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People keep asking what possessed us to combine Shakespeare and puppetry; as we head into the final week of rehearsals for ‘Macbeth: Walking Shadows’ (Aug 13th-30th), we thought we’d pass the buck, and ask someone else that very question. When we heard about Jillian Keiley’s decision to bring puppets to the world of ‘Twelfth Night’, next season at the NAC, we were very excited (and relieved), that we weren’t the only ones who thought puppets and Shakespeare would make a great combination. We’ll get around to answering this question ourselves, but for now, back to rehearsal. -SitR
Programming Shakespeare at Canada’s National Theatre – by Jillian Keiley
Even though I was raised on and have directed, acted in or assistant directed eight different Shakespearian productions, I have always felt kind of politicized about the sheer amount of Shakespeare that Canadians produce. Don’t get me wrong – I love Shakespeare. But I’m also a nationalist. And it strikes me odd that the primary storyteller in our theatres is a man from another continent who had never dreamed of knowing Canada.
I believe in that good kind of nationhood: shared ideals, pride of place, together we are better. And so I believe that when a Hannah Moscovitch play slays a new audience or when Robert Lepage makes the world believe that Canada (or at least a part of Canada) is at the cutting edge of the craft – I think that’s good for us, not just as an arts loving community but as a country: our stories, well told. So I do believe that Canadians and Canadian artistry should have priority in our National Arts Centre space.
However, when I took over the reins at the NAC I didn’t want to restrict the programming to only Canadian writers. I am from the school that believes that the writer is a very important key creator in identifying the ‘nationality’ of a play, but I also believe that the director or ensemble of artists can interpret a play in such a way that is so unique to that artist or to that community that the play becomes a Canadian expression, if not an entirely Canadian play. I think Raoul Bhaneja’s Hamlet is uniquely his version. I believe The Electric Company’s No Exit was as much about the art of that company as it was about Sartre. I saw Modern Times’ Macbeth several years ago and it was as unique a piece as I could imagine, using Shakespeare’s Macbeth as the primary of many layers. Chris Abraham’s gay wedding Midsummer Night’s Dream belonged more to the backyards of Toronto than anywhere else.
At the NAC, we have two ways of programming. We select six or seven shows a year to present from the multitude that we see live or on video. For our in-house productions, we bring together a group of actors from across the country to build that year’s Ensemble. The Ensemble inspires the choice of plays for the season. Often times, even though the Associate Artistic Director Sarah Garton Stanley and I pride ourselves on knowing as much as we can about the Canadian canon, we hit on a combination of people that seem to call for a classic which happens to be from somewhere else.
This coming season, for example, we happen to have the perfect alchemy of artists to do Twelfth Night. (Incidentally the other five shows for the Ensemble this year are Canadian.) I was very interested in how they would tell that story and hear that music. But also I wanted to see it envisioned by uniquely Canadian dreamers. So I went to a team of the most unique Canadian dreamers I know – The Old Trout Puppet Workshop. This group of guys, who started out in a shed south of Calgary performing for Hutterites, had the kind of vision that could engage visually with all of the textual delights in Twelfth Night. So we moved forward with the plan to do a Shakespeare as imagined by The Old Trouts. It won’t be with marionettes or hand puppets so much as it will be visually animated using the Old Trouts’ signature style. The Old Trouts for years have done interpretive works that have blended quite animate inanimate objects with quite animated humans to great effect.
The last Shakespeare the NAC produced (outside of presenting the visiting Raoul Bhaneja’s Hamlet) was Peter Hinton’s all Indigenous King Lear. It too was a very Canadian interpretation. I believe this Twelfth Night in the hands of the great artists in our Ensemble and the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, will offer audiences an entirely new theatrical experience; and a uniquely Canadian one at that.
Twelfth Night runs January 20th-February 6th, 2016, in Ottawa at The National Arts Centre.
I love Macbeth. It’s one of my favourite plays to read, to speak, or to perform in (I played Malcolm under the direction of Nick Hutchinson in theatre school). The visceral imagery that Shakespeare uses in his writing is unparalleled anywhere else – it’s incredible. And now, this coming summer, I couldn’t be more excited to be directing it with Shakespeare in the Ruff. But ironically, as an audience member, I’ve often had a hard time watching it. The play asks us to watch the fall of a tyrannical, blood-thirsty, Evil-with-a-capital-E madman. I’m often unsure if I’m meant to enjoy the blood bath as I would in a horror flick or be disgusted by the tyrant’s inhumanity. In either case the result is that I disassociate with Macbeth’s character, and lose the point of the play. So what are we going to do differently? ENTER THE PUPPETS!
