Backstage Masterpiece, Slings and Arrows and Stratford

by Ed Siegel, The Phoenix


INSPIRED: You don’t need to know a thing about King Lear to be moved by William Hutt’s performance as cancer-stricken actor Charles Kingsman (here with Sarah Polley as Cordelia).

As much as I adored The Sopranos, I have to wonder about the rush to anoint it the best television series ever. In fact, I don’t think it was even the best series to leave the air this past season. Those honors go to another show in which the members of a dysfunctional extended family bedded and betrayed one another at every turn while we waited — breathlessly — to see whether a central character would get whacked.

We’re talking Shakespeare, but have no fear. This is Will of the 21st-century world, not of the 16th and 17th. Some people have said that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing for television. I don’t know about that, but I’m willing to bet he’d love every minute of Slings & Arrows, the hilarious and hip series about a Shakespearean troupe in Canada that bears more than a passing resemblance to the real one in Stratford, Ontario.

The producers of the series, which aired on the Sundance Channel in the US, said they were interested in doing only three years, and true to their word, they finished up this past season — the final six episodes will join the previous two years on DVD shelves this Tuesday (Acorn Media). And whereas other great series in their last bow have gone for the mighty final gesture — Seinfeld and St. Elsewhere, in addition to The Sopranos — Slings & Arrows gracefully glides into an ending so sublime . . .

Unlike David Chase, I’ll finish that thought, but let’s start at the beginning. Oliver Welles — any relation to Orson is probably intentional — is the artistic director of the safely successful New Burbage Theatre Festival. He turns on the TV one day and sees his former protégé, Geoffrey Tenant, chain himself to the doors of his theater rather than let the landlord close it down. This is what theater should be about, thinks Oliver, who goes out and gets soused as he recalls how he lost his artistic vision. As he staggers about, he’s run over and killed by a truck carrying ham.

Funny, huh? Actually, it is. Oliver may be gone, but he’s not forgotten. Geoffrey is brought in at the last minute as the caretaker for the season, which includes Hamlet, the play that brought him fame and drove him to a nervous breakdown that was helped along by Oliver’s seduction of Geoffrey’s girlfriend, Ellen — this notwithstanding Oliver’s decided preference for the male of the species.

Before you can say, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” Oliver is haunting Geoffrey’s waking hours with a hint of how better to interpret Hamlet here and a bit of spiritus ex machina there, the latter to get rid of a wayward Ophelia. This could all be Edgar-Allan-Poe-meets-Topper if the writing and acting weren’t so extraordinary.

The relationship between Stephen Ouimette’s Oliver and Paul Gross’s Geoffrey is so vivid and charged with envy and black-humored bitterness — with touches of love and respect — that it’s hard even to entertain the notion that Oliver is a manifestation of Geoffrey’s dottiness. The rest of the New Burbagers think Geoffrey’s lost it as they overhear him talking to the ghost — which, of course, they can’t see. When he challenges the wonderfully loopy postmodern director, Darren Nichols, to a duel, there’s not much doubt left about Geoffrey’s sanity.

What makes Slings & Arrows more than an inspired comedy, however, is the way the Shakespearean similarities are played for more than laughs. Engrossing analyses of the scripts are scattered throughout each episode, particularly when Geoffrey or Oliver is explicating a scene. To that woeful Ophelia, who thinks that her character’s little songs are just gibberish, Geoffrey pleads: “Ophelia is a child. . . . Her father is murdered by her boyfriend and he is suddenly shipped off to England. She is alone for the first time, grieving and heartbroken and guilty, because as far as she’s concerned, it’s all her fault. She ignored her brother’s advice and fell in love with Hamlet and now her father is dead, all because of her. And the pain and the loss and the shame and the guilt — all of this — is gnawing away at this little child’s mind and it comes out as little songs: ‘And will he not come again? And will he not come again? No, no, he is dead.’ My father’s dead and I killed him.”

Along with the compassion comes such perfectly timed scorn for the actress’s lack of understanding that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. But Gross and Ouimette are only the beginning of the talent here. Mark McKinney (Kids in the Hall) and Susan Coyne — two of the writers, along with Bob Martin and Sean Reycraft — play Richard Smith-Jones, the festival’s business manager, and his administrative assistant with boundless degrees of exasperation. Don McKellar’s Darren Nichols is the pretentious postmodern auteur who keeps coming back for a licking each season. Martha Burns is slyly sexy as Ellen, Geoffrey’s former (and potentially future) lover — as well as Gertrude, Lady Macbeth, and Regan at the festival. Rachel McAdams takes over as Ophelia in the first season and then goes off to Hollywood (more art imitating life) at the beginning of Season 2; Sarah Polley (the director of Away from Her) is Cordelia in Season 3. Two of the more delightful characters are Graham Harley and Michael Polley (Sarah’s sire), who begin each show in the after-show pub singing irreverent music-hall send-ups of the Shakespeare shows being performed.

Although the story lines echo Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, they’re hardly slaves to them. Season 2’s most outrageous moments come when Richard decides the festival needs rebranding and goes off to an ultrahip advertising agency led by the Nehru-jacketed Sanjay (Colm Feore); he, without telling Richard, puts up posters trashing both the festival and its patrons, who are pictured as being on life-support. There are also secondary story lines that have to do with what’s happening on the smaller stage — a beautifully rendered Romeo and Juliet that captures the play’s eroticism even as the postmodern director tries to undermine the emotion.

Even if you think the Bard’s a bore, this series is great television. The more you know about Shakespeare and the theater, the more you’ll get out of Slings & Arrows, but you don’t need to know a thing about King Lear to be moved by William Hutt’s performance as Charles Kingsman, who’s determined to play Lear before his cancer kills him. (Hutt, a legendary Lear at Stratford, was himself dying of leukemia; he passed away last week.) Neither do you have to know anything about Rent to appreciate the delicious satire of that musical in the second stage’s production of East Hastings.

Yes, the second stage gets handed over to a musical. And that’s another of the show’s biting subtexts — the contemporary clashes between art and commerce, the performing arts and the popular arts, smartening up and dumbing down, elitism and populism.

Which brings us back to the third-season ending. In those final images, we’re reminded that live performance and great art are transformative, even if there’s just one person in the audience. It’s a message that 99 percent of theatrical experiences fail to deliver — but that one in 100 keeps us coming back for more. Leave it to this one-in-a-million TV show to make the same case.