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Stratford's Richard III is equally unsettling. As Douglas Watson plays him, Richard is monstrously twitchy but uncomplicatedly gleeful, a modern rather than a medieval sicknik, never giving the sense that he really loves evil for its own sake. The company's Much Ado About Nothing, on the other hand, is the best evening for sale at Stratford this summer. Riotous and briskly paced, with leafy sets, garden-party costumes and lighthearted acting, it goes some distance toward being the dish of sherbet that Much Ado should be.
∙STRATFORD, ONT. A Shakespeare memorial summer seems an odd time for the Stratford Shakespearean Festival Foundation of Canada to present two plays by other authors, but that is what is happening in Ontario, where Wycherley's The Country Wife opened early this week and Moliére's Le Bourgeoís Gentilhomme is already playing. King Lear and Richard II are playing too. John Colicos. who looks much like Paul Scofield in the role, is an able and imperial Lear in a production skillfully but somewhat sentimentally staged by Stratford's Artistic Director Michael Langham. The star of the summer, however, is William Hutt, 44, who is probably the best of Canada's actors. A deeply trained Shakespearean, he novelly plays Richard with strength at the start, gradually shading him into weakness. He is also candid about the shortcomings of earlier actors in the role. Alec Guinness, he says, "was impressive without being definitive." Michael Redgrave "played it like Barbara Stanwyck with a mustache." Gielgud? "I guess he thought Richard was a neurasthenic who could cry at the drop of a crown." As for the play itself, in which Richard's queen is a young child, Hutt says: "It out-Humberts Humbert. It should be retitled Take Her, She's Nine"
∙WASHINGTON, D.c. Begun three years ago, the Shakespeare Summer Festival is staged on the sloping lawns that lead up to the Washington Monument, and is in itself something of a monument to the determination of a housewife named Ellie Chamberlain Galidas, whose husband is a General Electric systems analyst. She decided that the capital should have free, outdoor, summer Shakespeare, and she brought it off. Her actors are partly Equity and partly amateur, plus 20 ballerinas from the Washington School of the Ballet. They do one play a season, and this summer's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is just right for its setting —full of pageantry and horseplay and Mack Sennett chases.
* Where it has run into some local competition. In Brooklyn, the Orthodox Jewish Shakespeare Troupe of the Menorah Home and Hospital for the Aged and Infirm has its annual summer production too. This year it was Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, 76, wearing a blue gown she made herself, addressed the audience at the end, saying: "Did I do bad? I wanted my husband to be a somebody." Said the 82-year-old Macbeth to his lady: "A king I had to be? A 15-room castle wasn't good enough for you?''