Ernest Reid
Staff Writer
A new production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is giving Elizabethan comedy a uniquely Toronto spin.
Direct Flight Theatre, in collaboration with GromKat Productions, are the people behind the production, which sets the Shakespearean play in Toronto’s famed Gladstone Hotel.
While Twelfth Night is known for its drunken hijinks and cross-dressing silliness, director Hume Baugh and his dedicated co-op team bring out the contemporary romantic angst lying dormant in the play.
The idea grew out of the cast’s disappointment with the state of Shakespearean theatre today. There’s Shakespeare in the Park, primarily for families in the summer, and the Stratford Festival, which depends on an aging subscription base, but not much Shakespeare is produced for youth audiences.
Baugh’s team aims to reach out to this untapped demographic. They have transformed Twelfth Night into a contemporary urban play without any gimmicks, letting the unaltered work speak for itself – you won’t see characters tweeting their soliloquies.
The modern backdrop also gives the production more thematic weight. While the Queen St. W. hotel has a long cultural history, the play eschews this to make
it contemporary.
This production of Twelfth Night is set on the day you see it. The costumes and the setting are all current – audience members are meant to see themselves in the characters. To research their contemporary roles, the production’s actors went to Parkdale and people-watched, looking for Malvolio or Sir Toby Belch in the crowds.
They also tap into the relevance of gender-bending for our time. Artistic co-producer Amber Mills talk- ed about how a woman dressing as a man means something different to us than it did to Shakespeare’s audience. As an actor, she says the play lets her explore what it’s like to be viewed as a man or asexual.
The production also explores contemporary feelings and our modern problems with love. Baugh wanted actors to bring their own emotional lives into Twelfth Night’s age-old characters. This gives the play a contemporary depth and allows them to examine the ways we love against the ways we lust.
Mills, who plays Viola, loves how Twelfth Night can show us love in new ways. “It presents an image of love as being a service to your partner or providing them the space to grow,” she said.
The actors also use the Viola-Olivia scenes to explore how people can fall in love without knowing the other’s gender.
This is fruitful territory for the actors. Kat Lanteigne, who plays the grieving Olivia, doesn’t know if her character has a happy ending. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Olivia falls in love with a woman disguised as a man and is then paired off with her identical twin brother. In the 21st century, we know this is not the same. Lanteigne’s ending has an ambiguity not seen in most productions.
While Twelfth Night is a comedy, there’s a subtle melancholic darkness underneath. Artistic co-producer Michael Rode, Malvolio in the play, wants to walk that border between comedy and tragedy. “It’s not just comedy for comedy’s sake; it’s always comedy for a specific purpose,” he said.
Ultimately, there’s an emotional aspect to the play that separates this from other productions. The actors are aware of the thousands who have played their characters before and have consciously involved their modern emotions into their work. The characters on stage aren’t Shakespearean artifacts; they’re meant to be people on Queen Street West.
After the long hours and lost wages everyone working on Twelfth Night sacrificed to get the production on stage, the play should be a worthwhile piece of Toronto Shakespearean theatre.
‘Twelfth Night’ runs at the Gladstone Hotel until Oct. 6. Information about the production and Direct Flight Theatre can be found at www.directflighttheatre.com
