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Field Trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival: Midsummer and J. Caesar

October 18, 2009 By 1 Comment

caesar_lgLast week our English Department took a bus load of students to Stratford, Ontario for an afternoon performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and an evening performance of Julius Caesar. This was our fourth trip in the last three seasons, previously introducing our students to performances of King Lear, To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Macbeth.

Once again we stayed at a downtown hotel, and once again the trip went wonderfully. This annual field trip is one of the best opportunities for high school students to enjoy a fun, educational experience and has led to a Shakespearean-Renaissance at our school. The drama club is thriving and has been putting on productions of plays based on Shakespeare’s works, and the Shakespeare units are generating the most interest and excitement in our English courses.

What worked well … Superb acting!

While all of the positive things that I mentioned last year continue to ring true (location, price, an optional trip, and relevant texts), this trip really highlighted the excellent acting that we continue to enjoy at Stratford. Some highlights:

  • Ben Carlson: What can I say? Ever since we saw him in Hamlet, our school has been a big fan. This time he made an excellent Brutus; so into his role that, from the audience, we could see the wheels turning as he considered necessary action.
  • Tom Rooney: While the students loved his role as Puck, I was especially impressed with him as Cassius (which in itself highlights his versatility). This was the first time, for me, that Cassius seemed calculating, persuasive, and human, and not simply a lean, hungry, sinister, Alan Rickman-like bad guy.
  • Michael Spencer-Davis: A perfect Casca.
  • Cara Ricketts: A perfect Portia and the best Hippolyta to date. Lots of fire.
  • Yanna McIntosh: Wow! Wow! and Wow! She was the highlight of Macbeth in the Spring, and she was one of the greatest highlights again on this trip. As Titania in the afternoon and as Calpurnia in the evening, she gave such bold, solid performances.
  • Geraint Wyn Davies: Wonderful! Nick Bottom in the afternoon, making me laugh at his every turn, and Julius Caesar in the evening, holding the audience in awe. Finally a Caesar strong enough to be a ruler, strong enough to be stabbed by all of the conspirators before falling, and only succumbing because of the pain of Brutus’ betrayal.

What needs work

  • If you read my blog post about Macbeth in the Spring, you know that I’ve been disappointed with some of the ‘bells, gongs, and buzzers’… more cameras and TV screens?! more helicopter sounds?! costuming that spans 2000 years?! Please, please, please… just give us some classic Shakespeare for a change. If William Shakespeare really is timeless, if he really is for all ages, then we don’t need these extra gimmicks.
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Field Trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

June 2, 2009 By 2 Comments

Though our English department had considerable debate this year about what the second show should be for the annual trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, we were unanimously excited about seeing Colm Feore in Macbeth and figured that it would best ‘sell’ the trip to the students. Perhaps it was our anticipation that led to our great disappointment.

The 3-hour drive to Stratford allowed us just enough time to check into the hotel and grab a quick bite before taking in our first show at the Avon Theatre, The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Brian Bedford. He has a consistently great presence on stage and, having enjoyed him as Lear two years ago, I expected him to be the highlight of the performance. However, it was easily Ben Carlson and Sara Topham that stole our attention. All told, this year’s Earnest is an excellent play all of us enjoyed it immensely. Oscar Wilde was a perfect way to spend an afternoon in Stratford … and we still had Macbeth to look forward to.

Little did we know that the Macbeth script had been inserted into a bad production of ‘Apocalypse Now-meets-The Ring’ and that the Weird Sisters had been replaced by a few intense granola-girl, humanitarian reactionaries!

Okay, William Shakespeare’s stories are timeless and universal. But, perhaps the multi-cultural, period-pieces are being a little overdone. The students often enjoy the Clare Danes/DiCaprio film in Grade 10, but by twelfth grade they’re complaining about Ethan Hawkes’ Hamlet effort and are begging for classic theatre.

