Macbeth. Romeo and Juliet. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These are just some of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. But there are also other, lesser-known works by Shakespeare. For its 27th season, the Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival returns with two plays by the legendary playwright—one popular, and one slightly lesser known. This time around, Macbeth and Love’s Labour’s Lost are the plays that audience members will get to watch, laugh, and cry along to.
Love’s Labour’s Lost director Janet Munsil says that although it’s not one of Shakespeare’s most popular, she had a great time directing and setting up the play, which focuses on a group of kings and their desire to study and learn without the involvement of love to distract them.
“Love’s Labour’s Lost is a funny play; it doesn’t get done very often,” she says. “Last year, I worked on Twelfth Night, which is one that gets done all the time. It’s fun to work on one of the big well-known ones, since it’s fun to play around with it in new ways. This time around, since it’s a less known play, we didn’t want to mess with it too much because it could confuse the play for the audience that wasn’t familiar with it.”
Munsil did indeed play around with Twelfth Night when she worked on it: all the roles in the play were gender-swapped. Munsil says that this time around the same thing will be happening, but on a much smaller scale.
“There are four male roles in the play that are being played by women,” she says, “and although it’s not as explicit as how it was in Twelfth Night, where we just swapped everyone, my idea is that these roles are kind of women who are disguised as men to find themselves a place out in the world working in royal households.”
Macbeth is being taken outside of the festival for the first time and will be shown a few times in Esquimalt in an attempt to extend the fest’s reach. And while things are smooth sailing so far for the festival in terms of getting everything set up, Munsil does admit to being a bit worried about the weather.
“There isn’t really a rain plan,” she admits. “Last year the rain held off all night right until the last 30 seconds of the play. Kind of funny, but also concerning.”
Macbeth director and producing artistic director Karen Lee Pickett says that the initiative to take Macbeth into Esquimalt—what they’re calling “Bard across the bridge”—is progressing smoothly, and has been in the works for a few years.
“This will be our first time doing something outside of our regular venue,” she says. “We’ve been at Camosun for 12 years now; it’s just something we’ve been talking about for years, and it’s happening. We’re super excited to be bringing it to Esquimalt. I’d love to eventually see it expanded further into a year-round thing or something like that, but we have to take it slow and just make baby steps, because the funding is the main thing. We’re a pretty small organization but we need to move slowly.”
Shakespearean plays have been around for hundreds of years; they are some of the most performed plays of all time. Pickett feels that Shakespeare tapped into what connected with audiences and that although times have changed, the human race has not, and so the plays endure.
“Why do we keep doing these 400-year-old plays? Why is there an industry built around these plays? I think it’s a couple of things,” says Pickett. “Shakespeare was able to create drama that really resonated and showed something about ourselves. He understood human nature really well, and it hasn’t changed much in 400 years. We still get jealous, love, laugh, and cry. Our context has changed but we as people haven’t.”
Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival
Until Saturday, July 29
Student tickets $19
Camosun College Lansdowne campus lawn
vicshakespeare.com