KATE TAYLOR
Theatre Critic
Saturday, July 1, 2000

Stratford, Ont. -- Written by Timothy Findley
with Paul Thompson
Directed by Martha Henry
Starring Brent Carver, Diane D'Aquila,
Peter Hutt and Scott Wentworth
Rating: ****

The Stratford Festival has been grooming a new play from Timothy Findley since 1997, and was richly rewarded Thursday when the lush and complex, albeit imperfect, Elizabeth Rex opened at the Tom Patterson Theatre.

The play begins on the evening of Shrove Tuesday, 1601. The Earl of Essex, former lover to Queen Elizabeth I, is to be executed for treason the next morning and his distraught monarch has called on Shakespeare's company to entertain her. The playwright (Peter Hutt) and his actors have finished their command performance of Much Ado About Nothing but are trapped at the palace by a curfew, and have been given lodging in the barn. A heavily veiled court lady pays them a visit and, to their comic consternation, reveals herself to be the Queen (Diane D'Aquila), come to see them through a difficult night in their amusing company.

The situation is fraught with tension and not only because of the class divide. The actors believe in love and tend to sympathize with the treasonous Essex, and the Irish cause that he supported. Two of them, in particular, refuse to bow and scrape. One is the Irishman Jack Edmund (Scott Wentworth), who played Benedick in Much Ado that night and proves the saucy charmer who will flirt with the Queen but will not eat with her. The other, Ned Lowenscroft (Brent Carver), was playing Beatrice. He's a desperate man too aware of his approaching death from syphilis to fear the wrath of a monarch. Meanwhile, Shakespeare is busy writing Antony and Cleopatra, a story with dangerous parallels to the Queen's.

Theatregoers with less nimble minds than Findley's are going to have a hard time following him, and will find themselves simultaneously trying to recall the plots of Much Ado and Antony, some crucial Elizabethan history and some details of Shakespeare's own biography to get through the first act. The effort, however, proves well worth it when the key drama emerges as a riveting confrontation between Lowenscroft and the Queen. He boldly insists that she mourn the lover she has condemned to death. But she turns the tables on him, forcing him to disclose that it was a soldier in a tavern who gave him the pox.

The situation is not only fictional but highly contrived, yet director Martha Henry achieves a remarkable naturalism in the first act that feels almost like real time as the actors come and go. Then, she is perfectly placed to intensify the action as the man who plays women faces down the queen who rules like a king.

The many secondary characters are beautifully fleshed out and one can see here the great efforts that went into the writing of this ambitious play: Findley worked extensively with Toronto director Paul Thompson in workshops in which the playwright, himself a former actor, was asked to play his own characters. The result is great meat for the actors, who create a whole series of delicious performances from Wentworth's brazen Jack to Keith Dinicol's aging clown Percy, from Paul Dunn's gentle boy actor Harry to Joyce Campion's blind seamstress Tardy.

Their company is also enlivened by the presence of Ned's tame bear, played by Aaron Franks in heavy costume. The creature is an outrageous bit of silliness and an in joke (any Shakespearean company that performs The Winter's Tale has a bear suit), yet it also scores a point about character, stressing Ned's isolation from the other humans.

As the Queen herself, D'Aquila takes great amusement in building up the imperious grouch and puts real emotion into the slow unveiling of the grieving woman beneath the painted face and bejewelled wig. But Carver's Ned Lowenscroft is the real star here -- the moments when he confronts her are spectacularly disruptive, then grippingly emotional. His own unmasking is true and touching, for he and Findley have managed a great act of anachronistic imagining, painting in plausible feelings for an unknown creature, the 16th-century homosexual and drag actor.

Yet, when it comes to Shakespeare, Findley hesitates. Hutt makes the man wry and repressed, and the character seems to remain as closed to the actor as he is to the audience. Ned drags Shakespeare into the debate about love and gender, attempting to make him, in turn, mourn his patron Harry Wriothesley, the nobleman imprisoned in the Tower with Essex. Findley hints that Wriothesley is the lover to whom Shakespeare's sonnets were addressed (echoing much scholarly speculation that their subject was indeed another man), but within the confines of Stratford he seems unable to let loose and imagine a gay bard.

This secretive Will would be easier to accept were it not that the play begins, with a rather tired device, by positioning the events as a flashback from the day of Shakespeare's death. Almost three hours later, it's still unclear what the Elizabethan playwright learned that night in 1601, although it's obvious enough why he remembers it: The remarkable fictional creation of Ned Lowenscroft is this play's genius and delight.

Until Sept. 30 at the Stratford Festival's Tom Patterson Theatre. 1-800-567-1600.

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