I really hope that this beautiful, valuable-beyond-price theatre-piece will be recorded in Christopher Plummer’s incomparable performance of it, because it is a treasure truly worth preserving for future generations.
Christopher Plummer has written about his extraordinary career as one of the world’s greatest actors, with details about the classic performances he gave in great leading roles and about a significant number of iconic performances by several of the world’s greatest actresses with whom he played supporting roles. And I’d like to see him in an autobiographical performance about that theatre-lifetime and those works and those actresses.
But A Word or Two is his memoir and his rumination about his lifetime love-affair with literature: it is beyond wordplay to call it a “play on words” or a “word-play” because it selects from, and celebrates and bares Plummer’s fascination toward, devotion to, and mastery of the written and spoken word.
Plummer has written and performed this piece before, but this is his latest revision and Stratford Festival artistic director Des McAnuff’s elegant direction and production of what may be its culmination.
Robert Brill has created a stage set dominated by a huge obelisk made of books curving upward perhaps 18 feet, like a monument. We first see Christopher Plummer sitting on books in a space made by one of its curves, reciting the first verse of Lewis Carroll’s “The Aged, Aged Man” who is “sitting on a gate.” And Stratford’s master lighting and scenic artists and musicians and video artists vary Plummer’s settings and supports as he moves on to stories of his boyhood discovery of books and reading and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and noble speeches, and Robert Service’s Yukon bar-rooms. The selections wander gloriously.
Service was a fellow Canadian; and among the wordsmiths Plummer recalls and celebrates and gives a bit of gold-plating to is one whom Plummer recalls actually knowing: Canada’s astounding mixture of world-class serious expert on economics and priceless creator of dizzying nonsense, Stephen Leacock. Plummer quotes Leacock’s famous sentence, from Nonsense Novels, 1911: “Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.” But he omits my favorite reported quote about Leacock: “It was said in 1911 that more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than had heard of Canada.”
A writer whom Plummer became friendly with was the poet/playwright Archibald MacLeish, whom Plummer here remembers fondly and quotes a portion of MacLeish’s J.B., which Plummer had performed notably on Broadway. He also gives a satisfying reading of two great speeches from Shaw’s Don Juan In Hell section of Man and Superman; but most of the material here is not an echo of the actor’s stage work. Wisecracks, puns, memorable descriptions, and repartee: the material is one great performer and writer’s personal compilation of fondly recalled uses of words – and an obvious plea for more such emphases.
We end with Plummer sitting on the monument of books again in the beginning pose, reciting the last verse of Carroll’s funny and sad poem. Say what you will about the loss of such values and emphases, I saw many young people laughing and crying and joining the rest of us in standing and cheering at the end.
