A new Renaissance in Middleton

With four productions of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s most famous collaboration, The Changeling, having occurred in or around Toronto in 2016 and 2017, it is hard not to think that Gary Taylor has succeeded in his goal of the Oxford Middleton – to crown his new dramatist of choice with the laurels of ‘Our other Shakespeare’. ¹ Indeed, given all this recent attention, if T. S. Eliot’s quip about The Changeling – that it ‘stands above every tragic play of its time’ ² – is incorrect, what certainly is true is that it has, at least recently, received a more just and favourable treatment than just about any other Jacobean play remounted in North America, for at least a decade or more. I write not in view of the number of Toronto productions, for surely one can find similar spikes in production for such plays as The Duchess of Malfi and The Spanish Tragedy. Rather, I refer to the intellectual wealth and genius that has been drawn to this very masterful team drama. For reasons of brevity, I am only here able to touch on some of the ample gifts these recent Canadian productions have put on offer, and I proceed chronologically in my analysis, as these productions occurred.

Long before the Stratford Festival of Canada had announced that The Changeling would be part of their 2017 big-budget season, or had even named the cast of their star-studded version, Harrison Thomas, of the Desiderata Theatre Company, already had in mind the topical appeal of this long-underrated play. Toronto’s first production of this ‘age of Middleton’ (16–27 June 2016) was the world of The Changeling reimagined to cancel out Rowley’s comic subplot with the gritty violence and horror entertainment of the Parisian ‘Theatre of the Great Puppet’, the so-called ‘Theatre du Grand-Guignol’. Thomas, son of the nationally celebrated Stratford actress Lucy Peacock, brought life to the play not as ‘the’ Changeling but as Changeling: A Grand Guignol for Murderous Times, a text reconceived by the contemporary Canadian playwright Julian R. Munds. Thomas was familiar with all the secret staging tricks of the Grand-Guignol, as a direct descendent of its London proprietress Sybil Thorndike. Munds began his adaptation of The Changeling while he was studying Jacobean drama at King’s College Cambridge, and continued to develop the project while he was at the Wrestling School with Howard Barker for three years, and as an academic manqué under the tutelage of Shakespearian enfant terrible Holger Syme. ⁴ The cast included, as De Flores, Prince Amponsah, whose performance in the role marked his return to acting after years of recovery from multiple surgeries after losing both his arms in a fire, and Sebastian Marziali, as Alsemero, an actor and a dancer best known under the burlesque sobriquet El Toro. Amponsah played De Flores with a villainous menace and captivating gaze of jealousy seldom seen outside the realm of carnivalesque horror (colour plate 5a). Marziali cut a very dashing Alsemero, with all the rapid eye movements and exaggerated facial expressions of a distraught lover drawn straight from the world of burlesque. The production ran for a week, with a cast of nine, in what is, essentially, a back-property. Actress Victoria Velenosi’s apartment-turned-performance-space, The Box Theatre, is very suitable for the Middleton–Rowley play and the ‘changeling’ theme.

Now imagine the opposite of all this and essentially you have James Wallis’s equally successful, sold-out, one-night-only, The Changeling: A Staged Reading, for his production company Shakespeare BASH’d (13 November 2016). Founded in 2010 and widely popular for productions of Shakespeare in bars at the Toronto Fringe, Shakespeare BASH’d is about that ‘crushing blow’ of either the attempt of ‘going at it all your own’ (bash, hit) or the ‘wild night’ (bash, party). Theatrically, the company has defined itself beyond its Fringe beginnings through textually rigorous, full-on productions of Shakespeare plays and academic-minded, exploratory staged readings of lesser-known Shakespearian dramas. The Changeling came second of a line-up that has now grown to include Edward II, Gorboduc, and Volpone. Wallis found his way into the excitement of this Middleton–Rowley double act through Brad Fraser’s 1990 adaptation, The Ugly Man (Darlinghurst Theatre, Sydney [1997]), and originally thought to modify the text in a mode the reverse of Munds, by keeping Rowley’s asylum episodes and dropping Middleton’s main plot. ⁵ Memorably, the production developed a series of conventions that BASH’d would redeploy in later staged readings: the company employed music-stand switching during scenes of seduction and persuasion, minimalist props, such as a horse whip for the character Lollio, and an ambiguous national and historical setting, evoked by modern dress and the ironic performance of the play in the backroom of Toronto’s historic Imperial Pub. Although Wallis has since served as the Assistant Director of Stratford Festival’s Macbeth (2016) and Romeo and Juliet (2017), the production came together before news of their season, with only one observable crossover. Stratford veteran Edward Smith (E. B. Smith) brought a great attentiveness and realness to the psychology behind his reading of De Flores. Proceeding on the Othello doctrine of one who ‘loved not wisely, but too well’, Smith imbued the character of De Flores with a heartbreaking, one-sided adoration that impregnated all his wordplay with Beatrice-Joanna (Erin Eldershaw). Eldershaw, a relatively new face to the Toronto arts scene, attentively portrayed a very matronlike, caring Beatrice-Joanna, holding her own against the elder Smith. Eschewing the predictable interpretation of the character as a flirt, she offered a Beatrice-Joanna who was anything but ‘a hapless sex-kitten’ or ‘a demonic madwoman’. ³ Eldershaw’s Beatrice-Joanna was a woman betrayed by her own emotions, a woman caught in the moment of being adored too completely by too many suitors.

