Bad theater, good TV

Not sure what to watch during the writers' strike? The giddy backstage sendup "Slings and Arrows" shoots for the sublime.

Editor's note: Salon's new weekly feature, Re-Viewed, offers a fresh look at great television shows now available on DVD. These foreign gems, forgotten faves and more will carry you through the writers' strike -- and beyond.

By Laura Miller

Read more: TV, Laura Miller, DVD, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Re-Viewed

Photo: Rhombus Media

A scene from "Slings and Arrows".

Jan. 29, 2008 | It's easy to lose your faith in the theater, if you ever had it to begin with. Theater costs so much and, nowadays, as a friend of mine once complained after blowing 75 bucks on "Dinner With Friends," it's almost always bad. But if you have ever experienced the tiniest flicker of enchantment while watching live actors perform onstage, no matter how dim that spark has grown, the Canadian television series "Slings and Arrows" can coax it back to life. Who knows? It might even succeed at winning over a few people who have never seen a play at all.

"Slings and Arrows," set in the fictional small town of New Burbage, ran for three seasons between 2003 and 2006. Each season consists of six episodes and is set during the time of the New Burbage Festival, the town's cultural (and touristic) mainstay. At the heart of each season is the production of one of Shakespeare's great tragedies -- "Hamlet," "Macbeth" and "King Lear." The tragedies mostly provide ballast for the show's comedy: a witty, sometimes giddy but always gloriously precise backstage satire that regularly takes flight into the sublime.

At the beginning of the first season, the New Burbage Festival is one of those staid, well-upholstered operations that draw a steady flow of aging subscribers but never quite manage to support themselves. "You don't make demands on the audience," an unctuous critic tells the artistic director, Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette). "You soothe them." Everyone involved with the theater seems at least partly checked out. We see the rich husbands of matronly donors eyeing the actresses' cleavage and making a beeline for the bar, and even the stage manager keeps one ear tuned to the hockey game during the show. At the opening night cast party, Oliver's leading lady, Ellen Fanshaw (Martha Burns), accuses him of "not caring," of merely going through the motions, just before she perfunctorily picks up a bartender half her age.

Oliver and Ellen live under the shadow of an earlier triumph, a production of "Hamlet" whose incandescent brilliance was such that people still talk about it even though it ran for only three performances. Oliver directed, Ellen played Ophelia, and the star, Geoffrey Tennent (Paul Gross), was his friend and her lover. For reasons unknown, Geoffrey suffered a breakdown during the "Alas, poor Yorick" scene, jumped into Ophelia's grave and fled the theater, ultimately doing a stint in a mental institution.

Now, seven years later, a soused Oliver passes out in the street on opening night and gets run over by a truck full of ham. ("Slings and Arrows," like the Bard himself, is not above the occasional kernel of corn.) Geoffrey turns up at Oliver's funeral, makes a speech damning New Burbage's artistic complacency and Oliver's toadying to corporate sponsors ("The whole town is a gift shop!"), and winds up getting named the interim artistic director. The next season's key production? "Hamlet," of course.

In each season of "Slings and Arrows," a rumpled Geoffrey, cuffs flapping and collar awry, wrestles with an assortment of problems that mirror the famous dilemmas of each play. The first time around, he has to muster the guts to take over from Oliver, flush the decay out of the festival and come to terms with Ellen's past betrayals. Geoffrey's terrified of "Hamlet" itself, a situation not much helped by the presence of Oliver's kibitzing ghost, who has lingered behind to help. "Apparently," the specter explains, "there's an afterlife, despite what they told us in university."

Afraid to direct the play himself, Geoffrey is forced to hire his nemesis, Darren Nichols (Don McKellar), a leather-clad compendium of phony avant-garde clichés who, despite Geoffrey's best efforts, returns at some point during every season. Darren insists on staging a "Hamlet" with live horses and flames (a perilous combination) and, zeroing in on the "rotten in Denmark" theme, instructs the supernumeraries to smell their armpits while standing in the background. In Season 2, he has the actors in "Romeo and Juliet" dressed like chessmen and forbidden to touch or even look at each other. (This, he claims, has something to do with "deconstructing the signifiers in the play.")

Next page: A theatrical theme park?