Newsday.com, July 13, 2003
Theater of Fear
By: John Bemrose
It was a great moment, and a great waste. The audience at Ontario's Stratford Festival was on its feet applauding an exhilarating production of Shakespeare's "Pericles" - but a third of the seats were empty. News of SARS had kept hundreds away, many of them Americans, who traditionally make up two-fifths of the festival's crowds.
Never mind that Stratford is 90 miles from Toronto, the sole location of SARS, or that your chances of catching the disease even in Toronto - and this was before the World Health Organization declared the epidemic in Canada over - were about as high as being hit by a street vendor's cart. Fear had done its work.
Ticket sales have dipped as low as 40 percent below last season's levels. So far, that adds up to about 28,000 empty seats. And what a pity. Stratford is not only the largest theater festival on the continent (16 major productions between May and November), but when all the elements are in place, it can mount shows of surpassing power. This year there's a stunning version of Noel Coward's 1939 comedy "Present Laughter," starring Brian Bedford, probably the best player of Coward in the world. And there's a fascinating trilogy of plays - by Aeschylus, Jean Giraudoux and Jean-Paul Sartre - based on that revenge tale from Greek mythology, the murder of King Agamemnon.
But the crown jewel of the season is "Pericles," marketed by the festival as "The Adventures of Pericles." Its success is surprising, because Shakespeare wrote only part of the drama, and its uneven patchwork of scenes scares most directors away. But England's Leon Rubin has filled the festival's thrust stage with magic, like the breathtaking moment when the young Prince Pericles (Jonathan Goad) slips from a ship's mast to fall slowly on his back, arms and legs flailing, through the blue depths of the sea.
The emotional core of the show is its climax when, after years of wandering, Pericles is reunited with his long-lost daughter, Marina (Nazneen Contractor). Goad and Contractor play the scene so vividly, that for a few moments the play seems to reconnect with drama's ancient roots in religious ceremony, so deep and oddly consoling are the emotions evoked.
In fact, "Pericles" is just what a cynical, fearful world needs just now. But the ancient theater of Shakespeare and Aeschylus is getting some stiff competition from another kind of drama. You could call it the theater of fear, and it's found on the average television newscast. The theater of fear purports to deal in facts, but delivers a fantasy world where no one is safe. It keeps people at home, feeding their addiction to the images on their screens. It makes the drive to Stratford look impossibly risky.
How does the theater of fear manage this? Mostly by manipulating the context of what we see. One British television crew found a man in a Toronto suburb who was refusing to leave his house until SARS was eradicated. His fearful face, glimpsed through a window, became the image of SARS for thousands of British viewers. Most people in Toronto were going about their business with relative nonchalance, but their city in British eyes had become a plague zone.
American and Canadian audiences are not faring any better. One network newscast showed a group of international travelers disembarking in Toronto. All wore surgical masks, above which their eyes darted warily. The item left the impression that everyone in the city was masked, when in fact you'd be hard put to find any masks outside the hospitals. The "truth" of this story was in fact a lie.
There's a very different kind of truth on display at Stratford. In one sense, "Pericles" is sheer fantasy - lies from beginning to end. There is no one called Pericles, his kingdom of Tyre does not exist. But somehow this fantasy, so brilliantly presented, strikes us as uncommonly true. It aims at and hits, not a factual truth, but more general ones. "I see that Time's the king of men," Pericles aptly observes in the second act, "He's both their parent, and he is their grave, / And gives them what he will, not what they crave." When we see Pericles and his daughter reunited at last, we remember the importance of love, the preciousness of life and the possibility of triumph over loss.
There's another truth at work in the play. All that Pericles finally achieves in terms of wisdom and love does not come from staying home on the couch. He visits no less than five foreign kingdoms. He fights in combat, risking his life for the hand of a princess. He wins and loses on a heroic scale. His courage is instinctual, almost nonchalant. It is the natural courage we are all born with, and which the theater of fear seeks to destroy.
The theater of fear speaks to only part of us - the rather craven part that is always looking for ways to make ourselves safe. On the other hand, the theater of Shakespeare makes a wider appeal. It acknowledges fear, but gives it no more than its proper place in the pantheon of our emotions. The Elizabethan world was more dangerous than ours. But the joie de vivre of Shakespeare's plays still speaks to us across the centuries, urging us to claim the whole of life.