My first introduction to puppetry was 8 years ago, by a great man named Zach Fraser who directed me in a show about WWII called “…and stockings for the ladies” by the ever inventive RustWerk Company. One component of the show featured three puppets speaking to their survival of the concentration camps. Yes, I was thinking the same thing: puppets + concentration camp = this is not going to go well. But their moving monologues were what the audience connected with most. Something about the simplicity, fragility, and naivety inherent in those puppets made them immediately sympathetic. A puppet, unlike a human actor, is clinging to life every moment they are on stage. The audience is directly responsible for that puppet’s existence – it’s their imagination that allows the puppet to live, and a unique bond is formed between them. Kind of like watching your child take its first steps.
It’s this aspect of puppetry that I want to explore with the story of Macbeth. I’m interested in a figuratively and literally fragile Macbeth built of wood and paper. A man, filled with naivety, exposing his doubts and fears to an audience who is responsible for giving him life. I would be more willing to go on a journey with Macbeth if I could see both his emotional and corporal fragility through everything he does. That’s exactly what we get with puppets.
And I haven’t even mentioned all of the supernatural stuff in the play that’s way more fun in the world of puppetry. Puppets aren’t bound by the laws of physics, and so can do all sorts of inhuman things. Witch puppets?! Are you kidding me?!
The real challenge is going to be bringing together the worlds of puppetry and Shakespearean text. Luckily we got to spend a week developing ideas thanks to funding from the Ontario Arts Council. We already have some exciting things up our puppet sleeves and we’ve embarked on a rather drastic adapting process, letting the aesthetic choice of working with puppetry guide our approach to the text.
And the secret weapon that I’m most excited about: I’ve brought on Zach Fraser, the man who taught me everything I know about puppetry, to build our puppets and work with us as a puppet choreographer throughout rehearsals.
And now, a word from the man himself:
Ok. Confession. I don’t always understand Shakespeare!
His words can be poetic & powerful, but at times, I get over-whelmed by the language. Through the years, I’ve seen many Shakespeare-in-the-Park productions. In Toronto… In Montreal… In Halifax… Each has its own charm. But I often leave the performance feeling like I don’t understand the story as well as I should.
This summer, with Shakespeare in the Ruff, we intend to create a truly accessible, visceral production that touches the soul and transports the spirit…
…using puppets.
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a production of Shakespeare as unique in its vision as that which we are venturing to create this summer in Withrow Park. Shakespeare’s language can be exquisite. The plight of puppets can be absurd, splendid, and heart-wrenching. Puppets are the masters of high comedy & deepest drama, so partnering them up with Shakespeare makes perfect sense to us.
There’s a reason why most theatre companies avoid puppetry: they add a LOT of extra work to a production. But there’s also a reason why some of us keep getting drawn back to puppets; because they are spellbinding, seductive, magical, and they have the power to win our hearts instantaneously! They appear to be naïve, but their power is great.
Ruff is an ambitious, motivated, slick young company of talented & bold artists. I applaud the company for their willingness to respect, revere, and yet reinvent Shakespeare’s plays. It’s an honour to join forces with these Ruffians this summer.
Zach Fraser
We are so thankful to directors Anita Rochon, Dawn McCaugherty, and Antoni Cimolino, who have shared their take on Cymbeline with us over the past month in our Cymbeline Series. Now that Ruff’s production is up and running, Brendan McMurtry-Howlett, our Artistic Director and director of Cymbeline’s Reign, tackles the same three questions we put to these thoughtful and generous theatre practitioners.
There’s no getting around it: Cymbeline is an odd play. The plot is labyrinthine, even by Shakespearean standards, with at least three intertwined stories; texture and mood seem to change with the wind. It’s also a bit of a hodge-podge, containing , as Jonathan Bate of Oxford has noted, an “array of favourite Shakespearian motifs: the cross-dressed heroine, the move from court to country, obsessive sexual jealousy, malicious Machiavellian plotting, the interrogation of Roman values.” It’s as though Shakespeare, nearing the end of his career, put every possible dramatic ingredient into the pot, and stirred.
But there is another reason, often overlooked, for putting Cymbeline in a class by itself. The play might – depending on one’s interpretation – offer a glimpse into the changing world-view that was underway when it was created. More specifically, it may allude to one of the most important scientific developments in history, one that unfolded in a northern Italian university town in the months before Cymbeline was written.
Looking Up
People have been gazing at the night sky since the dawn of humankind, but until the early 17th century, they had only their own eyes to provide the image. But in the autumn of 1609, a new optical device, invented in Holland, found its way into the hands of an ambitious Italian mathematician, Galileo Galilei. Before long, Galileo had improved on the original Dutch invention. From his workshop in Padua, Galileo turned this novelty into a scientific instrument.
