The Stratford Festival

Through November

Stratford, Ontario, Canada

800-567-1600, stratfordfestival.ca

In its early years, The Stratford Festival of Canada called itself The Stratford Shakespeare Festival. As the plays' range widened, "Shakespeare" disappeared from the name. This November, with Artistic Director Richard Monette retiring, the new management is restoring Will's name and putting new emphasis on his plays. In a spirit of contrarianism you have to hope he would have approved of, here are reviews of three plays from the current season, none of which he wrote.

The Stratford Festival's production of "To Kill a Mockingbird" has a ramshackle set of unpainted houses located, in this case, along a street festooned with ropes of Spanish moss. At first, the set feels realistic, but then, under Kevin Fraser's subdued lighting and deep shadows, it takes on a haunting aura that fits a coming-of-age story tinged with hatred and horror.

I had no particular desire to see Harper Lee's story yet again, despite its beauty and its appeal. I stand corrected: the version adapted by Christopher Sergel and directed by Susan H. Schulman retains much of the novel's power and charm. The production is moving despite occasional flaws, some of them significant.

Jean Marie Finch, known as Scout, grows up in a small Alabama town in the midst of the Great Depression. Along with her brother Jem and their friend Dill, she is shaped by the town, by her father's defense of a black man against a false charge of rape, and by the salvation that comes from their mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley.

Because this is a memory play, Sergel has added an adult Jean Marie to narrate the story. The device is not uncommon, as those who know Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" will recognize. But too much of the adaptation is given over to narration. Every time Jean Marie steps forward to talk, the play slows.

When W.C. Fields remarked, "Anyone who hates children and small dogs can't be all bad," he was referring to an actor's having to compete with them onstage. "To Kill a Mockingbird" puts three children front and center, and they are quite remarkable. Although the combination of high vocal registers and thick accents often made them hard to understand - a serious problem - Abigail Winter-Culliford as Scout, Thomas Murray as Jem, and Spencer Walker as Dill were utterly at home in their characters.

Despite the appeal of the children and their story, Scout and Jem's father, Atticus, is the play's central figure. Peter Donaldson's performance as a small-town lawyer called upon to do extraordinary things, is itself extraordinary. This is not Gregory Peck's magisterial Atticus, but a decent, intelligent man who does the best he can every day of his life, whether it's shooting a mad dog, raising his children, or defending Tom Robinson in a time of lynchings and universal injustice. It is a warm and loving performance.

The line between universality and banality can be perilously thin. That's the lesson to be drawn from Vern Thiessen's one-woman play, "Shakespeare's Will," written in 2005 as a tour de force for the splendid Seana McKenna. One of the problems with Shakespeare is that we know so little about his life. The same is true of his wife, Anne Hathaway, the subject of Thiessen's play, set on the day of Shakespeare's burial in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616.

Hathaway is something of a curiosity in her own right because she was pregnant when she and Shakespeare married, she was eight years older than he but outlived him by seven years, and they spent most of their married life apart because he was writing plays in London while she was raising their three children in Stratford. But nothing about her is more intriguing than her mention in Shakespeare's will. It leaves most of his money and property to various family members, and then leaves Anne in a notoriously brief paragraph, "my second best bed with the furniture." Now, after four centuries of silence, she has her say. Most bitingly, she lashes out at her husband's sister Joan, but mostly we hear about her complaints and adjustments over the years, including the secret pact she believes she and Will had made. It sustains her for years until the will makes his betrayal public. Their son Hamnet died at 11, a horrible and inherently dramatic moment, but the everyday tasks and terrors of motherhood would be no more than routinely interesting if this middle-class woman had not been the wife of William Shakespeare.

McKenna, an actress of grace, passion, and wit, deserved better - perhaps even a play with more than one character, a richer stew of people to latch onto, something more than "he said....she said." She moves surely along the steps and risers of the simple set, and just as surely through Thiessen's modern English, despite the clutter of the occasional archaism like "my sweetling."

Director Richard Monette should have left Oscar Wilde to The Shaw Festival, where it apparently belongs. His production of "An Ideal Husband," Wilde's 1895 domestic drama with a political twist, has little feel for the rhythms of the play or the way the dialogue gleams. The sharp-edged set pieces lumber along without air to sustain life or laughter. The character of Lord Goring, who represents Wilde in the play and has most of the best lines, strides to the front of the stage to recite bon mots to the audience, rather than having them emerge naturally from this dandified but ultimately substantive young man. Wilde's wit crackles with wisdom because it mocks a world, not because it's merely a snooty game.

A morality play disguised as a comedy of manners, "An Ideal Husband" exposes the virtuous politician, Sir Robert Chiltern, to blackmail at the hands of the unscrupulous Mrs. Cheveley. His wife, a priggish exemplar of Victorian virtue, loves him but can tolerate no moral blemish. Only the apparently amoral Lord Goring can argue for a highly moral form of pragmatism and compromise, and help save the day before he submits to marriage with Sir Robert's younger sister, Mabel.

Tom McMamus is steady and upright as Sir Robert, but Brigit Wilson is nondescript as his wife, Gertrude. Dixie Seattle mugs and grimaces in a cartoon-like portrayal of Mrs. Cheveley, and David Snelgrove feels out of place as Goring. Lady Markby, a minor character, has the play's funniest set speech, but Chick Reid has little feel for comedy.

Finally, a play set in drawing rooms feels lost on the large Festival Theatre stage - yet another way in which this ponderous production of a wonderful play loses its way.