Taking Shakespeare

This surprisingly engrossing two-person interaction is mostly a series of meetings and lessons between a rebellious, young male graduate student and an aging, unpopular female professor of Shakespeare studies. The meetings take place in the book-cluttered first-floor apartment that “Prof” lives in – mostly in her combination living room and office, where she sometimes eats and often sleeps on the divan. “Murph,” a wary, sullen man in his early twenties, has accepted his mother’s ultimatum that he take a personal study in Shakespeare with this woman in order to remain, supported, in his mother’s house because he feels unready and uninterested in immediately going on to post-graduate study. His mother is dean of the college, actually now Prof’s boss; but Prof was his mother’s favorite teacher and really liked his mother as a student. We learn later that the Dean has a more devious motivation for setting up this informal course.

As any good teacher will tell you, the professor and student learn a good deal from and about each other; and these two are drawn out of their defensive postures and develop a guarded affection for one another. After reading Shakespeare aloud to each other and arguing, they decide, at his suggestion, that the focus of their sessions together will be a study of her favorite play of Shakespeare’s, Othello. Then they refine the ultimate thesis of their study to be solving the question of Iago’s motivation: why he wants to destroy Othello.

Finally, Prof is going to be “let go” in the Dean’s Byzantine explanation of the professor’s status of “provisional tenure.” And Murph – once he and Prof have not only “solved” the problem of Iago but also both found a new personal independence – has left his mother’s house and control and will stay in Prof’s now-empty apartment until the lease expires.

That’s all that happens in Taking Shakespeare and all we see are their study-sessions together. But John Murrell’s play is rich in ideas as well as providing notes and encouragement for seeing Othello, which opens at Stratford several weeks after this one.

It’s a pleasure to see director Diana Leblanc return to Stratford; she is a master of contemporary drama. And this intimate production – though quite elaborately detailed in Michael Gianfrancesco’s designs and Itai Erdal’s complex lighting – is entertaining, thought-provoking, and affecting.

Luke Humphrey, who is a dashing and adorable D’Artagnon in this season’s The Three Musketeers, here manages both empathetic appeal and sly comedy as Murph. And Martha Henry – who is, after all, not only one of Canada’s finest actors and directors but also the master teacher who directs the Birmingham Conservatory of Classical Theatre at Stratford – is as perfect casting as the role of the Professor in this play is ever likely to get.