1. Saturday night and Sunday we saw two fine productions: King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, respectively. Lear--featuring Colm Feore in the title role and Stephen Ouimette as the Fool--was very strong, though the effects were so powerful (loud!) in the storm scene that we could barely hear a line. Feore was a very convincing Lear (though I thought he'd be too young), and the play moved swiftly to its grim conclusions about families and power and life and regret and loyalty and ... just about anything else that makes us human--and inhuman.
Our Sunday matinee, Antony and Cleopatra--with Geraint Wyn Davies and Yanna McIntosh in the title roles--was one of the best productions I've ever seen up here. She, especially, was luminous, capturing perfectly the mercurial Cleopatra--varying from regal to adolescent to petulant to grief-stricken to whatever, sometimes in the turn of a second, the release of a breath. And the entire cast was outstanding. The eunuch, Mardian (played by Antoine Yared), for example, was so believable--so affecting--that I can't believe I didn't even remember that character from earlier productions I've seen--including a very good one back in the 1980s (in London) with Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave.
It didn't end till about 5, at which time we zoomed away from Stratford, another season gone. Impossibly gone.
3. There was some sort of delay at the U. S. border in Detroit (much longer than usual); it took us over an hour to inch through the line, and at one point we saw two handcuffed guys heading off to who-knows-where. The result? We didn't get home until about 12:30 a.m., way, way past this Old Man's night-night time. We flopped in bed, where Morpheus, waiting impatiently, greeted us like kin.
4. Then, this morning ... Reality. All the cleaning up, unpacking, catching up, and all the while our wonderful week fading, fading ... and we again ask: How can a week go so fast? Eleven plays, six days. A universe to think about. And so little time ...
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