finds with happiness, when my eye fell with startlement on a title in a small volume of Elizabethan Tragedies: The Merry Devil of Edmonton. “Why have I never heard of this?!” I exclaimed, perhaps aloud. There and then began a decade or so of study, writing, and mild badgering of the Edmonton theatre community about the need to somehow bring the Merry Devil (and, later, The Witch of Edmonton) to the stage in their namesake city in the distant woods of Rupert’s Land. A passing mention of the plays to Danielle La Rose of the Malachites (over frozen haggis, if I remember) about a year ago, led to a staged reading of the two plays at Edmonton’s first Winter Shakespeare Festival in 2020.

     The Merry Devil as it has come down to us is what would be termed a “bad” text. Many passages seem garbled and whole scenes appear to be missing. I have emended one speech, in Act IV, Scene ii, to remedy a generally recognized corruption of the text. Three scenes, those of Fabell disguised as Hildersham meeting the knights in the Rectory of Holy Trinity, of Sir John’s singing in the woods of the Mill Creek Ravine with his friends (the songs themselves are traditional), and of Smug and the Tavern Signs are my own creations. I have added these scenes to clarify very apparent inconsistencies in the play as it has survived. The events in my added scenes are hinted at in the play and the latter two survive in a chapbook version of the adventures of Peter Fabell, Smug the Smith, and his friends. I have little doubt that in some Elizabethan performances of The Merry Devil of Edmonton similar scenes would have been performed.

     Peter Fabell (like most of the characters in The Merry Devil of Edmonton) is a folkloric figure with perhaps some basis in fact. He bears resemblance to the Faust legends, but, unlike Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Fabell traditionally outwits the Devil, saving his own soul (by being buried in the exterior wall of the Church in the Village of Edmonton, in the space between consecrated and unconsecrated ground) while having enjoyed the benefits of his Demonic contract.

     In our play, Fabell is still a young man, just beginning on his magical career of outwitting demons and the older generation. But he is already a powerful trickster figure. With his tricks Fabell helps his young friends overturn the plans of their parents. In fact, Fabell works to effect the transition of his society from the Medieval to Modern — in Marshall McLuhan’s words, “out of the world of roles into the new world of jobs” (The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 22 in my old Signet paperback copy). Young Raymond, Millicent and their friends, and particularly Fabell, are not willing to quietly submit to the roles prescribed to them by their elders. Instead they set about, with the help of Fabell’s wit and magic, the job of creating their own future, and, in the end, they draw their elders into that world as well.

The Witch of Edmonton

This natural infirmity is most eminent in old women, and such as are poor, solitary, live in most base esteeem and beggary, or such as are witches; insomuch that Wierus, Baptista Porta, Ulricus Molitor, Edwicus, do refer all that witches are said to do, to imagination alone, and this humour of melancholy.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2.

     The story of Elizabeth Sawyer, the Witch of The Witch of Edmonton, is a most quintessential tragedy, made even more tragic by the fact that Elizabeth Sawyer was a real woman tried and executed just a few years before the play was first performed. Mother Sawyer was scapegoated and killed for witchcraft. This in spite of the fact that the educated of her time, such as the real-life scholar Robert Burton, writing about what we might term “geriatric depression” in 1621 above were quite convinced that witchcraft was not really a “thing”. Mother Sawyer is a woman far more sinned against than sinning. She is condemned as a witch by neighbours who project their own fundamental ugliness onto her truly superficial ugliness. She wishes nothing else than to cling to her meagre existence, to be left alone, but she is condemned, beaten, and killed by the wealthy and the privileged, while those same wealthy and privileged go about their sinful business. Mother Sawyer so rightly describes that business of the privileged as actual “witchcraft”. Mother Sawyer is a tragic and pitifully realistic counterbalance to the educated and urbane Fabell. Both Fabell and Sawyer deal with the Devil, but it is only in poverty that the Devil truly has full, unrestrained power to do his damage.

     For the Winter Shakespeare Festival, I very heavily abridged the text of The Witch of Edmonton to bring it within the time constraints of the staged readings. This was a quite painful process: there is much poetry in this telling of the true-life tragedy of Elizabeth Sawyer. Much of the abridgement came down to the removal of single words, often of lines or brief speeches, but once of a large portion of a scene. The process was very opposite to that of adapting The Merry Devil, which largely involved adding my feeble creations rather than vandalizing a wonderful and coherent piece of art.

