Summary 
World premiere adaptation of an early 1950s Canadian novel, shifting The Tempest to rural Ontario and a community theatre's production of the play. Colorful characters echo - and shed light upon - those in The Tempest. A charming exploration of creative expression and self-realization.
Design
Adapted and directed by Richard Rose. Set and lights by Graeme S. Thomson. Costumes by Charlotte Dean. Compositions by Don Horsburgh. Sound by Todd Charlton.
Cast
Michael Schultz (Solly), Benedict Campbell (Cobbler), Robert King (Roscoe), Kate Trotter (Nell), Les Carlson (Tom), Richard McMillan (Hector), Lucy Peacock (Valentine), Jonathan Goad (Roger), Brian Tree (Vambrace), Tara Rosling (Pearl), Michelle Giroux (Griselda), Adrienne Gould (Freddy).
Analysis
The Stratford Festival's Richard Rose directs his world premiere adaptation of Robertson Davies' first novel. Published in 1951 as the first installment in the Salterton Trilogy, Davies' novel explores an amateur community theatre's comic attempt at mounting The Tempest in an outdoor venue within a small Ontario village. Rose focuses on romantic foibles, but with emphasis on the lack of emotional development caused by isolation. The title's Shakespearean quote - "Though his bark cannot be lost/Yet it shall be tempest-tost" - comes from the darkness of Macbeth, with reference to emotional dwindling while living "a man forbid." Tempest-Tost portrays little of this tragic darkness, save for a late failed suicide attempt, instead examining immature failures at romance within the artistic "new world" of semi-rural 1950s Canada.
The Tom Patterson Theatre's thrust stage becomes the sprawling green lawn of the Webster home in the "dreamy Old World" of Salterton, Ontario. Trellised benches grace the narrow stretch of the set, and a pathway at the audience's level winds around the elevated stage.
The frenetic Nell, artistic director of the Salterton Little Theatre, plans her company's production of The Tempest like a bumbling Prospero. Clad in a gaudy powder blue pantsuit and wearing a "Leave it to Beaver" hairstyle, she gathers the cast and crew at the start of the production in a crack of thunder, herding them out of a torrential rainstorm to the protection of The Shed. To the sounds of a harpsichord and distant bagpipes, the gardener's tool shed - indicated only by an elongated rectangle of light at downstage right - provides physical shelter from the storm, while the creation of the play provides the vehicle for the characters' Tempest-like emotional self-actualization.
Nell proves only a faux-Prospero, as one sifts through Davies' comic characters and Rose's conception of the roles. Nell's worldly New York City-experienced director, Valentine, reveals herself as the true magician. Valentine teaches the immature cast and crew discipline and professionalism by the example of her behavior, as well as the value of artistic expression. The "spinster director" privately suffers through the loss of her grandfather, donating to charities his fortune in rare old books.
The Miranda role among the characters is seemingly taken by "gristle" Griselda, the alluring but self-centered eldest daughter of the gentleman who has volunteered his estate for the outdoors production. Her younger sister comments, "if brains ever come back into fashion for girls, it would be a bad day for her." Griselda flirts and poses in lovely dresses, fielding romantic advances from three suitors, playing the role of Ariel in The Tempest that is given to her not because of her talent but from the debt to her family. The real Miranda among them is the bespectacled Pearl, who squirms under the restrictive influence of her blowhard father, Professor Vambrace, as she endeavors to assert her individuality and blossoming romantic inclinations. It is Pearl, in an awestruck puppy-love swoon over the dashing but vain actor, Roger Tasset, who exclaims, "oh, brave new world!" Her dress rehearsal kiss with Roger, she as Miranda and him playing his opposite in the self-effacing Ferdinand, is a comic highlight. Pearl valiantly refuses to break the kiss, falling to her knees and then to the stage, her arms tightly wrapped around the actor's neck.
Griselda's suitors include Roger, who wants to possess her physically as another conquest (he's giving her a "mild buzz"), and Solly Bridgetower, the earnest assistant director who most resembles Ferdinand. Plagued by his over-devotion to his sickly but domineering (and always off-stage) mother, Solly struggles with the conflict between his duty to a parent and the need to fully express his romantic feelings for Griselda.
Griselda's third suitor steals the show. The bookish nerd Hector Mackilwraith, tightly wound in a suit and tie, slicked hair and black glasses, yearns to explore the emotional liberation of acting. Having just turned forty, he worships "the Gods of planning and common sense," using bribery to attain the dignified role of the advisor Gonzalo. His enslavement to propriety and appearance as well as his over-emphasis on scholastics render him an entertaining modern-day Caliban. Limited but believing himself filled with possibilities, his ascent into unrequited passion is the focus of the production. Hector bumbles as he never would in his classroom, becoming moon-eyed and idiotic at the mere sight of Griselda, and he paces laps around the path off-stage, soliloquizing while rehearsals and preparations - and life - continue around him.
The role of Ariel, a free spirit that first identifies then resolves the blooming romantic situations, is improbably taken by the usually besotted musical director, Humphrey Cobbler. Cobbler presides over a semi-drunken bull session - and its ensuing fistfight - with the soldierly Roger and the studious Solly. Cobbler's amiable Ariel-like character deftly identifies Roger's "second-rate man-of-the-world manner" and Solly's "devitalized charm." Their "fight" is a farce, ending quickly in a punch to the nose and an unintentional head-butt that leaves Solly with a nasal voice while stopping his nosebleed and Roger badly lisping with a lacerated tongue.
Seemingly light comedy - Freddy teases the lovelorn Hector into believing that Griselda, the sudden love of his life, was the "champion burper of the school" - becomes subtle social criticism. The community theatre troupe aspires to greatness, but its members are child-like amateurs at theatre and at life, some of them intellectual snobs and most of them emotionally stunted.
Professor Vambrace is a pious egghead, battering Pearl with Polonius-like instruction: "we must train like athletes," "avoid drafts," and "don't slouch." At the casting session, Vambrace browbeats a rival for the plum role of Prospero with a display of erudition, reciting from memory then commenting, "you'll find it in Act Four, scene one, at about line 146 if you are using the New Temple edition." Vambrace provides the play's biggest laugh when he proceeds with his plan to eat seven grapes onstage during a speech in order to link the lines with the Seven Ages of Man passage from As You Like It. Without rehearsing, however, the sequence becomes an opening night fiasco: his speech becomes muddled with the third grape and unintelligible after the fifth; after he stuffs the seventh grape into his mouth, he chokes, becomes red-faced and panicked-looking, then after a long pause, he gags and coughs, spewing grapes across the stage.
Rose's new comedy proves a refreshing entertainment as well as an insight into the characters and situations from Shakespeare's The Tempest. And from its Canadian post-war perspective, the play glimpses into mature emotion, self-realization, and creative expression as if all were brave new worlds.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.20, No.2, Spring 2002.