A New York Times theater critic visits the Stratford Festival, describing it as a “bucket-list chance.” Trade talks resumed, and Canada is preparing for a view of the solar eclipse.
Jesse Green, who became The Times’s co-chief theater critic in May, recently made his first trip to the Stratford Festival. He was impressed by one of the few remaining repertory theater companies in North America, describing his visit to Stratford, Ontario, as a “bucket-list chance.”
I asked him for his impressions:
Mr. Green is the latest in a string of critics The Times has dispatched to Stratford since the festival began in 1953, with two plays that were performed in a large tent. During the debut, Brooks Atkinson, who was The Times’s drama critic for 31 years, told the story of how Tom Patterson, a trade magazine journalist, had lured Tyrone Guthrie and Alec Guinness from the Old Vic in London to produce “Richard III” and “All’s Well That Ends Well” in a place then mainly known as a workshop town for Canadian National Railways.
Mr. Atkinson declared the two plays to be “a genuine contribution to Shakespeare in North America.”
A trip through The Times’s online archive gives not just a history of the performances at Stratford (most, although not all of them, were well received) but also lays out the festival’s changes in direction and, at times, its fortunes. In 1976, Clive Barnes, another of The Times’s formidable theater critics, wrote that the arrival of Robin Phillips a year earlier as artistic director had “turned the company upside down.” He added: “It is an extraordinary process to watch — what you might call the beginning of greatness, the gathering of a team, the first imprint of a style.”
But four years later Mr. Phillips was leaving and Andrew Malcolm, one of my predecessors as a Canada correspondent, reported that declining government grants and gasoline shortages in the United States were creating financial headaches for the organizers. That didn’ t stop the festival from featuring an all-star cast, however, including Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Brian Bedford, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and Douglas Rain, the Winnipeg, Manitoba-born actor best known to filmgoers as the voice of the homicidal computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
(Some of the archival links above will be available to subscribers only after Aug. 25.)
Read: A First-Time Visitor Inhales Stratford’s Theatrical Perfume
True to form, the Trump administration opened the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations this week with bombast. And consistent with its approach to politics, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used the start of negotiations to touch upon some of the leadership’s key themes: the environment, gender equity and indigenous rights.
This is the fourth major trade negotiation I’ ve reported on during my career. The first one led to the pact between Canada and the United States in 1988. One lesson I’ ve learned is that the early rhetoric is rarely reflected in the final result.
Another lesson is that when it comes to dealing with the United States on trade, Congress is ultimately as important as the president, if not more so. Binyamin Appelbaum, who covers economic policy for The Times from Washington, wrote that Mr. Trump’s political problems, which noticeably intensified this week, will only make it more difficult to gain Congressional support for a Nafta agenda that many American companies reject.
Read: Canada Wants a New Nafta to Include Gender and Indigenous Rights
Read: U. S. Begins Nafta Negotiations With Harsh Words
Read: How Nafta Changed U. S. Trade With Canada and Mexico
Read: One U. S. Factory Goes Global, While Trump Shrinks the World
While Canadians won’ t see a total eclipse of the sun on Monday, the sun and the moon will nevertheless still be putting on a partial eclipse show up here. People in British Columbia will see the most startling effect. The eclipse isn’ t the only current astronomical exhibition, of course. The Science department of The Times has bundled them into a calendar that can be downloaded so that you’ ll never miss a shooting star — or at least the prospect of trying to see one.
Download: Sync your calendar with the solar system
Read: The Illuminating Power of Eclipses
• While the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is boasting about its new temporary visa program for skilled, highly paid tech workers, there’s another visa program that is less cause for celebration. Dan Levin went to British Columbia to look into the system for temporary farm workers, which critics say is poorly supervised.
• A medical mystery has affected both Canadian and American diplomats in Havana.
• The Times’s international real estate column checked out a $4.65 million, 19th-century house in Oakville, Ontario, Toronto’s prosperous western suburb.
