A 400-YEAR HIATUS
Rosalynde returns to the title of As You Like It and actress dives in on short notice,
So far this summer, there has been a lot of celebrating over the number of women taking the stage at the Stratford Festival in some of Shakespeare’s biggest roles: Martha Henry as Prospero in The Tempest, Seana McKenna, Michelle Giroux and Irene Poole playing Caesar, Mark Antony and Cassius in Julius Caesar, and Beryl Bain and Jessica B. Hill as one-half of the separated twins in A Comedy of Errors.
In fact, the Star’s theatre critics started the applause around this year’s cross-gender casting last December.
But if Shakespeare still reigns over the summer theatre season, then attention must also be paid to the Bard’s biggest female character, Rosalind from As You Like It.
Speaking a quarter of the play’s text, Rosalind’s journey from persecution by Duke Ferdinand, her uncle, into the Forest of Arden under the disguise of the male Ganymede is the main arc of the play.
To mark this, the travelling summer Shakespeare troupe Driftwood Theatre have renamed their production of As You Like It after its heroine.
“Shakespeare’s source material for this play is very specifically a 16th-century novel called Rosalynde. And I don’t know why he decided to change the title, but he did,” said Driftwood artistic director D. Jeremy Smith.
“I think that considering what has been happening in our industry, we wanted to make a statement that it’s about time Shakespeare had a play named after a woman. We have enough plays named after men, and it’s very clearly her story,” he said.
Rosalynde (or As You Like It) has been touring Ontario throughout the month of July, with its stops in various parks across the GTA, from Mississauga to Ontario Place to Scarborough to North York, happening this week until Aug. 3.
On top of handling a condensed version of Shakespeare’s play, the cast also takes on multiple roles, puppetry, and an added layer of an alternative setting — 1918 Canada, in the middle of the (white) women’s rights movements.
If that wasn’t enough of a challenge for the woman to play Shakespeare’s largest female role, Sochi Fried, a last-minute casting change had her join the company with one and a half weeks before opening.
“It was terrifying, it still is terrifying, but exactly the kind of challenge that I was looking for; to have all of me be challenged and utilized to learn a huge Shakespearean role, in a complicated play, in a week and a half,” Fried said from the troupe’s stop in Orillia. On the day The Star spoke to her, she had come up with a new moment to add to the ending and was planning on trying it out for the first time in front of that night’s audience.
“In general I work slowly as an actor. You want to spend time rehearsing to learn what is going on with this character, this moment. Then once, of course, you put it in front of an audience, you learn even more. I’m still playing catch up in a lot of ways,” she said. “But hey, it makes you feel more alive than at any other time. I love it.”
Fried is known in Toronto as an impactful stage presence in indie theatre and new Canadian plays, most recently in Modern Times Theatre’s Blood Wedding, Obsidian Theatre’s Up the Garden Path, and Circlesnake Productions’s The Queen’s Conjuror. And though she has played roles like Isabella in Measure for Measure, Fried hasn’t often felt compelled to perform in Shakespeare’s works.
“Working with heightened text, the technical artistry of it, it’s hugely demanding and that is absolutely worthwhile. But in a lot of ways I’m more interested in new work. And I have to say that in general, doing classical plays in traditional ways just does not in- terest me,” she said. “In some of the other roles that I’ve played, which has all been women, they kind of disappear at some point in the play. I would find it so deeply frustrating and kind of unforgivable.”
But in playing the central female role of Rosalynde, Fried’s views have softened.
“This role, she does not disappear. Under the guise of this male alter ego of Ganymede, she learns to take agency in her own life. I think she’s absolutely fascinating and has deepened my appreciation for what I guess so many other people in the world have already come to understand, which is the genius of Shakespeare,” she said with a laugh.
Of course, Rosalynde is one female character in the Shakespeare canon that receives such a journey, while other women — even in the same play — must remain silent. According to Smith, the framing of Rosalynde (or As You Like It) within the Canadian women’s suffragette movement gives this silence a purpose, to highlight the inequality between white women and those of colour or Indigenous backgrounds that weren’t granted the same rights.
“You are definitely going to be seeing As You Like It. But the hope is that with the little judiciously placed quotes and framing in terms of the time period, that there will be resonances in people’s mind,” said Fried.
It’s clear that Shakespeare still dominates the summer theatre fare in Ontario — and if “all the world’s a stage,” then these resonances will hopefully have a lasting impact outside of the play itself.