Taking the Bard to the back Alleys
Remember the old Bob Dylan verse about Shakespeare from Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again?
“Well Shakespeare, he’s in the alley / with his pointed shoes and his bells / speaking to some French girl / who says she knows me well.”
Well Shakespeare, he’s going to be in the alley, right here in Montreal, in the alleys of St-Henri to be exact. Shakespeare in the Ruelles makes its world première Friday afternoon and repeats on Saturday and Sunday. It’s an experimental outside-the-box bilingual rethink of the Bard with some 20 local performers providing their own interpretation of William Shakespeare’s oeuvre.
You meet outside the main entrance of the Lionel-Groulx métro station at 3 p.m. and from there, the audience splits into two groups. One will go to the alley between Greene and Brewster Aves., the other to the lane between Irene St. and Laporte Ave. After an hour, you’ll switch alleys to catch the other half of the innovative show that features revamps of bits and pieces from a slew of Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and a few others.
There is even one segment that includes characters from two different plays who meet — clowns from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night. They meet ... and end up in a sword fight!
“It’s partly inspired by (Shakespeare in the Park),” said Matt Enos, who is co-artistic director of Shakespeare in the Ruelles, along with Michelle Cajolet-Couture. “We went to see a couple of productions of theirs over the past few years and it’s really beautiful watching theatre outdoors. But we wanted to use the architectural backdrop of the city as part of the show and we wanted it to be a little more intimate. We wanted it to be more interactive, to be more of an up-close-and-personal type of thing.”
The cool thing is it makes use of one of the great things of inner-city Montreal — our alleys. Cajolet- Couture, who’s lived in France for the past few years, notes that, sadly, they don’t have many alleys in that country.
But Shakespeare specialists take note. This is not your grandfather’s Shakespeare.
“It’s a deconstruction of Shakespeare,” said Enos. “We have many different scenes from many different plays or for example a scene might be inspired by a particular character.”
“Like there’s one piece in which a woman is talking to Hamlet,” adds Cajolet-Couture.
Each performer wrote their own segment and the performers include actors, writers, puppet artists, performance artists and musicians.
“The purists will be shocked,” said Cajolet-Couture.
The other neat thing is it’s bilingual, in an organic way, simply a reflection of how life is lived in central Montreal in 2018.
“It just makes sense to do it like this in Montreal,” said Enos. “We all do the French-English thing every day in our lives. So why not?”
“We have a desire to push that aspect,” said Cajolet-Couture. “I have a lot of friends on the franco side and they ’re open, curious, but they still don’t really know what’s happening on the anglo side. So it’s just to provoke more exchanges. Getting the two scenes to meet is part of the essence of the project. It’s to inspire people to go from Hochelaga to St-Henri or to go the other way.”
We wanted to use the architectural backdrop of the city as part of the show and we wanted it to be a little more intimate.