My third venture to this year's Bard on the Beach at Vanier Park was a much different experience from the last two. Not to slag off the creative and innovative world of directorial interpretation, but The Shrew's Western reality still captures that awful taste in my mouth. In other words, Julius Caesar is minimalist, Roman attitude with no modern interpretive angles - Caesar (Allan Morgan) is old, and raging (just the way he's supposed to be). Fuck, I thought his ghostly white hallucinating stare was going to make my eyes bleed. So bitingly cold...
The best part is Dunn's slight Elizabethan, Renaissance undertones - making the story of betrayal and political injustice imparted as a shared value between the Elizabethans and the classical era of the Roman Republic. In fact, this bears more significance as Brutus (Scott Bellis) spirals into despair and self-perpetuated guilt over his betrayal, which is a classical tenet of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Ultimately, Brutus' hamartia of excessive ambition has a more lasting effect, that paradox of something being so good that it eventually defeats itself and turns to damage that otherwise perfect world. Some may call it shit disturbing, but this kind of stuff is really what makes Shakespeare worth reading or seeing in the flesh. It's that delicate boundary where potency becomes decadent, and then unstable to implosive. I ate muffins in the audience and soaked this all in while Brutus suffered in soliloquial turmoil.
Overall, this play was the most impressive thus far, despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of the cast was made up of balding men, their cul-de-sacs more distinct against the shinyness of the skin underneath. Although there was much baldness tonight, the perfomances were grade A (I particularly marvelled at Gerry Mackay, who played the revolutionary zealot Cassius all too well), and had the intimacy which only the studio stage can capture.
Maybe this is really fucking petty but I can't help but add that Craig Erickson (who played Marc Antony) did not look anything like his headshots from the programme. I felt like I'd been duped. Someone should tell him that it's not honest to deceive others with uncharacteristically good photographs of himself.
