Theatre Review
WORLD PREMIERE
Play: There Reigns Love
Devised & Performed By: Simon Callow
Seen: Opening Night Performance, July 13^th 2008
Where: Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Run: July 11^th to August 3^rd 2008
Where: Tom Patterson Theatre  

Reviewed/Wrote By: Kindah Mardam Bey (Ontario Correspondent - Canada) 

Let me be the first to tell you about the newest brain-child of thespian Simon Callow and commissioned by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival Of Canada for this 2008 season. There Reigns Love premiered tonight to much anticipation as Callow, known for his on-screen accomplishments in Shakespeare In Love, A Room With A View, and Phantom Of The Opera, performed eighty of Shakespeare's one-hundred-and-fifty-four published sonnets. If you are a more literary person, you might know of Callow as an author of biographies, most notably on Charles Laughton, and a three-part biography on the venerable Orson Welles. Callow is known to the theatre world for his many contributions, but most notably for his An Audience With Charles Dickens whereby Callow performs many of Dickens own spoken-word readings that the author loved to perform, with interjections from Callow's own sourcebook of the story behind the tales.

A testament to Callow's own virtuosity, he has managed to carve out a niche for himself that has made him a unique one-man show player and an authoritarian on great British authors as he has played Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare's sonnets. However, for now, we must be content with his understanding of Shakespeare's sonnets, which Callow refers to as the ‘Sphinx of English Literature.' Not shy of this Sphinx, Callow has performed the sonnets in one form or another for over 30 years now, but this is the first time he will marry theory, speculation, and performance.  

Possibly the only reviewer eager enough to type this up directly after the evening performance, you may have stumbled upon the very first international impression of There Reigns Love; and by the five star rating, you can acknowledge it was a wonderful way to absorb the history of the sonnets under Callow's tutelage. Indeed, Callow divided up the play into treating the performance as somewhat a professor's classroom, where he is giving a lecture on renowned psychoanalyst John Padel's theory on Shakespeare's sonnets, and a direct stage reading of sixty sonnets, purely derived from an actor's perspective.  

Professor Callow, informed his eagerly awaiting students of Padel's discovery that the sonnets could actually be essentially sectioned off according to the commissions Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembrooke primarily requested Shakespeare write to inspire her son (William Herbert) into the benefits of holy matrimony. Callow ends the performance on the well-known sonnet:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Which was apparently wrote for William Herbert's wedding day, according to one theory. Callow examines how Padel's theory creates a passionate and cohesive storyline which can be followed succinctly to its natural end. How the three primary characters of the sonnets fits in; the poet, the fair youth and the mysterious dark lady. Callow's first assertions end with him declaring "perhaps... maybe...who knows?" an apt earmark to the annals of history, to which he follows "don't take anything I say as gospel."

In large part, the second half of the play was Callow performing the sonnets, and much of the first half was of equal mind. Callow staged the sections of sonnets, one directly and fluidly after the other to demonstrate the plausibility of Padel's reasoning, and only when a section was at its completion did Callow don the professors cap again.  

The stage was lightly dressed; a balcony accented with wildly growing red roses, a table with books, a podium with an exceptionally big book, a water glass and jug, and a good portion of the stage had orient rugs haphazardly strewn with beautiful cushions for patrons brave enough to watch the performance on stage, at the knee of wisdom. Deciding against the discomfort of Elizabethan costume, Callow wore a more modern attire in the form of a suave gentleman's suit. 

Michael Langham, the second artistic director of the Stratford Festival (1956-1967), directs There Reigns Love, and has brought his old-school theatrical sensibilities to both this production and this season's Love Labours Lost.  

Callow's performance was both commanding and questioning; following the ebbs and flows of the sonnets, he brought romance, heartbreak, and the interminable legacy of these poetics to full fruition. In a subtext, Callow draws the many underlying questions between each line of the text, out of the sonnets, with every line and verse he conveys. In his own good humour, Callow has a wonderful sense of prose and language in his own right, so he can elegantly describe Shakespeare's return to Stratford-Upon-Avon, for example, as "brooding on majestic melancholy."