Responding to the Stratford Festival’s selection of The Changeling for its 2017 season, Paul Yachnin, a Montreal Middletonian, proposed a partnership between the Festival, his Early Modern Conversions project, based at McGill, and the School of Performance at Ryerson University in Toronto, chaired by Peggy Shannon: The Changeling, Conversion & Desire (2 March 2017). In light of the upcoming production, it was deemed educationally beneficial, and no doubt good public relations for the Festival, to hold a day-long conference at Ryerson University leading into a performance of choice scenes from The Changeling, as chosen by Yachnin’s researchers. This event was held at Ryerson’s new Studio Theatre, located in the heart of the city at 345 Yonge Street. For the actors and scholars, who included such recognizable names as Yachnin, Stephen Wittek, Shannon, Tyron Savage, Brad Hodder, Ruby Joy and Robert King, the trick was, as outlined in the write-up of the project, ⁶ to encounter a play challenging for ‘a project on conversion, especially since it seems more about what the lead female character Beatrice-Joanna calls “giddy turning” than about conversion as it is usually understood [i.e., “turning towards a higher order of being”, in the Augustinian sense]’(1). Though the actual performance pieces of the day were rather short, it is hard not to view the experiment as anything but a success for several very valid reasons. First off, it brought a few of the characters to life in a provocative, memorable and powerful way, with Savage bringing a visceral sexual energy and dynamism to the character of De Flores. Strikingly worthy of the name Savage, he hopped around the stage space with dexterity, enunciated every line to perfection, and achieved a mastery of subtle, nuanced gesture. Second, Shannon facilitated invaluable, hands-on learning experiences for her students, the extent of which is documented meticulously in Lauren Eriks Cline’s and Joseph Gamble’s write-ups of the workshops. ⁷ Third, the study day provided essential speaking opportunities for the researchers to introduce and to add original commentary to scenes of the play. Regarding this third point, two interpretations stood out resolutely, Heidi Craig’s proposition that The Changeling is a play of ‘hands’, pulling together a number of hand-some metaphors preceding and following De Flores’s de-fingering of Alonzo, and Stephen Wittek’s bold observation that much of the titillation of The Changeling originates in the ‘sexiness’ of seduction from ‘those adventurous and flirtatious Catholics’ (nod to the Spanish Match, the Armada, and Middleton’s political-allegorical play, A Game at Chess). With a bare minimum of props, academics sitting behind the performers, and a long and fruitful Q&A, Yachnin’s The Changeling became like a production of a production of a play – like Hamlet’s Mousetrap – where the entertainment and the medium of the commentary are hard to separate but equally fun to watch.

The Stratford Festival’s production, directed by Shaw Festival veteran Jackie Maxwell, starred the adroit Mikaela Davies as Beatrice-Joanna (25 May through 23 September 2017). What struck me most about Maxwell’s production was the trust in fine acting and ensemble coordination – a feature that defined the early successes of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), and to which the Stratford Festival should be more dedicated. First, there was the set of the production, which consisted of four relatively unobtrusive arches in the style of Cordoba’s cathedral, a former mosque, suggesting perhaps the ruins of civil war in Franco’s Spain, an impression reinforced by army-clad members of the cast – Maxwell telescoped the action from the original Mediterranean seaport of Alicante to Spain of the mid-twentieth century (colour plate 5b). As a key feature of the set, Maxwell converted the jut of the Tom Patterson’s apron stage into an open courtyard, replacing the posterior wall with additional seating. Thus, in every scene the actors had to be mindful of the spectators whose view they might inadvertently be blocking. Second, in Davies, now Assistant Director of Robert Lepage’s Coriolanus for the Festival, Maxwell found a collaborator capable of living up to the demands of a very challenging role. Following in the footsteps of such great British actresses as Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Miranda Richardson, Davies, still in her 20s, conducted serious historical research into the dialogue she was required to speak. Her study of the role included a trip to Spain to track down the real location of events behind Middleton and Rowley’s largely imaginary ones. ⁸ Particularly memorable, there was a scene where Davies stepped down from the cumbersome high-heeled shoes of her costume, later on falling to the ground in a fit during her lovemaking with De Flores – one wonders whether the episode was at all influenced by the line from the text ‘Show me the ground whereon you lost your love: / My spotless virtue may but tread on that, / Before I perish.’ Third, in her directorial choices, Maxwell avoided all the unfortunate appropriations from musical theatre that the Festival has tended to overuse in recent years, such as audio enhancement and large, unwieldy groups of mechanical background actors. Fewer actors, but actors of more tried and tested abilities, made Maxwell’s production a delight to watch. For example, Gareth Potter handled the title role of the ‘changeling’ Antonio/Tony superbly. I wondered whether his high kicks were informed by any knowledge of the role’s second embodiment, the high-kicking clown Timothy Reade, whose long-legged humour is talked of satirically in the 1641 pamphlet The Stage-Player’s Complaint. In the words of the doctor’s servant, Lollio, ‘your best dancers are not the wisest men; the reason is, with often jumping they jolt their brains down into their feet, that their wits lie more in their heels than in their heads’(III.iii.270–73); and, as such, Potter expertly footed the follies of your typical madman.

Although these productions of The Changeling are now long over, they have demonstrated to Canadian audiences the neglected beauty of Jacobean drama. Canadians have had the opportunity to enjoy the collaborative writings of Middleton and Rowley, the duo Gary Taylor has referred to as ‘the best doubles team in the history of European drama’. ⁹ The Stratford Festival last staged The Changeling in 1989. The Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, University of Toronto (now the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies), last mounted a production of the play in 2006. Let us hope that we do not have to wait another decade for the next revival!