Having said that, the mid-twentieth century, African setting is not my complaint about Stratford’s Macbeth production. Believe it or not, in the hands of another director, I think I’d like to give the African setting another opportunity. However, I would only sit through it if they got rid of at least half of the lighting, half of the bangs, buzzers and other noises, and all of the TV screens. With the amount of media used in this production, I might as well have stayed home and watched a webcast, or spent my money on a large rock concert. The words of Shakespeare were drowned amidst all of the noise and light, and the character of Macbeth wasn’t noticed at all.

Of course, it didn’t help that Colm Feore — this great actor from Trudeau, from Slings & Arrows, and perhaps the greatest Mercutio ever on a Stratford stage — was unfortunately completely wooden. Was he distracted? Or even angry at someone? Other than the ‘dagger’ speech, he didn’t seem human and used no inflection at all.

Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, was really good. After finding her stride, she gave perhaps the best performance of the night. The students wondered if the Michelle Obama resemblance was intentional. I like to think so.

All-in-all, this year’s Macbeth is a production with an identity crisis. On the bright side, perhaps it is such a bad production it will become infamous; years from now, people will say, “Oh! You saw the 2009 Macbeth! Wasn’t that something…?!”

Filed Under: Lessons, On My Mind Tagged With: , ,

"Was Ophelia pregnant?" and other questions after the second act

April 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

There are a number of students in my Grade 12 class that attended last year’s school trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival to see Ben Carlson’s performance of Hamlet, and therefore already have a pretty good grasp of the play. After Act I, we had some good class discussion about some possible collaborative essay topics and as we work through the text I am appreciating the depth of the students’ questions. Now, at the end of the second act, students are asking:

  • “Is Polonius’ hiring of Reynaldo (II,i) a way of spying on Laertes, testing Laertes, or a way for Polonius to protect his own reputation?” and
  • “What’s with all of the references to conception, pregnancy, and children in II,ii? Is this a way of hinting at the possibility that Ophelia was pregnant? And, could that then have contributed to her madness?”

Wow. I’ve had classes in the past that have spent the bulk of the unit simply trying to follow the plot and keep the characters straight, but this particular group really wants to analyse Shakespeare’s words. Their understanding of this play strikes me as being far beyond what my own was when I was in the twelfth grade, and I like to think that I’ve got the Stratford performance to thank for that.

While my initial response to their questions is always, “What do you think?”, these questions are far too irresistible not to try unraveling here … eventually.

——
Image by KalinaSoftware

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Top 5 Stage Theatre for School Groups, 2009

November 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

After the 8th of December, school groups will have the opportunity of purchasing tickets for the

Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s 2009 season. Naturally, our English Department will be planning a trip to see Colm Feore’s MACBETH. After that, we may decide to make it an overnight trip, giving the students the opportunity to enjoy a second show in the evening. We could always see A Midsummer Night’s Dream again.

Or should we consider something radically different? The classical production of Antigone at Soulpepper in Toronto? Or the comedy of The Odd Couple at Drayton? The Shaw Festival is offering everything Noel Coward.

Personally, I think that after Macbeth, our top 5 options should be:

  1. Julius Caesar
  2. Billy Bishop Goes to War
  3. The Importance of Being Ernest
  4. Glengarry Glen Ross
  5. Three Sisters

The buzz around our school for Macbeth has already begun. Whatever else we choose will be in the Thane’s shadow.

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Lesson Debrief: Field trip to a stage performance

May 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

One of the many good things about teaching high school English is the opportunity to organize an appropriate field trip for the students. This week, students attended the Stratford Shakespeare Festival to see a matinee performance of Romeo & Juliet and an evening performance of Hamlet.

What worked well

  • Our high school is only a 3 hour bus-ride from Stratford, so it was possible to make the trip with very minimal time away from the classroom.
  • With two performances and overnight accommodations, the trip is still remarkably affordable for the students. All of this makes it a very popular trip for the students to attend.
  • The fact that the trip is completely optional, and any student in our school is welcome to participate, ensures that it is the students interested in seeing the performances that actually attend. Rather than a mandatory trip for a specific class, simply because a performance connects with our class text, our group of students took the responsibility for their own education by choosing to attend; rather than a group that has little care for the staged act, our students were completely engrossed.
  • Stratford’s calendar continues to include many titles of texts our students study: all students at our school encounter Romeo & Juliet in Grade 10 English and Hamlet in Grade 12. Last year, appropriate performances for our students included Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and King Lear. Perhaps Stratford will someday attempt a stage version of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game? Or Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz?
  • Both plays do not stage their official openings until next week, but let me say here that the greatest highlight of the day was Ben Carlson as Hamlet. This production was unanimously preferred, both by our students and our chaperones, to the Romeo & Juliet matinee, and Carlson was a big factor in that preference. What a Hamlet is this!

