Post 35/2023. The shows were compelling. The five days allowed for variety. Time with family featured food, a tour through a new house under construction and a farewell tribute to the old house where my siblings and I grew up. It’s Sunday evening, home from Stratford, Ontario.

Marty and I have been doing an annual visit to the festival–and family–for almost 40 years.

Yesterday I took time to sketch a few notes, a brief reflection of our time away.

Saturday: a morning walk that included a brief stop at the annual regatta races in support of breast cancer research. A takeaway coffee from Balzac’s. Then a futile search for a T-shirt that aped the title of one play we saw: Monty Python’s Spamalot. We saw the shirt two days earlier, but woe betide us, we could not find it as we retraced our steps around town.

Its message was: I love SPAM . . . A Lot

We did love it, as we did Grand Magic.

I’ll concentrate on Grand Magic, by Italian playwright Eduardo De Filippo. I’m under no illusion that I can briefly describe the heart of the show, much less the delight and challenge in how it made me think, as Director Antoni Cimolino notes in the program, about “Love, Illusions and the Games People Play.” Check out the play’s description on the Stratford Festival website–or call me for coffee.

Grand Magic. deals with fact and illusion. Cimolino: “Grand Magic explores the age-old idea that life is a game, a dream. What at first appears to be simply a spectacle, may be a metaphor that leads to deeper understanding of ourselves. Perhaps through illusion we can find truth. And perhaps the purveyors of magic–as of theatre itself–are simply imitating and illuminating life.”

Reflective moment

Back at our B&B I sat on the front porch, coffee at hand, the London Free Press undulating in the slight breeze.

Now, this is just too good to be true, I thought to myself. Idyllic. Ideal weather. Three fine shows–and tasty meals–under our belt. But is this newspaper real or illusionary? Is the hot liquid passing my lips real or just a sensation? Is my Stratford theatre experience of more than 60 years factual or illusion? Jeepers-creepers, has time stood still, evaporated, or has it obliviously chugged merrily and not so merrily along?

That’s what Grand Magic stirred in me. I’d see it again, really, if I could.

The third show was the musical Rent. Not our favorite (too loud), but still engaging and evocative of the connection, care, and push-back, that came out of a bohemian circle of friends in New York in an isolating age in the 1990s.

Scenes from the Shakespearean Gardens

Sweet and bittersweet

Saturday afternoon siblings and spouses gathered at the farmstead to say farewell to the house where we grew up. A brother lives in one of the houses on the farm after a manufacturing and housing development career. A nephew and his family now live there and are building a new house (their life, too, extends to careers beyond the farm). The 1880s house has served its purpose well, I trust.

Sweet and bittersweet, too, is the decision of our B&B hosts to retire from the business. Today was their last day. We were their last guests.

I treasure these words from Robert Browning’s, Grow old along with me: “The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand who saith, ‘A whole I planned, youth shows but half; Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!'”

May new chapters in all that is sweet and bittersweet, pull, drive, propel, us on, fearing not what lies before.

-John