To me, there is no test of an actor's skill quite so revealing as a role in what theatre folk refer to as a "two-hander" -- a play for two performers. That's because, with rare exceptions, each actor is on for the full length of the piece without respite. And, unlike a one-hander, the actor must continually function in relation to another person who is there on stage with her or him.
Stratford Festival this year has mounted a very intriguing two-hander entitled Taking Shakespeare, written by one of the senior and most respected Canadian playwrights, John Murrell. With what can only be termed luxury casting, this performance is helmed by one of the finest directors ever to work at Stratford (in my humble opinion), Diana Leblanc, and stars Martha Henry and Luke Humphrey. Martha Henry has been a company leading lady since the 1960s, as well as a fine director in her own right. Especially interesting is the fact that Murrell wrote the role of "Prof", a middle-aged and disenchanted university English professor, especially for her. Luke Humphrey, a three-season veteran of the company, proves himself thoroughly up to the major challenge of playing her unexpected student, "Murph".
And a challenge it is. Murrell's script is layered with fascinating complexities, and while some of the back story is revealed by the dialogue a great deal is not. There's a great deal of laughter evoked by the verbal fencing of the two characters, and there are a few moments when the author seems to be rubbing a moral in your face rather pointedly. Not until afterwards do you realize that these were almost like distractions, to make you lower your guard, so some deeper and not so obvious points could be scored.
Henry gives a performance shot with repeated lightning flashes of brilliant wit, timing, and power. As the student, Murph, who is sent to her for special coaching in Shakespeare's Othello, Humphrey achieves a realistic portrayal of a young man who, like many of his age, is bored and blasé with everything but video games. The tone of the play, and the relationship between the characters, is set right in the first minutes when Murph, quite typically, drops an F-bomb and Prof immediately repeats it right back at him, in the form of a question. This, as we soon learn, is as typical of her as the F-bomb is of Murph.
As the play develops, the relationship between these two disparate personalities continuously shifts and grows and evolves, and the evolution is not by any means always along predictable lines. (For an actor, this must be like a theatrical equivalent of singing the choral music of J. S. Bach, where the notes often seem to fly at you in a sequence that is neither expected nor especially easy to sing!) Take just one example, the moment when Murph springs the surprise that his mother (who asked Prof in a phone call to coach Murph) is the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the university. It's plain that the reaction he gets from Prof is not the one he expected (but what would that have been?). The impact of this reversing of the surprise is that further doors are opened to further growth and confidence between them.
Expecting a love relationship here? Don't. Murrell is far too brilliant a writer to fall into the trap of that oldest of formulas. Really, the only formula here is the one of teacher and pupil learning from each other, which is only a reflection of the reality of true teaching. Even this one Murrell manages to handle without lapsing into wholesale imitation of his predecessors. The similarity in treatment with Shaw's Pygmalion is not all that noticeable on the surface, but it's an undoubted similarity all the same.
The trio of Leblanc, Henry, and Humphrey has created a wonderful performance of this piece. The fourth key person in the team is designer Michael Gianfrancesco. Within the confined space of the arena stage at the Festival's Studio Theatre, Gianfrancesco has created a marvellous mess of a room that totally reflects the mess of Prof's life. It's old, tacky, tattered, overstuffed, creaky, and comfortable all at once. And, in spite of the "overstuffed" part of the description, this apparently crowded-to-death room actually has plenty of space for the characters to act and interact in all sorts of ways, at all sorts of interesting angles.
A final note: there must have been some temptation to move this show into a larger space like the Tom Patterson Theatre. It could probably still have done very well -- Martha Henry's name alone is a guarantor of a respectable take at the box office, as is shown by the fact that the run in the Studio is virtually sold out and has even been extended. But the Studio, small and slightly cramped, is the place for this performance without question. No other Stratford theatre could have drawn us so thoroughly into the claustrophobic room and life of Prof, nor made us feel so strongly the liberation that comes over both her and Murph by degrees as the play unfolds.
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