A Note on Locations

     The localities mentioned in the original text of the plays — Edmonton, Waltham, Enfield, Cheston (Cheshunt) — are now neighbourhoods of North London, but in Elizabethan times they were rural towns and villages in their own right. Just so, many neighbourhoods of our Edmonton were their own towns and villages not so very long ago. My own neighbourhood, Strathcona, was once a city in its own right. Since truly human truths are true wherever their story is told, I felt it would be both true and entertaining for modern Edmonton, Canada audiences if I quietly replaced the localities of London, England, circa 1600 with names of neighbourhoods, churches, and other landmarks around my home in 21^st century Edmonton.
The Village of Edmonton in the plays, Fabell’s and Mother Sawyer’s home, is the namesake of our City of Edmonton, where so many today are energetically working like Fabell’s cohort, or tragically struggling like Mother Sawyer, to use imagination and wit to invent and reinvent themselves and their home. It has been small but enjoyable work to move the localities from the banks of the Thames to the banks of the North Saskatchewan.

Vanessa and the Mob

     There is a lady who lives in my neighbourhood– let’s call her “Vanessa”. She has a small dog, and she sells slim street newspapers each Saturday outside the “Farmers’” Market just down the Avenue from my house. If you live in Old Strathcona, you probably recognize Vanessa. The vast majority of the shoppers who pass by Vanessa drive cars from the suburbs each Saturday to get their little bit of “local” stuff before driving back to their distant homes. They can afford to shop at the Market. Vanessa can’t afford to buy her groceries at the “Farmers’” Market.

     Vanessa’s dog looks anxious, perhaps anxious to please. She is very calm, but when you talk to Vanessa– really talk to her — you get to know that she has — with reason – plenty of anger in her.

But Vanessa is kind.

     I help Vanessa out sometimes – less than I am able. And Vanessa has helped me, too, out of all proportion to the occasional twenty or collection of empties I’ve given her. She’s a “Street Person”, perhaps, but she’s definitely not “down and out”. Vanessa has a home. I have seen Vanessa survive surgery, eviction, alcoholism, and stuff I suspect but hesitate to imagine. Vanessa and her little dog are survivors.

     This evening, as I sit thinking about The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Witch of Edmonton in my comfortable home in a comfortable neighbourhood of a comfortable Canadian city in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century — a time when all statistical indicators tell us unequivocally that I live in the best of times ever for humans on this planet (despite the quite apparent coming climate apocalypse) — I think of Vanessa and her little dog. And I see that I am Fabell — little but fortunate, not a survivor — and Vanessa is Mother Sawyer, gathering sticks just to survive. I wish so much Fabell had been a totally real person, not largely myth, and that he had used his cunning to help the tragically real Mother Sawyer, even if only with a shilling, or a few sticks, or nothing more than a kind word.

     And if, as it came for Elizabeth Sawyer, the mob ever were to come for Vanessa, in this modern time, in this Gilded Age of (anti-)Social Media in which it seems so easy for mobs to appear, I hope that I would help her, that the whole neighbourhood would help her, that Edmonton would help her, somehow.

     But I wonder . . .

Twin wishes, for these Plays, and for the Reader

     I wish that through my small efforts of adaptation, through the creativity of the actors performing the staged readings at the Winter Shakespeare Festival, and through the publication of my adaptations in a little volume, The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Witch of Edmonton will have been, first of all, appreciated, if only for an evening, by an audience in Edmonton; and secondly, that at some point in the not too distant future these two plays will be taken up and be given a fuller production — and a new home — by Edmonton’s wonderful community of theatre artists.

     Foibles afflict all of our lives, and we all need distractions from the little and the big things that disrupt our days and nights. I hope you, Reader and Theatre-goer find these two undeservedly unknown plays at least a small, pleasant diversion. Most importantly, may all your future foibles be nothing like Mother Sawyer’s tragedy, and much, much more like Smug’s comedy.

     And if you see Vanessa anywhere in your travels, say “Hello. I hope you’re doing okay.”

     And give her a fiver, for her paper.

“The Two Gentlemen of Verona”: wherein the Freewill Players demonstrate how to properly “tweak” a problematic Shakespearean play.

No spoilers here.

Like the texts of a number of Shakespeare’s plays (The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello), The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a little uncomfortable for audiences today.  How can one respond to a happy ending that sees the victim of attempted rape reconciled to her attempted rapist just a few moments after the crime? How can we accept the whole cast going off to celebrate a wedding just after the Bride was almost raped by the Best Man?  Well, as the Freewill Players warn us in the playbill for this year’s production, “we have tweaked Shakespeare’s ending”, and the tweak is, I feel, a profound success.  By means of a final repetition (with slight modification) of a line spoken earlier in the play, the women of the play find freedom in the only way possible: as outsiders, exiles, outlaws from the male social structure of the play.

