Richard II in a hot tub, Much Ado done anew: Canada’s Stratford festival puts shocks into Shakespeare

Drive west of Toronto for over an hour, beyond a hamlet called Punkeydoodles Corners, and you reach the village of Shakespeare, with a pie shop and truck centre bearing the Bard’s name. Up the road lies Stratford, an affable town where Romeo Street leads you to the banks of the river Avon (pronounced, unlike its English cousin, with a short A).

Here, 70 years ago this month, the inaugural Stratford Shakespearean festival took place beneath a leaky canvas tent roof, with Alec Guinness holding court in Richard III and All’s Well That Ends Well, both directed by Tyrone Guthrie over a six-week season. It almost didn’t happen: a black hole in the finances meant an emergency meeting was held the day before Guinness set sail to determine whether he should bother making the journey.

The festival’s success gave Stratford, which was settled in 1832, a theatrical reputation to match its British namesake – an improbable achievement for this former railroad town, which is surrounded by farmland. Canada’s largest theatre festival, it now runs for more than half the year, with 13 productions staged in four different buildings in 2023, including the striking new Tom Patterson theatre, named after the journalist who founded the festival. Visitors who remember the early tent years are still returning, prompted – as is tradition here – to take their seats by a fanfare played live outside the Festival theatre. The musicians – with four herald trumpets and a parade snare drum – assemble to announce each performance there, as popular a local custom as the annual release of swans into the Avon.

You could, perhaps, be forgiven for expecting those shows to be something akin to ye olde heritage Shakespeare, preserved in aspic for tourists fitting a matinee around trips to the city’s smart eateries. But there are no mothballs in this season. Actor turned artistic director Antoni Cimolino, whose Stratford roles have included Romeo and Laertes, tells me they resist the idea of a “house” approach to productions. “If Shakespeare seems dusty and old, we haven’t done our jobs.”

Take the opening of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Chris Abraham and bookended by new scenes written by Erin Shields, known for previous feminist takes on King Lear and Paradise Lost. Staged on Julie Fox’s lush garden set, with succulents including outrageously phallic cacti, this comedy does not open with the usual back-slapping, macho banter about the “feats of a lion” in war. Instead, Maev Beaty’s Beatrice rises amid the audience, as Allison Edwards-Crewe’s Hero appears upstage before a mirror that resembles both a huge moon and a band of gold.

In a wry, softly saucy prologue, Beatrice invites us to consider the expectations faced by Hero specifically and by all women then and now. As well as providing ample satire – “it is exhausting to be innocent,” says Beatrice, with a witty rhyme about Hero needing to mute the strumming of her “private lute” – this is a canny way of ensuring we focus from the start on the inner life of a character whose reticence is all the more marked by the quicksilver exchanges between Benedick and Beatrice.

Shields’s prologue is true to Beatrice’s wit and the spirit of Much Ado as, with the gentlest waft around her groin, she reminds us that “nothing” was once slang for vagina. The play unfolds with a lighting level that allows the audience to see each other, essential for some deft crowd work at the edges of the Festival theatre’s beloved thrust stage, with its pioneering design by Tanya Moiseiwitsch. The venue fits an audience of 1,800 but no one here is further than 65ft from the stage.

Michael Blake’s Don John sneeringly imitates our applause after his brother declares his plan to play Cupid; Graham Abbey’s Benedick asks a theatregoer to help him remove a boot and carelessly tosses fruit peel around the front row. That scene is directly echoed in Claudio’s denunciation of Hero as a “rotten orange” when she is practically thrown from the stage as the result of Don John’s scheme to suggest her infidelity. For the pair’s reconciliation – which ranks among Shakespeare’s most uncomfortable reunions – Shields again intervenes, this time with dialogue that combines righteous anger with humour and tenderness. Having seen Hero repeatedly spoken over or instructed how to act by others – even by an ally such as Beatrice – she herself interrupts the Friar before he leads everyone to the tidy wedding scene.

At the peak of a superb performance, Edwards-Crewe takes aim at both Leonato and Claudio for their betrayal, and at patriarchal obsessions around maidenhood. While Claudio states what Much Ado audiences are used to thinking of him (“I am not worthy of your love!”) Shields adds a generous exchange in which the pair consider the potential of their relationship and the terms with which they should proceed. All of which makes the final festivities far more enjoyable.

Much Ado always closes with a party. Richard II? Not so much. But the opening minutes of Brad Fraser’s new adaptation, in a riveting show directed by Jillian Keiley with an intoxicating set design by Michael Gianfrancesco, plunges us into 1970s New York neon clubland. The Tom Patterson theatre’s thrust stage is a dancefloor and, as the bassline thumps, Richard (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) gyrates across it, with swinging pearls, bare midriff, outsized crown and frou-frou trousers (hat tip to Bretta Gerecke for the wild costume designs).

The only orb for this Richard is a disco ball and he leads a posse of shape-throwing angels, many in hot pants, who function as both flatterers and enablers, a permanent reminder of his divine right. In a play of stinging betrayals, it is affecting to see the angels eventually abandon him when he loses the crown.

With a permanent midnight vibe, Richard’s hedonism is linked to his indecision and his sense of entitlement is played as coquettish. “Be ruled by … me!” he says, reaching a crescendo with a giggle, and he can’t resist saying the Duke of Norfolk’s name as an expletive. Cameron Carver’s choreography, often kinky, also conveys the notion that this Richard is an addict and the crown is just another narcotic (when he does not wear it, he often looks in withdrawal). A Giorgio Moroder-style disco pulse accompanies the duel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, staged as a bare-chested, oily wrestling match.

