A trace of transparency: long-time reviewers (I'm one of them) soon learn that it's impossible to set aside whatever assumptions, attitudes, and memories they've accumulated. Even so, you do your best to take each play as it comes. The result won't be perfect, even though it may be surprising. This year's trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival was certainly that - imperfect as always, but also more surprising than usual. I was impressed by "Camelot," a musical I heartily dislike; I was mostly disappointed by "Twelfth Night" even though I love the play and was eager to see the well-known actor Brian Dennehy as Sir Toby Belch; and I was most deeply stirred by "The Little Years," by John Mighton, a play and playwright I'd never heard of. I also saw Shakespeare's slapdash comedy, "The Merry Wives of Windsor."

Mighton is both a playwright and an adjunct professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. First he was a poet, then he returned to school at 28 to earn his doctorate in math despite early struggles with the subject matter, and only then did he start writing plays. "The Little Years" reflects his own experience and his deeply held beliefs that math is endlessly fascinating, that anyone can study it successfully, and that the assumption that women cannot master it is an outrage.

The play, which begins in the 1950's and covers a half-century, is small but ambitious. Written in 1995, it interweaves large ideas about the nature of time with the increasingly blighted life of Kate, an insightful teenager who is rebuffed at every turn, mainly by her small-minded mother (the solid Chick Reid) and a concerned but unimaginative school principal (Victor Ertmanis). Mighton's attempt is generally but not always successful as we see Kate in her teens, 20s, 40s, and 60s. Young Kate, played passionately by Bethany Jillard, becomes a thwarted, embittered woman, whose capacity for love and learning wither. She spends much of her life in silence before another young woman, also played by Jillard, discovers the notebooks she had written a half-century before.

Mighton's writing is richest when young Kate expresses her fascination with the nature of time; it gives the play its theme. Newtonian time is fixed and immutable, but new theories see it differently. Somebody who travels around the world, for instance, returns home younger than those who remained behind. In such a universe, the smallest things can be consequential. That idea excites Kate (and Mighton), but the principal would rather see her study to be a secretary. Much of the rest of the play - including conversations between Kate and her sister-in-law Grace (Yanna McIntosh), and between Grace and Roger, an artist she has an affair with (Evan Buliung) - resembles everyday chit-chat. Even so, the scenes in which Irene Poole appears as the adult Kate are gripping. She has a gift for restraint and understatement as she builds a character from silence as much as speech, and also from the smallest moments in what looks to be a wasted life. Only a long and largely extraneous scene between Grace and her artist-lover drags.

Every time I've seen Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's "Camelot" on the stage or the screen, I've come away irritated by its bloated book, its second-rate production numbers (except for the clever "The Lusty Month of May"), and its bathetic sentimentality when it needs genuine emotion. The flaws are still there, but director Gary Griffin has had the good sense to cut the running time by at least 20 minutes, and has mounted (with set designer Debra Hanson, costume designer Mara Blumenfeld, and lighting designer Alan Brodie) a sumptuous production. Griffin and the cast have actually given this sloth of a show some energy.

Lerner's adaptation of the story of King Arthur and the Round Table from T.H. White's classic novel, "The Once and Future King," is turgid. His lyrics fare better, especially in two charming duets for Arthur and Guenevere, "I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight" and "What Do the Simple Folk Do?"

Most people know the character of Arthur through Richard Harris' eccentric, self-important portrayal in the movie version of the show. But at Stratford, Geraint Wyn Davies invests Arthur with humanity and wit. He never takes himself too seriously as he struggles to do the right thing. Wyn Davies' large yet stirring performance makes Arthur's fall more moving than anything I've ever encountered in this lumbering show.

