The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page A

contrasted it with Michael Langham’s important 1956 production at London’s Old Vic. Set in a Regency era of Byronic heroes and décor reminiscent of Jane Austen:
    The sentiments and the clothes go perfectly together. There is an essential frivolity about Regency costume which persuades us to abandon our disapproval of Proteus and our concern for the ladies’ feelings as irrelevant. If the producer can make us agree to accept it as artificial comedy, set in an age where we take romantic absurdity for granted, he can restore to the play a gaiety with which I believe its author tried to endow it. 19

    2. Ben Iden Payne’s 1938 production for the Stratford Memorial Theatre: Lance and Pantino. While “all the chief romantic characters are continually vexed by the ghosts of their descendants,” Jay Laurier (left) “finds in Launce a character almost perfectly suited to his humour, and whenever he is on the stage we are in contact with something that is more than a mere foreshadowing of greater things to come.”
    In this world of emotional excesses, the ending came as a perfect climax of sensibility and swooning, in which a repentant Proteus threatened to kill himself with a pistol, prompting Valentine’s offer of Silvia. Langham’s production reintroduced
Two Gentlemen
to the repertory as a play of some merit.
    The play has rarely been filmed, but Don Taylor’s gentle studio production for the BBC/Time Life series in 1983 drew on Botticelli for a poetic, faithful presentation that used a formal garden setting and towers to exaggerate the play’s lyricism. There have been several foreign language screen adaptations, including
Yī jíăn méí
(
A Spray of Plum Blossoms
), a silent Chinese film from 1931, and the 1964 German TV version
Die zwei herren aus Verona
. More effective in reaching a large audience was Mel Shapiro’s Tony Award–winning rock musical of 1971, playing to appreciative crowds on Broadway and in the West End. Featuring numbers such as “Night Letter” and the climactic “Love Has Driven Me Sane,” the multiracial cast and provocative score captured a zeitgeist alongside shows such as
Hair
and
Grease
, introducing the story to a new generation of theatergoers.
    Two noteworthy productions were staged at Stratford, Ontario. Robin Phillips directed a faithful 1975 version set on the Italian Riviera. Most notable was a reversal of the usual Valentine/Proteus dynamic:
    Stephen Russell … presented a dangerously volatile, restlessly physical Valentine who worked out with boxing gloves, threw a beach ball about, and displayed all the attributes of his type: frankness, generosity, impulsiveness, and a shortage of acumen. Nicholas Pennell played the softer Proteus as a young man not devious by nature but grasping at duplicity as the only weapon that might serve him against such as Valentine in his pursuit of Silvia. He came to contrition at the end in the same way that Valentine abandoned his anger, almost with relief. 20
    Jackie Burrough’s forthright Silvia was also praised: “You felt she was enjoying herself, and that the touch of chagrin in her silence following Valentine’s intervention was as much the result of being preventedfrom dealing with Proteus in her own way as of finding herself, for once, not the center of attention.” 21 In 1984, Leon Rubin directed the Young Company at the Third Stage in a New Wave–inflected production where an uproarious Crab upstaged a weak Lance, but in which the complexities of Proteus were finely drawn:
    [David Clark] plays Proteus as an ebullient undergraduate whose apparently harmless self-absorption turns vicious and proves ultimately as painful to him as it has to others … He becomes so plausible an opportunist that he makes easy game of Valentine … and so ardent a spokesman of the poetry of courtship that he justly holds Milan and Thurio spellbound at his recital. 22
    In the UK, Jeremy James Taylor set his Young Vic production in a