Elizabeth Rex

Just got back from Timothy Findley's Elizabeth Rex at the Saidye Bronfman Centre. Was charmed to be sitting two seats away from my CEGEP English teacher Yvonne Klein, who assigned us Findley (Not Wanted on the Voyage). It took me until intermission to place her. Surprisingly, I recognized her face, even though I am utterly incompetent at facial recognition in almost all contexts, including people I know well.
The play is full of clever lines, and most of the actors were good; there was something lacking in the direction though. The play is set in a barn where William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, and their respective entourages (actors and court ladies) spend a night awaiting the execution of Essex and Southampton for treason. It's a sill setup but made slightly less silly than it sounds as summary here. One of the men that Elizabeth has consigned to death is her ex-lover. In the barn there is an actor with the pox who plays female parts. He got the disease from his lover, an army captain. And so they are pat complements to one another: he the man playing women's parts, given a deadly disease by his lover. She the woman playing a man's part, bestowing death upon her ex-lover. And they spar, with words and at one point with a prop sword (I mean it's a prop within the action as well as without). Anyhow, it is one of those plays where the lines are good and the setup is good but there is perhaps not enough development, and so the second half was not as interesting as the first. And yet there are writers are of very wordy plays who manage to get out of this trap: Tom Stoppard always has some difference between his acts, so that you feel like maybe something is moving though there may be little in the way of action. Still, always hard to know with a play one encounters for the first time whether the faults are in the text or the production. And despite these faults it was fun and entertaining to sit through.