EQUIVOCATION
Oregon Shakespeare Festival &
Seattle Rep
November 22, 2009
“Equivocation” premiered this year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Bill Cain's play was the hit of the season. The production, as directed by Bill Rauch,
has been brought intact to the Seattle Rep and it is a gift to local
audiences; it's a complex, deeply reasoned, highly entertaining and
powerfully relevant drama. This is playwriting of the highest order and
it is given a production as accomplished and impressive as anyone could
hope.
The story is concerned with Shagspere (as playwright Bill Cain
prefers the spelling) and his company members as they attempt to create
a play commissioned by their patron, King James, on the then
treacherously current subject of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. That
conspiracy by rebellious Catholics to tunnel beneath Parliament and
blow it up with 36 barrels of gunpowder was thwarted, and though the
conspirators were jailed, tortured and executed, many questions
remained about who else was complicit, who originated the plot, and who
remained a danger to the throne. England at the time is bitterly
divided by religion, by the outlawed “old faith” and the arrogant new
“head of the church” the young and brash James of Scotland. The court
is ruled as much by the political management of ideological division as
it is by a man.
The story is concerned with how a playwright and an acting company
can write a play to please the King which is truthful but not too
offensive, challenging or possibly even treasonous to their patron and
his powerful allies, in particular Sir Robert Cecil (a powerful Jonathan Haugen),
the top royal advisor and the man most responsible for James being on
the throne. The story is also concerned with making theatre in the
Elizabethan world, the “co-operative venture” of an acting troupe of
shareholders trying to bring in the audiences, please their moneyed
supporters and quiet the rowdy groundlings with stories that are
exciting and accessible. The story is also concerned with a very great
writer, near the end of his career, trying to create something for
posterity, something which is both great art and a great show. Great
writer or not, he is also just a man, a flawed husband, unhappy father,
self-doubting and passionate about making his work about “what is
human.”
While that is much of what this large story is about, the play is
about even more. It is about finding and defining the truth, about how
truth is shaped in circumstances that bend and distort it, about
integrity and what it means to an individual, be he an actor, King or
bereaved father. It is about the power and the falsity of the stage,
the dynamic of great themes becoming, after all, “just a play.” It is
about faith and religion, how politics demands one and defines the
other, how loyalty and trust are either held as sacred or the bonds of
community are irreparably destroyed. It is about what happens to
government when a lie becomes a doctrine, when morality is temporarily
waived in pursuit of security. And, finally, it is about this
extraordinary body of work Shakespeare left, all the grandeur and
intimacy, the glory and ridiculousness, the fantastic and the profound.
That's a hell of a lot to get into one play, and even at three hours,
you never get tired or overwhelmed. As my 17 year-old daughter said as
we were leaving, “I don't want it to end.”
No small part of that is to the credit of this superb cast and the commanding expertise of the director. As Shag, Anthony Heald
keeps the writer well off any pedestal, a working man of the theatre
trying to ply his trade with dignity and sincerity, a man whose
inadequacies in his personal life make his professional ambitions all
the more important. I loved the way his interactions with the company
manager, Richard Burbage (Richard Elmore) made it clear that
their's was a company of professionals and that the artistic
relationships were strong and long-lasting, at the same time that it
reinforced that unless they were commercially successful there would be
no financial security for any of them. Heald also defines Shag in the
cautious and deferential, but not obsequious, way he behaves in front
of Robert Cecil and in front of the King himself.
When he visits with the convicted Tom Wintour to interview him
before his execution, we see the depth of his pursuit of the human in
the face of suffering and mortality, the lifeline of truth and
integrity in the face of death. Similarly, as he feels his own time on
earth shortening, his terribly difficult relationship with Judith, his
daughter (Christine Albright) who survives after her twin
brother Hamnet dies, becomes both more painful and more comforting. She
is, perhaps, the most critical audience for his work, and she is
responsible for finding the solution to his perilous situation with the
“gunpowder” play.
This very small cast of six is responsible for many, many more
characters and it is much to their credit that it is often impossible
to recognize that the same actor is playing several different roles.
Another illusion of theatre. John Tufts was outstanding as the
bright young actor, Sharpe, even better as the rather foppish,
insubstantial and dangerously powerful King James, and pitiable as the
prisoner Wintour.
The physical production is both simple and expansive. The set design by Christopher Acebo allows
for fluid transitions between the current world of the Globe, the
historical world of the conspiracy and the imaginative world of the
plays. Christopher Akerlind provides a lighting design that is highly emotional and very effective in elevating the drama of the play's many conflicts. Deborah M. Dryden
costumed the show to emphasize the day-to-day of ordinary clothing and
the pretentiousness of royalty, the authority of churchly gowns and the
misery of a prisoner's rags.
I've probably gone on quite too much about “Equivocation” and
that's because it's so rare to find a play that combines such grandeur,
seriousness of purpose, theatrical finesse and pure delight. I know
there are some who question the Rep for bringing in a show rather than
producing it themselves, but I think we should just be grateful that we
get a chance to see this amazing piece of work. Maybe like Shag
himself, we need to just lose all of the “how” to history and
appreciate what has survived to be presented to us.