Books, Arts & Manners: The 1970 Stratford Festival

North America has so few of what we euphemistically call “theater companies” that seeing a real one in commendable action on our continent is exhilarating. The 1970 Stratford, Ontario Festival boasts an ensemble, most of whose actors and directors and designers have been working together at a consistent level of quality for some years. Unlike the ACT or the late lamented APA, the Stratford group strikes a comfortable balance between the continuing basic company and the necessary outside leavening agents brought in to keep the regulars on their mettle.

Of the major productions mounted at the Festival this summer, Sheridan’s School for Scandal best exhibits, the ensemble effort for which Stratford is so justly famed. The School for Scandal might have seemed a non-starter, a bow to a “name” classic. It is a play which this critic, in fits of secret egocentricity, has consigned to the English literature people—a nice, theoretical jolly-up for armchair or classroom dramaturges, but too stilted and twee for production. Mea culpa. Sheridan has finally come up winners.

RC

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Richmond Crinkley

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North America has so few of what we euphemistically call “theater companies” that seeing a real one in commendable action on our continent is exhilarating. The 1970 Stratford, Ontario Festival boasts an ensemble, most of whose actors and directors and designers have been working together at a consistent level of quality for some years. Unlike the ACT or the late lamented APA, the Stratford group strikes a comfortable balance between the continuing basic company and the necessary outside leavening agents brought in to keep the regulars on their mettle.

Of the major productions mounted at the Festival this summer, Sheridan’s School for Scandal best exhibits, the ensemble effort for which Stratford is so justly famed. The School for Scandal might have seemed a non-starter, a bow to a “name” classic. It is a play which this critic, in fits of secret egocentricity, has consigned to the English literature people—a nice, theoretical jolly-up for armchair or classroom dramaturges, but too stilted and twee for production. Mea culpa. Sheridan has finally come up winners.