From left: Jesse Gervais as Gossip 4, Julie Lumsden as Gossip 5, Jenna-Lee Hyde as Gossip 2, Christopher Allen as Gossip 1 and Celia Aloma as Gossip 3 in Sense and Sensibility. Stratford Festival 2025. Photo: David Hou.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
A funny thing happened on the way to NYC, and a summer working holiday tradition in that great theatre city. Actually, not funny at all. A country came unravelled in unthinkable ways, the whole world suffered terrible setbacks. And suddenly curtain times across the border … well let’s just say they’ve lost their lustre for now.
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So, I want to tell you about a Canadian excursion east, with quick stops at the theatre festivals in Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake.
There’s something magical, to be sure, about wandering through a beautiful park, and nodding to a swan or two, en route to the 18th century — and the Stratford Festival mainstage for a matinee. But what’s fun about Jane Austen, and the bright, playful stage adaptation of her 1790s novel Sense and Sensibility (the first of her six) as directed by the Citadel’s Daryl Cloran, is just how bracingly contemporary it all feels.
Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane as Marianne Dashwood with members of the company in Sense and Sensibility. Stratford Festival 2025. Photo: David Hou.
The Dashwoods are up against it — the two high-contrast sisters of the title, their little sister and their mama, bustling through their small-town Regency world in reduced circumstances. Austen’s wit and sharp-eyed comic sense are sharpened against such hard surfaces as money and class, and the compelling need for a suitable match — income, real estate, annuities, inherited wealth, wills, entailments…. Where’s dad? For openers, a reverberating thud, on the stage: the corpse of Mr. Dashwood, now the late Mr. Dashwood, smacks down from above, and the family fortunes are in peril.
Members of the company in Sense and Sensibility. Stratford Festival 2025. Photo: David Hou.s
The chief theatrical framing device of the adaptation, by the American actor/playwright Kate Hamill, is a sort of Greek chorus of five Gossips. Cloran’s production has a great time with these gleeful, malicious, upward-mobility vigilantes, judges of propriety and arbiters of the minutiae of income (Jesse Gervais among them). And the basis of Dana Osborne’s design, used by Cloran with great comic pizzaz, is an assortment of hanging frames of every size and shape, empty till a character’s head pops through, in a world of genteel surveillance, stage managed by the overheard and overseen.
At the Citadel in 2023, we saw another Austen adaptation by Hamill, Pride and Prejudice as a rom-com that turned into an out-and-out farce, with goofy cross-dressing jokes and relentlessly clown-ish drive.
Jessica B. Hill as Elinor Dashwood (left) and Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane as Marianne Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility. Stratford Festival 2025. Photo: Ted Belton.
Cloran’s Sense and Sensibility is a different kind of fun, with theatrical ingenuity, Austen smarts, and a beating romantic heart. Elinor (Jessica B. Hill) is the “sensible” sister, who advises caution and discretion in romantic entanglements. Marianne (Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane) is her opposite, impulsive, histrionic, plunging into the life of passion without reserve. The actors are excellent; they have sibling chemistry.
And their cast-mates, who include Andrew Chown as the dashing Willoughby, Thomas Duplessie as the paralyzingly awkward Edward, and the great Seanna McKenna as the marital arranger Mrs. Jennings, are all top-notch. And Jade V. Robinson is a riot in her double-assignment as sulky, perpetually aggrieved little Dashwood sister, and the malicious schemer Lucy.
The furniture gets reconfigured by the cast, in motion. The mimed meals, a visual capture of the artifices of the world, are apt and funny. Cloran’s production, full of theatrical invention and comic vigour, propels a complicated story along at a lively clip. Highly enjoyable.
Members of the company in Macbeth. Stratford Festival 2025. Photo: David Hou.
At the Avon Theatre, Stratford’s small “downtown” proscenium house, men on motorcycles roar on and off a dark stage in Robert Lepage’s production of Macbeth. The director/designer locates the nightmare declension into chaos of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy in the world of Quebec biker gangs of the 1990s.
And the effects devised by set designer Ariane Sauvé and lighting wizard Kimberly Purtell are stunning: the seedy motel, where the Macbeths preside, the gas pumps that explode and become barbecues, the barrels where the witches, with their tattered hooker garb and weird amplified voices, hang out … there’s no end to the imaginative theatrical resources and high tech of Lepage’s production in service of the concept.
And as for the potential artifice, built into that concept, of biker characters speaking iambic pentameter, it disappears as Stratford stars — including Tom McCamus and Lucy Peacock as Macbeth, Graham Abbey as Banquo, Tom Rooney as Macduff, André Sills as Ross — own the language in an easeful way. It’s no mean achievement.
Lucy Peacock as Lady Macbeth and Tom McCamus as Macbeth in Macbeth. Stratford Festival 2025. Photo: David Hou.