Lancelot is difficult to play because he's such a prig; perfection isn't very interesting. But Jonathan Winsby invests the famous love ballad, "If Ever I Should Leave You," with human feeling. Despite the richness of his voice, he sings it, not as an aria to show off his tonsils, but as dialogue that speaks in soaring melody to the woman he loves. Brent Carver brings welcome humor to his two roles, Merlin and the slightly addled King Pellinore. Kaylee Harwood as Guenevere has charm but not the presence to command the stage in her solo numbers.

Queen Elizabeth I gets some of the credit for "The Merry Wives of Windsor," so the story goes. She let Master Shakespeare know that she'd like to see Sir John Falstaff again, even though Mistress Quickly had announced his death in "Henry V." The result was "Merry Wives," in which Falstaff, as ebullient a scalawag as ever, sets out to seduce two married women but ends up the butt of their jokes on three separate occasions. In the Henry plays, Falstaff is a scoundrel who also happens to be the greatest comic character in English theater. By the time of "Merry Wives," he has become merely a fool who never learns from his mistakes or failures. He is more Gulliver than the Falstaff we remember.

And that takes us back to Wyn Davies again. His ability to humanize the characters he plays turns Falstaff from the bumptious villain who deserves what he gets to someone we care about even in his reduced state. With his clothes and hair askew, his cheeks red and his voice raspy from too much sack, and his misplaced confidence in his wit undiminished, he is a gaudy and still entertaining shadow of his former self.

In addition to Falstaff and his folly, what matters in the play is the vengeance taken by Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, but Laura Condlin and Lucy Peacock reduce their characters to little more than recitations of speeches. The routine romantic plot between young Anne Page (Andrea Runge) and Fenton (Trent Pardy) is there only for convention's sake. Without Wyn Davies and Tom Rooney's very funny portrayal of the oafishly jealous Master Ford, "Merry Wives" would have made for a very long afternoon.

Director Des McAnuff has wreaked havoc on "Twelfth Night," one of the last and greatest of the comedies. Shakespeare wrote it shortly before such tragedies as "Othello," "King Lear," and "Macbeth." The play seamlessly integrates sparkling wit and boisterous knockabout with deepening melancholy. As a result, the scene of reconciliation and restoration at the end is funny and moving but also strangely unsettled.

In brief, Viola washes ashore in the strange land of Illyria after a shipwreck. Donning men's clothes, she serves the lovesick Duke Orsino, who pines for Olivia. Olivia won't give the Duke a tumble because she plans to mourn her dead brother for seven years. Olivia's kinsman, the rakehell Sir Toby Belch, cons the foolish Andrew Aguecheek to pay for their drunken revels, and undertakes the gulling of the Puritanical (and egotistical) Malvolio. Commenting wittily on the action and on the follies of all human beings is Feste, the fool (and the wisest man in Illyria). His delight in language and his songs, especially the mournful "Come Away, Death" and the alternately flippant and pensive "When That I Was and a Little Tiny Boy," play an essential role in establishing the play's mixed tone and its insight into life's follies.

But McAnuff has decided that adding anachronisms throughout the play will somehow improve it, so somebody delivers a pizza in the middle of one scene, and black-suited, umbrella-ed solicitors and clerks stride around and through a serious conversation to make it almost impossible to listen. Is there a shabbier way to get an easy laugh? The show's songs become a "history" of popular music styles for the last half-century. Although the musical numbers are often bright and loud, and add a rowdy element to a play that's already rowdy, they undermine its melancholy. McAnuff strips away most of its humanity but at least he was wise enough not to fool with the scenes in which Malvolio appears cross-gartered before Olivia and the final reconciliation scene. They are the two most effective moments in the play.

Mike Shara played Orsino as if he is fully engaged in the world; as a result, his speeches about his lovesickness were meaningless. Stephen Ouimette lived up to his reputation as a brilliant comedian as Sir Andrew, and Ben Carlson was a sly, sympathetic Feste. But Dennehy was especially disappointing as Sir Toby. His irresistible vulgarity, so essential to the play's comic side, never materialized.

2011 Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Through October 30

Stratford, Ontario, Canada

Stratfordfestival.ca