I first got to know Susan Benson over the many years I reviewed the Stratford Festival, starting in 1976 (during the long-vanished golden era of Robin Phillips). The celebrated British designer was already putting her stamp on Canadian theatre, opera, and ballet, and my admiration for her work resulted in a fairly extensive personal collection of her renderings. When the theatre designer Michael Eagan viewed some of my framed Bensons, he singled out her rendering of Fenton, from The Merry Wives of Windsor, in 1982. “This costume design is worth your entire collection,” he said. “Besides the fine modelling of the figure and face, the subtle colouring seems to be there and not be there.”
Eagan was spot-on: Benson renders Fenton with black ink and watercolour. The delicate accuracy of her fine lines — along with her cleverly restrained use of muted earth tones for Fenton’s cloak, jacket, pleated trousers, boots, and hat, finished off with just two touches of...
Keith Garebian has published thirty books and five chapbooks, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay. He is featured in the third volume of Laurence Hutchman’s In the Writers’ Words.
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