Much is often made of images of transformation in The Two Gentleman of Verona, of references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses — this thread is made obvious in the name of one of the two Gentlemen, Proteus.  But in this Freewill production, the transformation is wonderfully turned away from the men who are textually the centre of the play, in the final moment — which I hope I haven’t spoiled — in which the ever-present Shakespearean crossdressing female character embraces her femaleness and offers escape to the trapped-in-their-gender-roles women of the play.

The “tweaking” of the ending is textually subtle (unlike the bitter, savage mess the Citadel recently made of The Tempest), just a repetition of a few words from earlier in the play which reveal a wonderful new depth of meaning perhaps inherent in the text.  Certainly, the repeated line serves only to emphasize meanings already conveyed by the body language of the actors.

If I go on, there will be spoilers, so I will end by saying, the performers were uniformly delightful, the sound system had it’s usual glitches, and,

go see Freewill’s Two Gentlemen of Verona!

A Brief Response to the Oxfordian (Conspiracy) Theory of Shakespearean Authorship

 

 

No.

 

 

 

Witches. In a Church. On a Winter Evening.

                               Wyrd oft nereð
unfaégne eorl      þonne his ellen déah.
— Beowulf

There’s something magical about walking through an Edmonton winter evening snowfall to live theatre.  Strathcona theatre-goers are blessed to have available to them the walking part.  But all of Edmonton is blessed by The Malachites (and their friends at The Grindstone) and their hosts, Father Chris Pappas and the Holy Trinity Anglican community who bring us the now-annual winter tradition of Shakespeare in a most beautiful space.  This year it’s a riveting, tempestuous, three-hours-in-a-hard-church-pew-that-feels-like-an-exhilarating-forty-five-minutes-in-a-comfy-chair psychological thriller called Macbeth.

Director Benjamin Blyth has his Anglo-Albertan Malachites fill the space of Holy Trinity’s sanctuary with both external and internal struggles with swords and ambition, drawing the audience in (“come, come, come, give me your hand” says Danielle LaRose’s sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, and she crouches to take an audience member’s hand).  Swords clash, blood flows (a little), and we all, characters in terror and audience in fascination, seem inexorably pulled along by the spun, spinning, and yet to be spun life-fate-threads of the Wyrd Sisters (Monica Maddaford, Jaimi Reese, and Kaleigh Richards).  Sarah Karpyshin’s set design has T-shaped risers thrust the action into the audience down the nave of the church while also dividing this “public” space from the characters’ “private” space in the choir.  And the Witches are ever enveloping all with eerie sound from the aisles.  And so, I must mention the remarkable musical selections and sound design by Danielle LaRose wearing her non-Lady Macbeth hat.

The battle and murder scenes show off Janine Waddell’s wonderful fight choreography without unnecessarily bathing the stage in blood.  (Full disclosure: Ms. Waddell very generously provided fight training for the cast of Guenevere at the Fringe last year, so I’m biased. And some of the sword’s in Macbeth look comfortably familiar.)  Dana Luebke’s costumes are exquisitely Medieval and provide effective shorthand for identifying more minor characters played by doubling-up supporting actors.

Yes, some of the supporting actors are a touch too quiet at times, but there ends my negative criticism. Colin Matty’s Banquo is a twin-like complement to Byron Martin’s Macbeth, Bob Greenwood turns in stalwart and varied performances as Duncan, the Porter and a few other character parts. Young Anna MacAuley is charming in the dual child rolls of Macduff’s daughter and Banquo’s son Fleance (watch for her magical apparition in the “Double, double, toil and trouble” scene).  And all the rest do some enchanting things with very original tableaux and expressive backchat.  No matter where you glance, there always seems to be something fascinating happening.

Of course, the centre of the play is the descending spiral of LaRose’ Lady Macbeth and Martin’s Fate-marked Thane of Glamis.  They are wonderful, and — those eyes! On both of them.  Through all their terror, rage, determination, indecision, ambition, laughter, madness, and, yes, moments of tender love, LaRose’s bright and Martin’s melancholy, the eyes of these two brave, tragic souls so marked by the Wyrd spinners of Fate will haunt you as you walk home through the snow.

 

Go see Macbeth.

