Arts & Manners: White Shoe Shakespeare

The American Shakespeare Theatre (AST) at Stratford, Connecticut rises to conventional competence at times in two of its three new productions— The Country Wife and Measure for Measure. An afternoon or evening in the theater on the Housatonic still has the ambience of Sunday antiquing, an open-collared stroll amid prettily arranged still-life, with a rare glint of authenticity. You can wear your white shoes. The third new show clinches it with a theater-museum exhibit of nineteenth-century rant, featuring Fritz Weaver as Macbeth.

The AST company juggles rather well the canes and laces, wit and winces of William Wycherley’s comedy about urbane British sexual manners in 1675. Philip Kerr is an attractive, though uninterestingly casual, Harry Horner, the libertine whose beau stratagème is to have himself declared impotent. This assures Horner of the complacence of London’s husbands and the curiosity of London’s wives. Margery Pinchwife is the sheltered young bride of a crabbed husband (too likably played by Jack Gwillim), the country wife who, despite all odds against it given her invincible simplicity and honesty, becomes the successful pupil of city life, learning how to deceive her way out of her locked bedroom into Horner’s. She is Carole Shelley with a china-doll face, sunflower eyes, and a toy voice, and she wants only a sure, selective director to orchestrate her in the bravura letter-writing scene. Director David Giles has directed traffic with only serviceable resourcefulness—and directed it right past the play. He allows the evening to be played out as pleasantly as if it all were good-natured Molière or romantic Congreve where Wycherley’s play is largely a mean minuet of concupiscence, the languid dance of death of a souring, venal society. That this could be entirely missed suggests a gap in an eroded sensibility of our own age.

GW

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Gary Jay Williams

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The American Shakespeare Theatre (AST) at Stratford, Connecticut rises to conventional competence at times in two of its three new productions— The Country Wife and Measure for Measure. An afternoon or evening in the theater on the Housatonic still has the ambience of Sunday antiquing, an open-collared stroll amid prettily arranged still-life, with a rare glint of authenticity. You can wear your white shoes. The third new show clinches it with a theater-museum exhibit of nineteenth-century rant, featuring Fritz Weaver as Macbeth.

The AST company juggles rather well the canes and laces, wit and winces of William Wycherley’s comedy about urbane British sexual manners in 1675. Philip Kerr is an attractive, though uninterestingly casual, Harry Horner, the libertine whose beau stratagème is to have himself declared impotent. This assures Horner of the complacence of London’s husbands and the curiosity of London’s wives. Margery Pinchwife is the sheltered young bride of a crabbed husband (too likably played by Jack Gwillim), the country wife who, despite all odds against it given her invincible simplicity and honesty, becomes the successful pupil of city life, learning how to deceive her way out of her locked bedroom into Horner’s. She is Carole Shelley with a china-doll face, sunflower eyes, and a toy voice, and she wants only a sure, selective director to orchestrate her in the bravura letter-writing scene. Director David Giles has directed traffic with only serviceable resourcefulness—and directed it right past the play. He allows the evening to be played out as pleasantly as if it all were good-natured Molière or romantic Congreve where Wycherley’s play is largely a mean minuet of concupiscence, the languid dance of death of a souring, venal society. That this could be entirely missed suggests a gap in an eroded sensibility of our own age.