Shakespeareans lure new audiences
The festival, now in its 28th year, is reaping the rewards of being one of the longest of its kind in the city
When the Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival moved its offerings to the Lansdowne Campus of Camosun College in 2005, it was designed to bring the celebration of all things Bard to an entirely new audience.
Changes of pace have been constant in the years since, with the addition of programming at a secondary Saxe Point stage in Esquimalt last year.
Karen Lee Pickett, the festival’s artistic director, loves where the popular event is headed, especially after the decision to stage a second run of events at Saxe Point in August resulted in an influx of new attendees.
“We put our focus into raising the artistic bar the last few years, and really making the work as good as we could make it. That’s what people are responding to.”
She’s both cautious and optimistic about the future of the festival, which is now in its 28th year. It has weathered a series of competitors during its run, and is reaping the rewards of being one of the longest-running theatre festivals of any kind in the city.
“The hope is to perhaps go other places as well,” Pickett said. “It’s not a plan right now, but I really like the idea of bringing Shakespeare to the whole community. I could see us touring at some point. We’ll see how it goes over the next few years.”
Pickett, who has been with the festival since 2012, believes the festival is positioned to improve even further with this year’s program. Pericles (directed by Christopher Weddell) will be staged on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings at Camosun, while The Tempest (directed by Chelsea Haberlin) will run Wednesday and Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons at the same location. Both plays will be active through July 28.
The Tempest will also run Aug. 2-4 at the festival’s Saxe Point stage. The decision to produce one of William Shakespeare’s better-known productions, as part of the festival’s Bard Across the Bridge partnership with the Township Community Arts Council of Esquimalt, was an obvious one for Pickett.
“It is a balance. You have the greatest hits that everybody knows — Romeo and Juliet,A Midsummer’s Night Dream — six to 10 plays that have immediate name recognition. Of course you want to program those as regularly as you can, without repeating them every year. And you balance that with what your audience responds to.”
Picket said the Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival waits seven to nine years before repeating one of Shakespeare’s classics.
For example, it has been over a decade since the company produced Pericles, she said.
As for the other variables that factor into her programming decisions, Pickett said she takes stock of the world around her and how it relates to the story arcs in specific Shakespeare works.
If it looks like audiences are in the mood for a certain kind of story, that weighs heavily in her decision.
Cry not for Pickett and her massive annual workload. Running a festival dedicated to the foremost playwright in history is often a win-win proposition, she said.
“Shakespeare is really relevant. There are things about these plays that speak to us now, as they did 200 years ago or 400 years ago. That’s why people all over the world still do these old plays.”
Context is king when it comes to evaluating Shakespeare’s work. Though considered by many to be mostly lighthearted, there was an underlying political bent to some of his work that, in turbulent times, means his plays never truly go out of style.
“I don’t think the meaning [behind Shakespeare] changes, what we perceive the meaning to be changes. Pericles is about somebody who travels the world, trying to find a new home. Today, with the situation with millions of migrants and refugees in the world, that has a certain kind of resonance. It’s there in the plot, but the way we approach it is going to be different.
“That’s what is so brilliant about Shakespeare, and why it’s so relevant. He understood human nature so acutely, we can always find new things in his plays.”