If variety is the spice of repertory life, the Stratford Festival in Ontario is the place to savor it. Crowning this season's six initial offerings are two intrepidly ventured rarities:
THE WAY OF THE WORLD by WILLIAM CONGREVE
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Restoration drama takes us into a licentious world of high style, low morals and ice-cold wit. Interestingly enough, its aim is never bedroom comedy but drawing-room raillery. It is as if sex had been invented as a topic of conversation —either the veiled allusion or the saucy double entendre.
Congreve was the master dramatist of the genre and of its convoluted mechanics. Plots, subplots, stratagems, backfiring intrigues and unmaskings make up The Way of The World. In simplest terms, the play hangs on a purse string. The superannuated but insatiably lustful Lady Wishfort (Jessica Tandy) controls a fortune and has an itch for the philanderer Mirabel (Jeremy Brett). He, in turn, has fallen in love with her niece Millamant (Maggie Smith) and schemes to blackmail Lady Wishfort in order to secure her consent to his marriage to Millamant. That is just about what happens.
The pivotal center of the comedy is S Millamant, as iridescent a creature as a g dramatist ever pinned on paper. She is almost a pre-Shavian heroine, a kind of ' sexier cousin to Shaw's Major Barbara. Like Barbara, she is independent in mind and as spirited as a thoroughbred. Unlike Barbara, Millamant is a complete coquette, full of feminine witchcraft. She adores the marital chase but is eminently dubious about its outcome. She fears she "may dwindle into a wife." She faces marriage like a firing squad, but with her eyes open.
The luck of the gods fell on Stratford when Maggie Smith was cast in the role. She has an invincible gift for Restoration comedy. She can tease a spasm of laughter from an inert line, and she renders the great set speeches as if Mozart had been transmuted into prose. She makes startlingly effective use of what can only be called Brecht's "alienation effect," inhaling a line in one breath like a drag on a fresh cigarette and instantaneously tossing it away like a dead butt. This is well suited to Congreve, with his worldly ability to appraise life in the very art of savoring it.
The other performances are anticlimactic. Jeremy Brett seems not so much to be playing the role of Mirabel as modeling for it in some 18th century fashion parade, and while Jessica Tandy gives Lady Wishfort a brave try, she lacks the coarse, sensual vulgarity of what is, essentially, a dirty old woman.