Freewill Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director David Horak says he’s always looking for ways to reinvent and reinvigorate the timeless work of the legendary playwright, and this year’s festival is no exception.
Horak says, “The fun of these plays is to make them fresh, make them new.”
This year, instead of an open amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park, the festival is being transported to a vintage pavilion of stained glass and mirrors called the Cristal Palace Speigeltent. It’s a unique venue, built in Belgium in 1946, and is one of three of its kind currently in North America. The portable wooden tent is currently residing at the Edmonton Exhibition Grounds, which are in its transition from the chaos of K-Days but will soon be brimming with Elizabethan vocabulary and a variety of Shakespearean festivities.
While the new venue has reduced capacity compared to previous years, it also comes with the advantage of being sheltered from the elements and the benefits of being on the Expo grounds. This means the festival is able to run later and host even more programming than years prior. This includes kids’ programming that helps prepare young viewers for Shakespeare’s antiquated dialogue and complex storylines, plus academic programming for those seeking to dig deeper into the drama.
With their new location and the new events, Horak says it “feels very much like a festival, not limited to the two plays.”
A fresh coat of paint on the festival is sure to help it be more accessible and more engaging than ever before, but the timeless work of Shakespeare often doesn’t need much to find relevancy today. Horak says that pop culture often still finds inspiration in classical theatre to this day.
“I’ve been watching Succession, and it’s so clearly based on King Lear, and you can just see these same themes,” says Horak.
The themes for this year’s plays at the festival are no different, and while there are no inspired or adapted pieces of fiction as recent as Succession, both Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet have shockingly relevant things to say about the world, even today — 400 years after they were written.
“Twelfth Night has gender-bending in the play; it has a woman who dresses up as a man and hides her gender — and that’s very relevant today — talking about gender and talking about the patriarchy and kind of hiding gender.”
There’s even late-night libations for the adults like Shotspeare (a Shakespeare drinking game), as well as a performance that adds layers of meaning while removing layers of clothing in the form of Shakespeare burlesque.
While Horak says the pandemic took a heavy toll on many in the arts community and says that audiences have been slow to return to live theatre, he’s hopeful that people will begin craving it again. With so much becoming digital, and the whole world up in arms over AI and authenticity, the timeless art of theatre is sure to find its niche.
“Theatre has stuck around for a couple thousand years, I think that it offers something a lot different than being at home watching TV or a movie or something.”
Get off the couch and into the theatre (or in this case, a Spiegeltent) for some classical theatre at Freewill Shakespeare Festival until September 3.