Wednesday to Sunday at 7:30 until January 19th at Holy Trinity Anglican Church.

 

Guenevere: A Tragedy

A long time ago, before Netflix or Google, almost before the Internet, when I was a young man, and people read books and used typewriters, I set myself an exercise. I was on the cusp between university and the real world, steeped in Classical and Medieval Literature, wanting to write something that might last. I set myself the task of writing an Aeschylean Drama. And I chose as my subject the last days of Camelot. Yes, a Medieval Classic Greek Tragedy. Sort of like attempting to write an Elizabethan Tragedy featuring Vladimir Putin (my current work-in-progress).

So, I sat down and wrote a thing called Guenevere. Some bits had been around for a while — a nostalgic bit of a lament addressed by Lancelot to Guenevere is the earliest kernel. All of it came out in verse, some of it, the odes of the Chorus, with an elaborate rhyme scheme emphasizing the strophic structure. It all came out quickly, a function of a few intense years of learning ancient languages by studying ancient poetry. Punctuation was inconsistent, like old manuscripts. Speeches were not always attributed to specific characters, again like old manuscripts. Stage directions were entirely absent, like — you see the pattern. I figured Guenevere would never see a stage, certainly not in my lifetime, and if it did, it would be interpreted as whatever group of thespians might perform it might wish.

Well, this August, at the Edmonton International Fringe Festival, my little exercise will be performed and interpreted. I would be very pleased if you went to see Guenevere. My play is deeply rooted in some very old traditions, is deeply conventional, is at once both very unfamiliar and extremely accessible, and is, I think, not quite like anything you have likely seen before.

Camelot is an empty shell. King Arthur and his knights have long been at war in a grey and fading landscape. Arthur’s greatest knight, Lancelot, is a monk. Guenevere, with all the ladies of Camelot, has gone to a nunnery. The Holy Grail has been found, but, is it too late? Golden memories of youth and dreams of happiness stand against a reality of war, decay, incestuous betrayal, and inevitable death. Guenevere, the woman, and Guenevere, the play, resolve to Myth, to human meaning in the face of universal meaninglessness, to the Life that lives in memory in the face of the endless Death of forgetting.

Just a little something I tossed off as a young man back in those mythic times of typewriters, fountain pens, and real books. I’d love it if you would give it an hour of your Fringe time. I guess I’m blowing my own horn, but I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Times and tickets will be available at the Edmonton Fringe webpage.

For those who remember real books, a limited number of printed copies of the play will be available for purchase.

Onegin

Look around
Look around
Look around
Do you see someone worth dying for?

— Onegin

I just got home from a wonderful evening in downtown Edmonton.

No, not at that hockey game.

I just got home from an evening of wonder at Catalyst Theatre‘s presentation of The Vancouver Arts Club production of Onegin, an unqualified marvel of theatre.

But . . .

How was it not a full house?!

From the moment the cast walked out from the voms and mingled with the first few rows of the audience (Nadeem Phillip sat with us for a brief discussion of the Edmonton theatre scene which ended with a hasty “до свидания!”) it was clear this was going to be a warm, inviting, fourth-wall-breaking, audience participation piece.

With vodka.

But the mingling and conversation (and vodka) were just the warm up. The fortunate people who chose theatre over hockey this evening witnessed a tour-de-force of acting, singing, dancing, musicianship, lighting and costume design, and just pure theatre.

I’m embarrassed to admit I’m not up on Pushkin — or Tchaikovsky — so I really didn’t have much of an idea of what the story was going to be except Russian and so probably dark and probably not a happy ending.  But I didn’t need to know anything in advance. I just needed to sit back and enjoy the ride.

The cast is outstanding, many of them in many roles, but I found Alessandro Juliani most remarkable as the title character, the nihilistic, dark, Russian young man with more wealth than empathy who probably won’t have a happy ending.  But everyone in the cast truly shone and endlessly surprised as they each in turn stepped into the background and joined the orchestra (The Ungrateful Dead), picking up instruments and joining right in. The cast doesn’t just break the fourth wall, they break the side walls and the back wall, too.

Special mention must be made of Chris Tsujiuchi, piano and keyboard player and clearly the leader of the band, who completed his one hundredth performance of Onegin this evening.

The voices of Meg Roe (Tatyana), Lauren Jackson (Olga and others), and Caitriona Murphy (Madam Larin and others) were simply angelic while Jackson’s flamencoesque pas de deux with Juliani was more than a little devilish in a very pleasing way. Josh Epstein as Lensky was lyrically charming until he became tragically pigheaded at the end of the first act. All the darkness of Russian literature suddenly possessed this sunny young poet, and the audience just had to head to the lobby for another Black Russian.

