FORSOOTH, YONDER SUNSET GLOWS!
Freewill Shakespeare Festival woos with words best heard from the comfort of a blanket
To be well-prepped for this year’s tribute to the Bard, patrons streaming into the Hawrelak Park Amphitheatre should absolutely read the play beforehand. Failing that, don’t forget the mosquito repellent.
Either way, Edmonton audiences will react as they invariably do to the comedy and tragedy presented annually since 1989 amid the chattering squirrels and squawking magpies. Patrons will burst out laughing at the hijinks bored housewives will get up to in the Merry Wives of Windsor. The next night, they will clutch their hearts, touched by Shylock’s humanity in The Merchant of Venice. If it rains, they will pop their umbrellas, grab a Twizzler and wait it out.
“Lucky for us, people love Shakespeare,” said the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director Marianne Copithorne. “Four hundred years later, his plays are still relevant. When we make contemporary, innovative, and accessible productions, we try to make them speak for what’s happening now.”
Copithorne also knows there are limits to the love of Shakespeare. When the amphitheatre tent tore and was unusable in 2014, productions were forced to move inside for the season. Attendance dropped to 4,000 people over the festival’s run from roughly 12,000 to 14,000 people. We may love Shakespeare, but we want him on a blanket.
This year, Copithorne is directing The Merchant of Venice, which has been set in Italy in 1939 as Mussolini and Hitler join forces to ramp up anti-Semitic sentiment.
“It’s a good brewing pot to start that play, in that atmosphere, and you can see clearly that this could happen in that time period,” says Copithorne.
The play, originally written as a comedy, follows what happens when a merchant defaults on a large loan given him by a Jewish moneylender. There is also love, and revenge, at the heart of the play.
“Thematically, what I’m pursuing with this play is that if you marry for money instead of for love, you are doomed,” says Copithorne.
But, as ever, Shakespeare’s characters are human, and flawed. Doom is sometimes inevitable, even if it all seemed like a good idea at the time.
“That’s what our audience relates to,” said Copithorne. “These characters are struggling with issues of morality and facing them down, and making mistakes.”
The second play at the 2017 festival is The Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by longtime Edmonton favourite Ashley Wright, who just finished a master’s degree in directing at the University of Alberta. He has also played the central character, Sir John Falstaff, numerous times, most recently at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach festival.
In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff finds himself short of cash. To improve his circumstances, he decides to court two wealthy, albeit married, women. When the two hear of his plan, they conspire to create a series of circumstances designed to make Falstaff look ridiculous. There’s a great scene in which he is forced to hide in a smelly laundry basket.
As legend has it, The Merry Wives was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I, who loved the Falstaff character seen in previous Shakespeare plays and wanted more.
“I find the play fascinating because most of the characters, except for Sir John Falstaff, are part of an emerging middle class in suburban London. People with good jobs,” says Wright, noting the play’s context still resonates today.
The two bored housewives who plot Falstaff’s downfall could be seen as the spark for a long line of stock characters seen even in today’s modern tales. (Surely the Real Housewives Of Wherever are bored as stink.)
Wright sets the play in 1977, during the disco era.
“When I was 10, I lived in suburbia and on the weekends moms and dads gathered in someone’s rec room and everybody would get up and start dancing,” said Wright. “I wanted to find the parallel between when he was writing, and today, and I kept coming back to the 1970s.
“And that disco music is so recognizable, and so fun and frivolous, which is kind of the play — it’s fun and frivolous,” says Wright.
While Shakespeare is often criticized as sexist, the Merry Wives contains powerful female characters, including a young woman who picks her own husband, despite her parents’ objections.
Copithorne and Wright have some advice for theatre-goers tackling Shakespeare in the park. The Bard works with many characters and multiple plots, and the whole business can feel confusing. Both directors urge the audience to be patient for about the first 15 minutes, after which everything becomes clear.
While you wait, there is always that big Alberta sky to contemplate.