Galileo aimed his telescope at the night sky – and was amazed at what he saw. He found the moon to be covered with mountains and craters, contrary to the established teachings of the day. His telescope revealed thousands of stars, too dim to be seen with the unaided eye. But the biggest surprise came when he peered at Jupiter: Alongside the planet he observed “three starlets – small indeed, but very bright.” Observing in “amazement” over several nights, he concluded that there were in fact four of these objects – “four wanderers [which] complete their revolution about Jupiter.” We now call them the “Galilean moons” after their discoverer.
Galileo described his discoveries in a slim book called Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), published in Venice in March of 1610. Although written in Latin, anyone could grasp the message: Here was a blow-by-blow account of the wonders of the night sky revealed by Galileo’s telescope, sights “never seen from the creation of the world up to our own time.” It was an instant bestseller.
It had been nearly 70 years since Copernicus had published his theory that the earth moves around the sun, rather than vice-versa – but it was a highly abstract, mathematical work, and few took notice at the time. But Galileo’s telescopic discoveries finally seemed to give Copernicus his due: Everything he saw through the telescope seemed to accord with the Copernican model of the universe. Jupiter, for example, behaved like a miniature solar system: If Jupiter had moons of its own, how could anyone say that the Earth was the centre of the universe?
The usual view is that these discoveries, announced in the spring of 1610, come too late to have had much of an impact on Shakespeare’s work. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty. Shakespeare was not quite ready to retire in 1610: He would write at least two more plays on his own, plus a few more with collaborators. It is among these final plays that we find Cymbeline.
The Symbols in Cymbeline
Don’t feel bad if you haven’t encountered Cymbeline yet: Since my book The Science of Shakespeare came out this spring, I’ve been asking audiences, by show of hands, who has either read or seen the play; only rarely does a hand go up. (Those of you in the Toronto area should definitely catch Shakespeare in the Ruff’s production this summer!) Let me summarize just one of the play’s three parallel plots: King Cymbeline is angry because his daughter, Imogen, has secretly married a commoner named Posthumus Leonatus. Cymbeline banishes Posthumus, who heads for Rome; there, he argues with an Italian nobleman named Jachimo over which of their native countries has the most faithful women. Jachimo wagers that when he travels to England, he will be able to seduce Imogen. (For the sake of suspense, I won’t reveal just how far he gets.)
There is much more to the play, of course, but let’s skip ahead to Act 5: Posthumus, having been convinced of Imogen’s infidelity, orders her killed; later he learns of her innocence, but mistakenly thinks his orders have been carried out. He had been travelling with the Roman army, but now switches sides and fights valiantly for Britain; the Roman forces are defeated. Believing Imogen dead, however, he yearns for his own death, and puts on Roman garb to hasten his demise. Instead, he is taken prisoner. While in jail, something very peculiar happens.
In Scene 4, we find Posthumus in his prison cell, where he collapses in slumber. He then has a dream involving the ghosts of four dead family members – relatives who he never knew in life. The spirits are those of his mother, father, and two brothers. As he lies in a daze, the ghosts move around him in a circle. (The stage direction says, They circle Posthumus round as he lies sleeping.) Feeling Posthumus’s anguish, they appeal to the Roman god, Jupiter, to come to his aid – and Jupiter obliges. The stage direction reads, Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle. He throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees. Jupiter chastises the ghosts, and then gives them a book, and instructs them to give it to Posthumus. When he is done, he ascends back to heaven.
Although Shakespeare’s characters often call on the gods for help, Jupiter’s appearance in Cymbeline is unique; there is nothing else like it in the entire canon. Scholars have examined the scene from various angles, but only recently have they begun to look at a possible Galileo connection. Granted, in Shakespeare’s play it’s the god Jupiter that we see, not the planet – but still, the details of the scene are compelling. Notice that we have exactly four ghosts, and that they move in a circle (why should they move at all?). Could the ghosts represent the four moons of Jupiter, newly discovered by Galileo? Certainly the timeline seems to hold up: Cymbeline is thought to date from the summer or fall of 1610 – in other words, it was written within the first few months (or at most half a year) after the publication of The Starry Messenger.
A New Look at an Old Play
About a decade ago, three scholars, working independently, hit on the idea of a Cymbeline-Galileo connection at about the same time: Scott Maisano, of the University of Massachusetts in Boston; John Pitcher, at Oxford; and a retired American astronomer named Peter Usher.
Usher is best know for his controversial (many would say far-fetched) theory of Hamlet, which he interprets the action in Shakespeare’s best-known play as an allegory about competing views of the cosmos. What he says about Cymbeline, however, is quite reasonable: Writing in the Shakespeare Newsletter, Usher summarizes the bizarre happenings of the play’s fifth act, noting the descent of Jupiter and the appearance of the ghosts: “These ghosts happen to be four in number, equal to the number of the Galilean moons.” And what about the book that Jupiter gives to Posthumus, via the ghosts? Its identity is never specified, but Usher believes we ought to see it as Galileo’s Starry Messenger.