What seems less clear in the production, despite the charisma of McCamus as a cordial and apparently hospitable member of the gang till he’s not, is the seductive hierarchy and the homicidal mania that drives Macbeth onward and upward (well, downward), to despair and moral doom. Who is King Duncan (David Collins) in this world? He’s hard to pick out. And, despite Peacock’s performance as the biker chick consort, there’s not much room for Lady M to have an impact in the chronic macho violence of this theatrical world, or on her blood-raddled hubby. That, in itself, is meaningful in the toxic male landscape set forth in the production.
Tom Rooney as Macduff (left) and André Sills as Ross in Macbeth. Stratford Festival 2025. Photo: David Hou.
Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, imagined as heard and seen on earphones and screen by the motel security guard and housekeeper, has a memorable desolation about it. It is perhaps revealing, though, that the scene in which Rooney’s Macduff learns the terrible fate of his wife and kids at Macbeth’s hands is the most lingering human moment of the production.
The drive from Stratford to Niagara-on-the-Lake as the early morning mist lifts at the horizon of the greenest of green fields is one of the great pleasures of summer in southern Ontario. And then as you enter the kingdom of Niagara, you’re reminded that the Okanagan isn’t the only immersive fruit and wine immersion in this country. The main street of Niagara-on-the-Lake is crammed with flowers and tourists. And at the musty Royal George Theatre, slated for a much-needed (!) re-do after the season, calm is the enemy in the Brit farce of the Shaw Festival season.
Tons of Money, a Jazz Age offering by Will Evans and ‘Valentine’ directed by Eda Holmes, has a wonderfully agile, rubber-faced lead in the person of Mike Nadajewski. He plays the upper-class rich kid wastrel, perpetually broke, who sets about conniving a way to nail down a big fat inheritance while avoiding his legion of creditors.
More and more the architecture of Aubrey’s lies, outrageous disguises, preposterous impersonations, improvised to vertiginous heights, threatens to topple at every moment. It is the bright idea of his partner in crime, wife Louise (Julia Course), that he fake his own death, and assume the identity of a long-gone relative who has disappeared in Mexico. Ingenuity is called for. And the ante gets upped, in the farce way, by competing sub-plots initiated by characters who have agendas of their own. Judith Bowden’s costumes, flamboyant and funny, are indispensable.
The lead couple, who fling themselves into, out of, and off their elegant furniture like a couple of kids at a playground (the set is by Bowden), are highly watchable. The rest of the cast, who do have their moments, aren’t really up to that standard. But it’s a fun way to spend a summer afternoon.
The only George Bernard Shaw play at the Shaw Festival this season is Major Barbara.
So … a substantial and particularly timely (when is it not?) classic full of provocations and combustible arguments, and directed by the great Peter Hinton-Davis: that’s the alluring prospect. But despite its many attractions, including a riveting and witty performance by Patrick Galligan as the charming, persuasive arms manufacturer Undershaft, it’s a bit of a slog. And largely the reason is an inert performance in the title role, the mis-cast Gabriella Sundar-Singh.
The play is poised at the intersection of the socio/political and the domestic. Barbara is the daughter of an aristocratic family led, in the absence of patriarch Undershaft, by Lady Britomart (Fiona Byrne). The rebellious Barbara has joined the Salvation Army. And when the family needs his financial help and he returns to discover this career path, Undershaft offers to visit her on location — provided she visit in return his weapons factory in the countryside.
The stimulating thing about Major Barbara is the way the playwright defies moral complacency. Undershaft, as he points out, does deal in destruction. But he offers his workers something real — a decent wage, a house, etc. — instead of the Sally Ann trade-off, blackmail Undershaft calls it, of free meals for ‘conversion’.
When Barbara isn’t actually engaging with other characters in speech, the character pretty much ceases to exist in the performance onstage. You don’t see her understanding, much less rising to, the challenges presented by Undershaft — much less adjusting her world view. Should the Salvation Army keep its doors open by accepting cash donations from arms manufacture? Should the moral rightness of sponsors be investigated? The applications in the current culture are everywhere.
Barbara’s prickly chemistry with Greek scholar Adophus (beautifully played by André Morin), who arms himself with a wholly different line of reasoning against Undershaft, never takes hold either.
I got bogged down, in short. The bold design choices (by Gillian Gallow, lighted by Bonnie Beecher), and the musical accoutrements (period hymns and anthems), offered by the production are intriguing, though. It happens in a sort of blue-lined cube, with outsized steps down to a playing floor. That all the exits happen with characters extending themselves on the stairs that are a stretch seems meaningful. Once you’re embroiled in an argument about the end justifying the means, there’s no easy way out. Discussion pretty much has to follow.
Aren’t we lucky to have such theatrical riches this side of the border?