What needs work

  • Our students were exhausted by the end of the first day. After the bus-ride, the afternoon performance, then the evening performance, the students were zonked… Then again, they were ready for bed and it was perhaps a quieter hotel for that reason!
  • The small city of Stratford is both beautiful and fun… except when it is cold and rainy. Our students were to spend the morning of the second day exploring the city. Well, we had cold, rainy weather; and very few shops open their doors in Stratford until 10:00 am.
  • The Stratford Shakespeare Festival offers two free chaperone tickets for every 20 student tickets purchased. However, the Festival expects schools to send one chaperone for every ten students. We have always bought the two extra chaperone tickets to comply with the Festival’s expectations, but it appears that some school groups are ignoring this expectation. I was very proud of our own students’ behaviour, but a boisterous group seated in the neighbouring section was obviously unattended. Perhaps the Festival should enforce their chaperone-expectation?
Filed Under: Hamlet, Lessons Tagged With: , , ,

Shakespeare Club #2: Hamlet

May 14, 2008 By 1 Comment

The plan to meet with colleagues once a month to discuss the Bard’s works has survived into a second meeting. In April, a few of us English teachers met at a coffee shop to discuss Romeo & Juliet– its language and characters.

Now, in May, we met to chat about Shakespeare’s greatest play, our favourite: Hamlet. What follows is a glimpse of our discussion…

What makes Hamlet the greatest play?

  • The depth of this play has provided us with rich discussion and debate year-round, in a way that no other play ever will — religion, existentialism and Freud hundreds of years too early.
  • The talk about theatre and acting throughout, analyzing the fiction and the reality of the performance.
  • As Richard Monette (former artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival) once said, “There is only one good reason for becoming an actor, and that is to aspire to play the role of Hamlet…”

Is Hamlet mad?

  • Hamlet obviously has a lot going on in his life and he is struggling to hold things together, but his madness is primarily an act. Still, how trustworthy of a narrator is he?

Did Hamlet and Ophelia truly love each other?

  • Ophelia ends the relationship under the direction of her father and her brother, not as an act of her own will.
  • Whether or not he lashes out at Ophelia because he is hurt, the evidence suggests that he did indeed love Ophelia.

Is Hamlet a likeable character?

  • Ay, here’s the rub. One’s feelings for or against this title character will direct much interpretation of the entire play…
  • Hamlet is witty and funny.
  • Is he also a self-centered, self-serving, disloyal, remorseless, uncaring, dangerous woman-hater?

Did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get what they deserved?

  • These two ‘friends’ were summoned by the King and Queen — they had no choice but to do as directed.
  • Do they genuinely care for Hamlet’s well-being? Is it possible that ‘the king’s remembrances’, ‘rewards’, and ‘making love to their employment’ suggest payment for their trouble?
  • Regardless, their execution is too cruel.

What is Shakespeare’s message about revenge?

  • Hamlet’s attempts at gaining revenge cause no end of trouble. Laertes too gets the worst of his own vengeance. Is the Bard suggesting that seeking revenge is folly?
  • Only Fortinbras succeeds in avenging his father’s death, by ascending to the Danish throne, though he acquiesced in his attempts at seeking it out.

Some further points that struck us:

  • Horatio almost killed himself to show loyalty to Hamlet
  • Gertrude was unable to see the Ghost, though the soldiers saw it
  • Fortinbras did come victorious from Poland — so was he in Denmark for a fight?
  • Hamlet’s words to Laertes prior to the duel were in response to the Queen’s request
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