Robert Lepage set to direct Stratford show for 2018 season
Celebrated Quebec auteur will make festival debut with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
Two major forces in Canadian theatre are coming together.
The Stratford Festival plans a production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus directed by celebrated Quebec auteur Robert Lepage for its 2018 season.
Although a bilingual touring production of “Romeo and Juliet” co-directed by Lepage played at the festival in 1990, this will be his debut directing for the company and working with Stratford actors.
Stratford’s artistic director, Antoni Cimolino, says having Lepage direct there is “a long held dream.”
He’s been following Lepage’s work since the 1980s and talking to him about their shared love of Shakespeare — and Coriolanus in particular — since Cimolino directed the play for Stratford in 2006.
Serious discussion about this collaboration began in 2014, but it’s taken this long to fit it into Lepage’s packed schedule, which currently includes the touring solo show “887,” opening next week at Canadian Stage; and “Frame by Frame,” a project for the National Ballet of Canada premièring in June 2018.
“We’ve been trying for years and years,” Lepage says.
The production will be in association with Lepage’s Quebec Citybased company Ex Machina, where he recently led a weeklong workshop of the play with members of the Stratford ensemble.
Another workshop is planned for the autumn.
Coriolanus is about an arrogant general who attempts and fails to rule 5th-century Rome amid political intrigue, a complex relationship with his domineering mother and conflict with the masses.
Lepage directed a celebrated production of the play in French in the early 1990s, which was staged in a long rectangular cut-out on a blacked-out stage, creating a cinematic effect. Cimolino says some elements of that production “may be carried over” to this one, which will be set “in the current context and the modern world of communications.”
“The mob that would have filled the Roman forum years ago is very much online. We have a different kind of forum now.”
While the Stratford board of directors still has to approve the project and it’s not yet fully budgeted, Cimolino underlines that the creative work is underway. “Lepage is a national treasure and it will be great to have him working here on Shakespeare with this great company of actors.”