Saint Lawrence Shakespeare Festival Archives - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Julius Caesar at the Saint Lawrence Festival: this youthful staging highlights an excellent Richard Sheridan Willis in the leading role.

By Alvina Ruprecht | July 24, 2016

Photos: Drew Hossick

Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, directed by Rona Waddington,

During the first moments of the play, the Roman tribune admonishes the silly people of Rome for wasting their time rejoicing about Caesar’s triumph over Pompey : “You blocks you stones, you worse than senseless things!” Especially since the same crowd recently cheered Pompey when he came to Rome. In this first tableau, Shakespeare and director Rona Waddington make several points. The Tribune , a male role, is played here by a woman so we know we are in a contemporary world of theatrical fun (never mind Brecht) , especially as the carnival atmosphere bursts joyously onto the stage. The audience is seduced immediately . This first contact also emphasizes the important notion that the fickle Roman crowd is easily manipulated by any talented orator such as Mark Antony, Brutus or Cassius whenever it serves their purpose, and this is one of the important strategies of Shakespeare’s text which clearly appears to be indestructible, no matter what one does in the acting space.

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Jesus My Boy at Saint Albin’s. The Christ Story Becomes a Family Narrative.

By Alvina Ruprecht | December 9, 2013

Photo from St Lawrence Shakespeare Company

This monologue, created in 1998 in England by author/actor (John Dowie) and then performed by Tom Conti at the Haymarket theatre the same year, is now appearing in the Ottawa area thanks to Ian Farthing, better known to us as the director of the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival in Prescott. Yes Mr. Farthing is an actor, who has worked and trained in the UK, has done musical theatre in Toronto and London. Now Farthing has taken on the fairly demanding role of the carpenter Joseph, the father of Jesus, as he tells the story of the nativity and the life of Christ from the point of view of a working class fellow, who happens to be the father of Jesus, as well as a poor Jew living under Roman occupation. That obviously changes his perspective of things. He has a very tolerant and unmacho vision of the Virgin birth which was surprising; he has a decidedly good knowledge of the Torah, of the squabbles between the different Jewish movements cohabiting in Judea at that period, and a pretty good political intuition about the way colonising Romans knew how to manipulate their own colonized, making it fairly easy to get rid of this trouble maker whom they eventually crucified.

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