[In the following excerpt, Taylor asserts that Richard Rose's production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona left the audience uninvolved and disengaged.]

The Two Gentlemen of Verona was jolly-on-a-trolley, full of high spirits, high voices, clever gimmicks, clever speeches. On at least one occasion it literally filled the Festival cavern: the first act ended and the intermission began with the sound of an airplane circling low overhead and leaflets dropping from the ceiling, which turned out to be “Wanted” posters for the fugitive Valentine. And the opening scene imaginatively and economically established the play's social world: a championship-hockey-team photo shoot, followed by Graham Abbey's jock-Valentine and David Jansen's nerd-Proteus circling each other on the ice. But it was downhill from there. Richard Rose's production wasn't nearly as funny, or as real, as Monette's Much Ado or as the RSC's 1998 revival of Two Gentlemen. In the Swan, director Edward Hall set the RSC version in contemporary Italy, among people with a lot of money, a lot of arrogance, and no emotional maturity. It all made sense in an alternately amusing and appalling way.

Richard Rose, by contrast, seemed to have no faith in the play; it was as though everyone feared that the script would collapse unless they compensated with a lot of exclamation points—“We're all having fun, aren't we! aren't we!” No, not really. If this play were not by Shakespeare, would anyone bother reviving it? “It has a great deal of clever word play, but no great speeches,” one reviewer wrote; “There are some rich, comic set pieces in the action, but the plot is improbable and, for a modern audience, problematic.”¹ The Festival production shied away from the play's most dramatic challenge, Proteus's attempt to rape Sylvia followed by Valentine's attempt to give Sylvia to her would-be rapist. It was perfectly obvious that the nerdy Proteus was incapable of raping anyone, and obvious, too, that Valentine's gift was just a test. The audience was unperturbed and also pretty much uninvolved; contrast this with the groundlings at the Globe's 1997 production of Two Gentlemen, who recoiled in a kind of collective horror at a realistic rape attempt, clearly uncomfortable to be watching such a thing, and at being therefore somehow complicit in it.² At the Festival Stage I didn't see anyone even lean forward in their seats.

Notes

1. Kate Taylor, “Two familiar, if unlikable, Gentlemen,” The Globe and Mail, 13 August 1998.

2. Valerie Wayne, conversation with author.