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Culture Theatre

Bartholomew Fair

BARTHOLOMEW FAIR by Ben Jonson, directed by Antoni Cimolino (Stratford). Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford. Runs in rep to October 2. $29-$99, stu/srs $25-$79. 1-800-567-1600. See listing. Rating: NNN


Ben Jonson’s sprawling, rabelaisian Bartholomew Fair is rarely performed, in part because of its numerous characters and hard-to-sort-out, interwoven plot lines.[rssbreak]

A satire on 17th-century London, it can stand for just about any society defined by greed, appetite and various outlandish fixations. The play presents all sorts of people: the mad and the sane, the victims and the scoundrels, the devout and the sanctimonious.

Jonson uses the fair, a historical summer event that drew people from all walks of life, as a microcosm for examining his characters’ foolishness and faults no one’s without some quantity of human frailty.

The Stratford production, directed by Antoni Cimolino and the 1614 play’s professional Canadian premiere, savours the script’s rich variety, but doesn’t look hard enough at the darkness beneath the comic glitter.

We enter the world of the fair through the Puritan John Littlewit (Matt Steinberg). An amateur playwright, he goes to Bartholomew Fair to see the puppet show he’s written. Littlewit and his family and friends get mixed up with cozeners, whores, ballad singers and cutpurses, all desirous of making an easy shilling. Keeping an eye on the fair-goers is Justice Overdo (Tom McCamus), who intends to mete out justice to wrongdoers and play the deus ex machina in the day’s events.

Nothing goes as planned, of course, and everyone, including Overdo, learns a sad lesson about humanity and relationships.

Cimolino’s production, colourfully designed by Carolyn M. Smith and lit by Steven Hawkins, captures the show’s bawdiness and is often entertaining. There are a number of standout performances by a cast that includes seasoned actors and members of the company’s training program, the Birmingham Conservatory.

You can’t help but laugh at Juan Chioran’s Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, a hypocritical Puritan who resembles a stick insect and ends up bested in a debate with a troupe of puppets. And you’ll also feel some (but not too much) sympathy for McCamus’s disguised Overdo, who’s sure that he’ll set everything right in a troubled world.

Jonathan Goad as the wit Quarlous, determined to get a wealthy wife, handles the sometimes tortuous language with skill, as does Lucy Peacock as the lusty, tyrannical pig-woman Ursla, one of the play’s key figures of misrule. Kelli Fox’s gingerbread lady, Randy Hughson’s horse-dealer and Cliff Saunders’s puppeteer are also keenly drawn.

The standout conservatory actors include Dalal Badr as Mistress Overdo, Steinberg and Alana Hawley as Grace, a young woman with a mind of her own.

Sometimes wordy for modern audiences and with a plot that can be hard to follow, Bartholomew Fair still has its riches. Too bad this production doesn’t show its scary, sordid underbelly more effectively.

jonkap@nowtoronto.com

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