by AMY BARRATT

If this winter season in theatre proves to be a weak one, it won't be the playwrights who are to blame. From Shakespeare to Albee to Standjofski, the challenge for local actors and directors will be to live up to the writing.

Shakespeare is all over the place in two languages over the next couple of months. Two of the more unusual offerings are already up and running. Anne-Marie Cadieux brings Hamlet's mother into the light in Gertrude, le cri, by controversial English playwright Howard Barker at Espace GO until Feb. 12. And this week saw the opening of Gravy Bath's The Rape of Lucrece, adapted and performed by Gareth Potter. The play is based on the Roman legend of Lucretia, which tells of a chaste wife raped by the king's son. Lucretia takes her own life, but not before revealing the name of her attacker and exacting a vow of revenge from her husband and father.

Potter, already a veteran of Ontario's Stratford Festival, hopes to ultimately take this production to Stratford, England, in 2006 when the Royal Shakespeare Company, with help from international companies, will present all of the Bard's works in the space of a year. The Rape of Lucrece is at the Théâtre Ste-Catherine until Jan. 29.

The students of Dawson College's Theatre department will present Love's Labour's Lost from Jan. 24–Feb. 6 at the Dome theatre, directed by Douglas Buchanan.

Following Madd Harold's version of The Tempest at the Saidye last November, TNM's La Tempête, translated and adapted by Normand Chaurette, opens Feb. 22. It's billed as a multimedia spectacle conceived by Michel Lemieux, Victor Pilon and Denise Guilbault, with Guilbault directing.

Martha Henry began her Stratford career in 1962 as Miranda in The Tempest. This great lady of Canadian Theatre will grace the stage at the Saidye this February in the one-woman play Rose by Martin Sherman. Sherman is probably best known for his 1979 play Bent, about the persecution of gays in Nazi Germany. Rose, written 20 years later, is a theatrical memoir of an 80-year-old Jewish woman who has seen and survived many of the pivotal events of the 20th century. The production is directed by Diana Leblanc.

McCurtain call

Centaur artistic director Gordon McCall stars in Edward Albee's 2001 Tony Award-winning play The Goat Or Who Is Sylvia?. He's joined on stage by one of my favourite actresses, Jennifer Morehouse, and direction is by Ken Livingstone, who recently netted the Centaur a Masque for best English-language production for last season's Blue/Orange. This story of a family torn apart by a very unconventional extra-marital affair opens Feb. 3.

"An interdisciplinary work of performance theatre" is how Brokered Body Lab describes its upcoming production The Hope Machine. A retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, it is written and directed by Virginia Preston and takes place in the Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec (MMAQ), Feb 17–26, 939-7426.

The Nouveau Théâtre Anglais scores high on the chutzpah-metre with its upcoming production of Harry Standjofski's Here and There. A strong cast of 13 (13!) will take the stage at Concordia's D.B. Clarke theatre from Jan. 27–Feb. 12, directed by the playwright. The action of the play takes place here - Canada in the present, where characters come to grips with, or try to escape from, crimes witnessed and committed there - there being the war-torn Balkans.

And speaking of ambitious, One Foot Productions is now in its fourth year of producing full-scale musicals on the McGill campus. Following successes last year with Evita and Cabaret, they're tackling Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, a grown-up take on the twisted world of fairy tales. Neil Napier, profiled in our Jan. 6 Noisemakers issue, plays both Prince Charming and the Wolf. The production is directed by Sid Zanforlin, who helmed Jesus Hopped the A Train last year for Tsultrum8 Productions. Both of these are very promising signs that we can expect a high level of professionalism from this community theatre project.

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