Andrew Wheeler and Nadeem Phillip round out the cast performing a multitude of powerful and memorable “minor” characters with major impact.

I found the choreography of lighting and “theatrical fog” particularly noteworthy. Here the fog is not simply an atmospheric device unto itself, rather, it is also a canvas on which the light is projected, made solid by colour and shadow. So effective.

As I mentioned, I’m embarrassingly not up on Pushkin, but I know poetry when I hear it, and there is poetry — not just verse — in Veda Hille and Amiel Gladsone’s lyrics, poetry which, if not directly channelling Puskin, certainly does the Russian poet credit.

Edmonton’s theatre world is an embarrassment of riches; Edmonton theatre goers are amazing, generous audiences; we are very blessed on both sides of the many, many curtains we have in our city. We all benefited from this remarkable community recently when the very remarkable Hadestown had it’s run on the Shocter stage. And our community was noticed.

Tonight that remarkable theatre community was evident again: as Catalyst Theatre’s catchphrase has it, “Edmonton is our home. The world is our stage.” Tonight Vancouver Arts Club Theatre and we, the audience, were at home on our stage. Our theatrical riches keep increasing, and we don’t need to be embarrassed. We should embrace our riches proudly.

Onegin is playing on the Maclab stage at the Citadel until January 28, 2018. Fill the seats, Edmonton! You’ll be moved. You’ll marvel. You’ll maybe be a little heartbroken.

 

But you won’t be sorry.

 

Malachite Theatre’s Epiphany at Holy Trinity Anglican Church

It was a bitterly cold night outside Old Strathcona’s Holy Trinity Anglican Church, but so wonderfully warm and cozy in the Christmas tree (and empty wine bottle)-filled Sanctuary in which the Malachites gave us a laugh-filled and tender gift of a remarkably fresh yet faithful treatment of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Years ago at the Citadel (during the second season of the Shoctor Stage) I saw Twelfth Night with Brent Carver playing Feste and the great John Neville turned out in fairly conventional yellow stockings cross-gartered. As fine as those two long-ago performances were, Colin Matty’s remarkable Feste and Brann Munro’s hilariously unexpected, outside-the-box, and, in the end, heart-rendingly sympathetic Malvolio set a new, very high bar for Twelfth Night.

Merran Carr-Wiggin’s Viola is charming to the point of jerking more than a few tears, Byron Martin’s Orsino is romantically melancholy but not at all lacking in strength, and Danielle LaRose’s Olivia glitters from the eyes to the toes as she transforms from melancholy to love-struck to pragmatically and gently happy. Perry Gratton and William Mitchell are everything Sir Andrew and Sir Toby should be, and Monica Maddaford’s prank-pulling Maria is a perfect, earthy, brainy, trickster string-puller . . . .

Oh, come on: they’re all so good and individual and memorable! Andrew Cormier’s Sebastian, Evan Hall in the dual roles of the Sea Captain and Antonio, Samantha Jeffery in her two roles of Fabian and Valentine, and Phillip Hackborn in his of Curio and the rifle-toting Officer.

And the music! Every single cast member is a singer, many take a turn at Holy Trinity’s grand piano, and Feste even pulls out a harp for one scene. The denizens of the courts of Duke Orsino and Olivia clearly throw themselves into this mid-winter holiday period and, indeed, into life itself. What a raucous romp!

Over a fairly short number of years, Holy Trinity has made itself into a vital part of Edmonton’s arts scene. The wonderful building is host to three venues for the annual Fringe Festival, and it hosts constant literary, dance, visual art, and theatre events.*

Holy Trinity is a phenomenon to be treasured and supported by the whole city.

Just before the play started this evening, Holy Trinity’s Rector (and cast member — he plays the Priest), Father Chris Pappas, started the festivities off with a first small wonderful gift: his hope that Shakespeare by the Malachites in mid-winter will become an annual event at Holy Trinity.

The addition of an annual mid-winter celebration of Shakespeare would be tremendous, but, please, don’t wait: — Twelfth Night continues until January 20th, 2018. Twenty bucks a ticket. Endless fun and tenderness. You won’t find a better entertainment value on any winter evening, cold or otherwise!

_______________________

I’m deeply honoured to have been a part of Holy Trinity’s first ArtSpirit festival in 2013.