Maisano and Pitcher agree that the appearance of Jupiter, and the unidentified book, likely allude to The Starry Messenger. Maisano describes Cymbeline as a “scientific romance” – a work that urges the reader to question his or her understanding of nature. Toward the end of the play, as the various loose ends are tied up, a startled King Cymbeline asks: “Does the world go round?” Maisano notes that this is “the only such utterance in Shakespeare’s plays,” and it just happens that this very question “was part of intellectual discussion all across Europe in 1610.”
Like Maisano, Pitcher sees Cymbeline as Shakespeare’s attempt to come to grips with a changing world, a universe opened wide by the scientific discoveries of the day (an idea he discusses at length in the Introduction to the recent Penguin edition of the play). The transformation began with Copernicus writing about the revolutions in the sky; soon, Pitcher suggests, there will be revolutions of a more dangerous kind, with political and religious orders turned on their heads.
It is a rare treat to enjoy a production of Cymbeline under the stars. After the show, take a moment to glance upward: The play you have just seen might just bear witness to a dramatic turn in our conception of the universe.
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Dan Falk is a science journalist based in Toronto. His most recent book is The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright’s Universe.
Sheila Macdonald is one of Ruff’s dedicated Board Members as well as an avid theatregoer. We’ve learned that trusting Sheila’s advice gets us far, so you should too.
Ptarmigan (playing August 30th)
by General Manager and Resident Musician, Brooklyn Doran
Our production of Cymbeline’s Reign begins tomorrow night and our pre-show music series is going to be off the hook! The ‘Between the Trees’ pre-show music series sees local and emerging musicians share in our evening of magic by performing a half-hour of music before our mainstage production. This year we are inviting back some seasoned veterans and familiar faces, as well as welcoming some brand new emerging talents to the stage and we couldn’t be happier!
Every musician featured this year is mega-talented! If you’re in the neighbourhood, I’d suggest coming back to the park every evening to feast your ears on some of these artists’ offerings. It’s an incredible way to find out about new music, and experience the magic of Shakespeare in the park at the same time! If you like what you’re hearing, many of them will have their music for sale at our Box Office .
Here is a little preview of some of the artists who’ll be joining us this year. All three of these feature a little bit of banjo!
This year we’re excited to welcome back Three Seasons and The Move who played opening night for our production of Richard III last year. Three Seasons and The Move is an eclectic group of musicians who straddle folk, pop and rock genres. Their music is funky, danceable, timeless and Canadian. If you didn’t catch them last year between the trees, now is definitely the time. Your toes will be tapping and your hearts will be soaring. Preview track here
Crooked House Road is a Toronto-based indie, folk, pop outfit comprised of Shaina Silver-Baird (lead vocals/violin), Mirian Kay (vocals/guitar) and Tom Mifflin (vocals/piano), joined by Derek Gray (percussion), Darren Eedens (banjo) and Matthew Riggs (bass). Folk music wrapped in delicious harmony, Crooked House Road helmed by Shaina Silver-Baird’s powerhouse vocals is a band to watch out for. Foot-stompin’ fun- Crooked House Road will get you dancing up out of your seats and revved up for an evening in the park. The raw power and emotion of the vocals paired with the incredible musicianship of this band makes for a sweet, sweet set that is not to be missed. Don’t believe me? Check the evidence:
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Ruff Artistic Director, Brendan McMurtry-Howlett, isn’t the only one in the McMurtry clan overflowing with talent. We’re thrilled that cousin Peter McMurtry’s band, Ptarmigan, is returning this summer to bless our ears with their music! If you haven’t heard of Ptarmigan yet, I suggest you come to Withrow Park on August 30th to bask in the glory that is their catchy, brilliantly-crafted folk music. It is the perfect score for watching the last rays of sun drain from the summer sky before the park is lit with the explosive performances in our production of Cymbeline’s Reign. Preview track here
Can’t make any of the above dates? Don’t fret! Every single evening is sure to please with music that is equally impressive and beautiful. The full list of our ‘Between the Trees” performers can be found HERE.
Cymbeline doesn’t land on most people’s lists of Top 10 Shakespeare plays, maybe not even Top 20. For this reason, we spoke to three people who have directed this play to get their take on a few questions that we’ve tackled since deciding to produce it.
Second up in our series, is the founding director of Shakespeare in the Rough, the company that provided the inspiration for Ruff, Dawn McCaugherty. The company was founded in 1994, and their first production was Cymbeline.
Next week we speak to someone who had the resources to hire actors to play every part in the play. Including Jupiter and his eagle, we assume.