As you may by now have guessed, it’s not so much a delicate, teary kiss shared by Richard and Aumerle (as in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version with David Tennant) but popper-fuelled sex in a hot tub, which is cleverly created by crisscrossing lines of white material that the pair intermittently slip under. Their dialogue incorporates lines from Venus and Adonis, Much Ado, the Fair Youth sonnets and Coriolanus. From the last play, Aufidius’s line “unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat” is delivered with a laugh and his description of twining arms is realised in performances by Jackman-Torkoff and Emilio Vieira as Aumerle that are as supple as the verse. Both are often painfully vulnerable.

Richard makes love to the land, too, writhing on the ground in sight of Barkloughly castle where his words gain in prominence because of the surprise decision to excise John of Gaunt’s better known “sceptred isle” speech. One of Fraser’s major expansions is with the usually minor character of Lord Willoughby, who in this version falls ill with a mysterious and misunderstood virus. The confusion, prejudice and terror of the Aids crisis in the early 1980s – with one scene powerfully conveying fear of touch – subsequently unfold as Richard reaches the end of his reign and a new uncertain era begins.

“In times of plague,” Willoughby is told, “madmen lead the blind.” The line is borrowed from King Lear which is also staged at the festival, whose shows this year often reflect indirectly on Covid and the pandemic lockdowns – subjects that some theatres have been rather keener to ignore, perhaps fearing that audiences are reluctant to dwell on such challenging times. The official theme of the festival is “duty versus desire”. As Cimolino says, both King Lear and Richard II feature monarchs “whose personal agendas conflict with their responsibilities to the state”.

Dressed in jet black with flowing white locks and a beard evoking Poseidon, Paul Gross is superb as a manspreading Lear and plays the part with an off-kilter touch that makes him destined to be “mad as the vex’d sea” from the off. The language of disease, which riddles a play quite possibly written during a plague event, is accentuated in Kimberley Rampersad’s production, down to the way Gross asks why even a rat – those infamous carriers of pestilence – should live when Cordelia does not. This is a Lear set not in a distant past but a near future and the Covid resonances, as in Richard II, are palpable. “Let me wipe it first,” Lear implores Gloucester who asks to kiss his hand – cueing a rare laugh on the way to a stark ending, the Festival theatre stage looking as barren as it was abundant for Much Ado.

With three plays performed in rotation on its main stage, the festival leaves you in no doubt of a production’s ephemeral nature – the set starts to get dismantled after each show while the actors are still in costume. Audiences have the option to stay and watch these changeovers so I linger at the end of Lear to see the pillars and slabs of Judith Bowden’s design hoisted away, rubble removed from the wooden stage, and workers passing up and down the “vomitoria” tunnels that run diagonally under the auditorium.

Our guide offers backstage insights, including the secrets behind Gloucester’s blinding, eagerly overseen by Goneril in this version. It turns out that one vile jelly is a lychee, splatted on the floor; the other eyeball’s ghastly squirt is achieved by puncturing a mini cup of coffee creamer. After an hour of the changeover, Lear’s desolate landscape is well on the way to becoming the teeming Alphabet City block where Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent will take place that evening.

And who knew that Larson’s musical has so much in common with Lear? Cimolino’s careful programming means that those who watch the pair back to back see unlikely connections between the two. Questions of measuring life and love, and leaving a legacy, are at the fore of both as is the crushing sense of nothingness and the gulfs between rich and poor, old and young. As with Richard II, this Rent also aligns the public health crises of Aids and Covid, in particular their resulting fear, anger and division. “We are situating Shakespeare within a continuum, from the Greeks to new writing,” says Cimolino who likens the selection of plays to a visit to a sculpture garden.

Thom Allison’s staging of Rent is irresistible, thanks in huge part to a talented cast including Andrea Macasaet and Kolton Stewart sparking delightfully as faltering lovers Mimi and Roger, particularly in their duet Light My Candle. The film shot by aspiring director Mark (Robert Markus) is projected in the last minutes and affectingly shows backstage footage of the actors, the tight-knit company reflecting the characters’ own community, and revealing the joy offered by the rehearsal room after the lockdowns.

Stratford festival’s Covid cancellation in 2020, and its reduced season the following year, significantly damaged the local economy. It usually generates in excess of C$140m (£83.3m) in economic activity for the region and relies on three revenue streams: ticket sales, donations and government support. Last summer, the government invested more than C$13m to help the festival’s recovery.

There are 145 actors across this year’s season and the festival has North America’s largest classical repertory theatre company. The fast turnaround in the rep schedule means you see performers move between roles in a day or two. Beaty goes from a winning Beatrice to a bitter racist in Alice Childress’s shattering Wedding Band; Vieira switches from a nuanced Auberle to a brash cop in Cimolino’s rich production of Eduardo De Filippo’s Grand Magic; Nestor Lozano Jr, who is a fabulous Angel in Rent, takes on the part of Mrs Whatsit in an adaptation of the novel A Wrinkle in Time.

The festival, built on the work of Britain’s greatest cultural export, was renowned for years for enticing grand UK acting talent including Paul Scofield, Maggie Smith, Alan Bates and Peter Ustinov. The casts are now predominantly Canadian and feature many locals. But Britain is represented this year with Monty Python’s Spamalot whose vision of a plagued and divided kingdom, ruled by questionable supreme executive power, hits home and shares themes with the festival’s weightier offerings – while also delivering some crowd-pleasing nonsense. The goofy Fisch Schlapping Song is not, perhaps, quite in line with Tyrone Guthrie’s lofty Shakespearean ideals. But surely Stratford is the place for a tale told by idiots.

• The Stratford festival runs until 29 October. Chris Wiegand’s trip was provided by the festival.