Page 3 - 2018 Festival Edition

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the 2018 Stratford Festival Season
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THE WILL TO BE FREE
ABILITY CHOICE FREEWILL OPPORTUNITY LIBERTY RELEASE REDEMPTION ABILITY CHOICE FREEWILL OPPORTUNITY LIBERTY RELEASE REDEMPTION
BRUCE URQUHART
Managing Editor
The will to be free: It’s an urge that all of us can understand.
Regardless of our station in life, we crave per- sonal freedom but, as this year’s Stratford Festival reminds us, that freedom can sometimes come with a heavy price.
“People want to be able to determine what they want to do,” said Festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino while explaining the inspiration for this season’s theme. “They want to have free will.
“But does that necessarily lead to freedom, or is it just a di erent kind of enslavement? What does it mean to truly find a way to be free?”
With this as his starting point, Cimolino selected plays that would explore this yearning for freedom in a variety of contexts – moving from the personal to the familial to the political.
“Some of these plays, it’s looked at from a religious point of view, from a family and personal point of view, a political point of view, a philosophical point of view.”
In a handful of this season’s plays, the will to be free is also quite literal.
The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s final plays and this season’s opening-night production, is about exactly that – a play in which Prospera, an impris- oned sorceress, dreams of being released while struggling with a gnawing desire for revenge against her captors.
“She has been plotting ... this revenge for years,” said Cimolino, who directs the incomparable Martha Henry in this production. “... Her intention is to destroy them – to torture them and destroy them – and, slowly, over the course of the play, as she gains power over them, it’s not really what she wants. It’s not what’s going to do her – or anyone – any good.”
That literal freedom is supplanted by a di er- ent kind of licence, releasing the sorceress from her own baser impulses while embracing a shared forgiveness.
“There’s a sense of clearing the soul – an unbur- dening,” Cimolino said.
In The Comedy of Errors, another of this season’s Shakespeare productions, the freedom stems from a more holistic approach – finding that other who makes us complete.
“It’s an interesting observation in these plays because we always equate freedom with indepen- dence,” Cimolino said, “but sometimes true free- dom comes from union – finding your soul mate and finding your other half.”
While a “hilarious” com-
edy about long-lost twins and mistaken identities, the Keira Loughran-directed The Comedy of Errors celebrates a reclama- tion of family and a “discovery of freedom through the union with another,” Cimolino said.
“That’s not something in West- ern society that we think of very much.”
Corialanus, the title character in the season’s third Shake- speare play, believes himself
to be free but is shackled by a shared ambition and desire for fame.
“He’s willing to lay down his life for the state ... but also to be distinguished for (his) heroism, applauded for it. He won’t admit to that, and he doesn’t like to show his wounds, which is asked of him when he wants to run for political o ce.”
Driven in part by a controlling mother, Corialanus embraces the male warrior code – and a contempt for the common man – that “doesn’t really allow for love and nurturing – and we see the outcome of that.”
Helmed by acclaimed director Robert Lepage, this production draws explicit parallels between the Roman Forum – an ancient venue of public discourse – and today’s social media, and the spread of information.
“His thought is to take the idea
of the voices ... and the responses
to things, and update it to the age of Twitter, to the age of Instagram and Facebook,” Cimolino said, “and take social revolution and the voice of the people not simply being a mob, but also being about bullying online and social movements that are sometimes echoed ... and sometimes unify us.”
While Corialanus is a play about the “tensions
of early Roman democracy,” Julius Caesar, the season’s final Shakespearean production, chronicles its end. Directed by Scott Wentworth, this produc- tion examines how the mechanisms of democracy can be exploited to actually undermine democracy, Cimolino said.
“What is the journey that happens there? When you try to resist – when you actually try to stand up against the movement towards tyranny – what is the cost? Do you yourselves become bloody tyrants? Do you make it worse than it otherwise would have been?”
THE BEACON HERALD | 2018 FESTIVAL EDITION
PAGE 3
ANTONI CIMOLINO Artistic director
Directed and choreographed by Donna Feore, Meredith Willson’s The Music Man is about the “power of music to set you free – to find harmony,” Cimolino said.
“Music becomes a metaphor for a peaceful society and a happy coexistence,” he explained.
In The Music Man, a charming conman arrives in town and, through “fiction and dreaming and creat- ing excitement” brings people together “to create something truly beautiful.”
“The Music Man always reminds me of Tom Pat- terson because he was a journalist with a twinkle in his eye and an ability to get behind an improbable and noble and ultimately really exciting idea and make it happen,” Cimolino said.
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