Bard revived

>> Shakespeare Unplugged gives
a new twist to old words

IF CHANCE WILL HAVE ME KING:
Jennifer Morehouse and Paul Hopkins

by NEIL BOYCE

Repercussion Theatre marks an impressive 20 years in business that has seen its share of peril, but a recent successful fundraiser and a hit season last summer has helped the company bounce back, this year bringing on actor Paul Hopkins as artistic director.

Hopkins’s present to himself of a plum role in the season opener, Shakespeare Unplugged, is one we all get to enjoy, in a production that partners him on stage with Jennifer Morehouse and brings Ed Thomason, the creator and original director of the piece, to Montreal for a brief run at the historic Atwater Library.

Appropriately, a Shakespearean tempest was brewing outside on opening night and the old building creaked and rattled under gale-force winds—all adding to the effect as if by design. Under the plain, unchanging lights in the old meeting hall above the library, the play glided over scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Julius Caesar and a brace of others with equally memorable lines. This Shakespearean look at the “ongoing dialogue between two characters” and the endless ways in which men and women interact, as Morehouse remarked afterwards, was a fine, and on occasion spellbinding, collection of the Bard’s juiciest scenes.

With minimal props and scenes strung together with barely a pause, the evening played like a master class from the pair of actors whose careers have taken them to stages across Canada, with significant stops for both at Stratford. There was wonderful atmosphere throughout amid the groans of the old building and its many ghosts—a time-capsuled trip to imagined performances of Shakespeare in centuries past.

The actors assumed many personas throughout the evening, Hopkins delivering lines in Québécois-accented English, Morehouse as a 1940s movie hellcat or overly earnest talk show host. Both at times fastened on to an audience member, locking eyes as they delivered a charged line.

Morehouse was particularly gripping in a scene from Measure for Measure where she urges her adversary, “Go to your bosom; knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” It was a fascinating project, another look at the ways in which Shakespeare’s text can be revivified for the jaded.

In the coming season, Repercussion brings back their dual-language hit from last summer, Les fourberies de Scapin/Scapin the schemer for a two-week run at the Old Port, and will mount a touring production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, also enacted in French and English versions—coming soon to a park near you.

There’s an interesting production sneaking under the radar at Concordia University from director Alexandre Marine. Noted for his elaborate, large-scale productions at the Segal and Centaur theatres among others, using elements of surrealism in his sets and lighting, Marine is working on a more intimate scale with two one-act plays set in a hotel, Provincial Anecdotes.

The stories from Russian playwright Alexander Vampilov have been compared to Chekov in their humanity and insight—a blend of Russian motifs and Eastern absurdism that mingle into tragicomedy.

A great opportunity to see one of Montreal’s most dynamic directors working in miniature.

Shakespeare Unplugged until April 19
at Atwater Library (4023 Tupper)Tickets:
(514) 931-2644, www.repercussiontheatre.com
Provincial Anecdotes April 10–13 at D.B. Clarke Theatre
(1455 de Maisonneuve W.) Tickets: (514) 848-2424, ext. 4742