Every summer, The Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival sets up its stage outdoors at Camosun’s Lansdowne campus and performs two Shakespeare plays. This year, the festival is tackling Julius Caesar and one of The Bard’s first works, Two Gentlemen of Verona. At the helm of the production of Two Gentlemen is director Christopher Weddell, who has made the decision to do an adaptation, setting the piece in 1960s Italy.
“I just love that era in Italian film,” says Weddell, “and the subject matter lends itself quite well to it.”
Despite being set in the ’60s, the text will remain in its classic Shakespearian form. However, thanks to some controversial themes in the show, Weddell has done a little tweaking.
“I’ve done a little bit of rewriting and reworking of parts of the play,” he admits. “It’s quite problematic in 2019.”
The problem stems from the fact that show is based on the concept of male friendship, which in Shakespeare’s time, Weddell explains, was held in higher regard than romantic relationships. In the original ending of the play, one male lead tries to force his girlfriend to unwillingly return the affections of his best friend.
“There’s this assault which is followed by the woman who is assaulted is silent for the rest of the play,” says Weddell. “So, we have to find a way off text, through blocking, visual language, to continue telling the story, to continue to give her a voice.”
Weddell says he and the cast spent a lot of time talking about that aspect of the play and took their time to rehearse it to make sure everyone was comfortable with the storyline.
“A happy ending, in my view, had to be adjusted given what happens in the play,” he says.
The adjustment to the pieces of the play that don’t line up with current views on consent, gender issues, and sexual politics was something Weddell was happy to embrace, although he points out that reworking Shakespeare to better fit the times has been done for centuries.
“With this one, it was really the issues at the core that we really had to look at and adjust, but that’s been done with Shakespeare’s work going back to the 1700s and the 1800s,” he says. “His plays were cut and adjusted. Romeo and Juliet, at one point in the 18th century, had a happy ending, so great liberties have been taken with his plays over the years.”
Despite the controversial ending, Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy. Weddell explains that the characters are larger than life and the passions of the young lovers are huge—and paralleled in an unlikely way.
“There’s quite a bit of slapstick in the play. There’s a love relationship between this very, kind of… clown and dog, and that’s probably actually the most honourable relationship in the whole play,” says Weddell. (Weddell admits that having a real dog in an outdoor theatre production is a bit of a wild card—“We have deer wandering by on occasion.”)
Weddell says that part of the joy of Shakespeare is finding the themes that are important to the audience the play is currently being told for. Blending the rich language and universal themes is what he finds exciting about producing Shakespeare in 2019.
“The language is hugely important to me, the way it challenges us in this less literate age—the fact that we’re asked to put our devices away and, you know,” he says, “pay attention to something that challenges us.”
Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival
Various times and prices (student discount available)
Friday, July 5 to Saturday, July 27
Lansdowne campus, Camosun College
Thursday, August 1 to Saturday, August 3
Saxe Point Park
vicshakespeare.com