Shakespeare’s Will

By: Vern Thiessen

Directed By: Miles Potter

Stratford Festival Of Canada

www.stratfordfestival.ca

Runs: June 23^rd to September 30^th 2007

Studio Theatre

3 ½ Stars

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey

At a little under an hour and a half, this One Act play is the shortest production at The Stratford Festival Of Canada this year, but also the most intimately linked to Shakespeare. After all, what’s more intimate then a bed partner? Seana McKenna plays Anne Hathaway, who is Shakespeare’s arms-length away wife in Stratford while he forged his name in stone a hundred miles away in London. Hathaway was much older then Shakespeare and the unromantic connection of parenthood before marriage led to an eventual walk down the pewed holy walkway. I’ve seen Hathaway’s cottage, it feels very unromantic, unpoetic and inartistic; but I bet London was incredibly interesting during the sixteenth century for a playwright. Speaking of which, playwright Vern Thiessen has taken a microscope to the very undetailed life of Shakespeare and spun a yarn of ideas as to how his relationship with Anne Hathaway might have started, evolved and finished.

In her sixteenth season at Stratford, Seana McKenna has taken charge of this role entirely and made it her own calling card. The stage is lightly set, with minimal props, hanging lanterns from the ceiling, a canvas backdrop and a type of industrial fashioned staircase/runway centre stage. Throughout the play McKenna walks around the scaffolding, sits on it, stands on it, and squats on it; truly making this metal stage dimensional and part of the performance. All the surfaces on the industrial style walkway, benches and stool depict images of blue skies with clouds. Of course the greatest accessory was the full house in attendance. McKenna is dressed in a dark teal Elizabethan costume; the teal seemed to be a befitting colour as it is one of those colours that depending on which way you look at it can be more of a blue tone or more of a green tone.

From its inception, you can tell that Seana McKenna and director Miles Potter worked intimately on the developmental and portrayal of Hathaway as the performance seemed strong and magnetically weighted to the story’s core, even well into the season. As the audience watch McKenna tell of how Anne Hathaway met ‘Bill,’ got pregnant, what her life with an absentee husband was like, and his ultimate death, a piece of paper lingers around the stage; it is Shakespeare’s Will, a factual account of inheritance from the deceased. Where does Hathaway stand in Shakespeare’s esteem and affections? A piece of paper littered with bequeaths has the final stamp of a life lived as man and wife and what it was rendered down to in furniture, land and title. McKenna captivates her audience and slips between her love for Shakespeare, her heartaches, her hurt and even musical interludes with grace, elegance and stage presence. A high point to Shakespeare’s Will is McKenna, who the play was supposedly conceptualized for by Thiessen over twenty one years ago.

Of course for every high there is a low, and Shakespeare’s Will, originally performed in 2005 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, seems to be a modernized telling of Shakespeare’s life with Hathaway. One could equate Anne and Bill being a pair of free spirited hippies ‘You go your way hippie princess (with the kids of course), I’ll go mine and if we end up in other people’s beds its only a piece of ritualized paper we are breaking man; our commitment is in our hearts…somewhere.’ Thiessen delves into all the wild speculations of Shakespeare, including the hippie way of experimentation, open marriages and bisexuality. Thiessen seems to have pigeon-holed Shakespeare and Anne into a couple of farmers when together and her a steadfast adulterous wife when alone and Shakespeare a curmudgeon doing his own thing but also sticking his quill in multiple pots when away. Goodness only knows how those famous plays ever got wrote? I don’t doubt Shakespeare was an atrocious husband, great men often don’t have ‘normal’ home lives, and if he was dreadful to anyone in his life, it would definitely be Anne – no matter what way you look at it in history. However, Thiessen’s version of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway seemed very modern and basic and I kept thinking to myself that we all have our own version of great people in history and as they say ‘to each there own.’ In this case Thiessen’s version was not my own, but well worth using as a template to define my own perceptions of Shakespeare. Mind you, no matter how stunning Joseph Fiennes was as Shakespeare, I didn’t consider the Shakespeare In Love rose-coloured version of the playwright an accuracy either.

History is open for interpretation and Vern Thiessen’s version of Shakespeare is simply one perception which opens the doors for discussion on the subject. Seana McKenna gave an illuminescent performance and as everyone leaned on the edge of their seats to capture every morsel of her rendition of Hathaway, we were all glad we were there to watch.

Artistic credits
Director / MILES POTTER

Designer / PETER HARTWELL
Lighting Designer / KEVIN FRASER
Composer / MARC DESORMEAUX
Sound Designer / PETER McBOYLE

The cast
Anne Hathaway / SEANA McKENNA

Stage Manager / ANNE MURPHY
Assistant Stage Manager / KIM LOTT
Production Assistant / LUCY MARTIN
Production Stage Manager / MARYLU MOYER