OTHELLO

Shot entirely in the same studio used for the KING LEAR and MACBETH interiors, this OTHELLO is production designed by Cameron Porteous to evoke the play's various settings. The action moves from Venice to Cyprus, from a moody, watery night to a sunlit day and then through that day to night again. From a projection of water, to fishing crates to evoke an unseen harbour, to a garden behind an unseen castle, to a cafe, a marketplace and then to a bedroom, the movements of the characters are subtly tied together by a large square gold obelisk that appears in almost every scene.

Constructed in Cameron's Niagara backyard and transported to Toronto for the shoot, the gold square is first seen as a window frame in Venice, where Desdemona's father appears and discovers his daughter has eloped, and is last seen as the bedframe where she meets her death. In between, the gold square is the frame of a painting in the Venice council chambers, the dock of the harbour at Cyprus, a planter in the garden, a window at a cafe, and the window of Desdemona's bedroom in the Cyprus castle.

MACBETH

For A TASTE OF SHAKESPEARE: MACBETH, we did something new: we built a set. Previous productions have been set in limbo, in stylized settings with props and some set dressing or on location. For MACBETH we started with stairs, as they are the location of important moments in the play. Production Designer Cameron Porteous then went further, coming up with the idea of building the MacBeths’ home out of scaffold material.

This gave us the stairs, plus endless angles, lines of tension in the frame and foreground pieces. With the addition of curtains and firelight, we suggest the hallways and rooms of the castle. As the play progresses, the curtains go away and more of the scaffold reveals itself, at the same time that more of the truth and precarious nature of life reveals itself to Macbeth. We can see into the dark corners, into the endless darkness we can become once evil has been allowed to roam free. Surrounding the murderous king with scaffold gives Macbeth the illusion of strength and solidity at the same time as it reminds us of a skeleton. The see-through home in which Macbeth lives can only hold its glimpsed secrets behind curtains for so long before the truth has to be faced.

But the show begins outside. Toronto’s magnificent Scarborough Bluffs stand in for Scotland, as Macbeth and Banquo return from battle and encounter the witches, who are thus connected to nature. Looking as if they came from the earth, they are not constrained by it as they can disappear.

Macbeth and the thanes continue on to meet King Duncan, and Macbeth is now considering how he can become king since the witches said this is what would happen. Once Macbeth begins to give in to evil thoughts, moving away from proper human nature, he never sees nature again: the rest of the show is shot in studio. Even the final swordfight which takes place outside, is in a stylized studio setting. Macbeth has left nature far behind and it is too late for him to find his way back.

To dramatize the play under an hour, A TASTE OF SHAKESPEARE always has a narrator. This time it is the character of Banquo, who plays his part and also talks to us. But he is no omnicient narrator: we do not put him in scenes where his character is not present and he has no idea how the action will turn out. He is certainly surprised to find out he dies before the story is over. But because Banquo’s ghost comes back to taunt Macbeth at the banquet, we can also bring the narrator back as from beyond the grave, he sees the rest of the action unfold.

KING LEAR

To meet the challenge of how to represent the world of King Lear, we look to the play and its central character for inspiration. While the king must deal with the real world when it comes to winning wars, he spends much of his time in a world of power, flattery and privilege that is quite unreal.

But in this play, this king eventually has to deal with the real world when he is unceremoniously dumped into it. From the protected berth, he then must deal with weather and nature, finding in them insight as well as misery. So we decided to visually move the king from a stylized world to a real one, as that is what happens to him. The first half of the script was shot in a studio and the second half outside. The link is the storm sequence, in which the outside world impinges on the inside.

The opening scenes are shot in limbo with only the key trappings of castle and home - throne, gate, servants, desk, candles. As Lear is thrust into the storm, forced into his own mind and the world's chaos, we give him a combination of natural and unnatural sights and sounds to represent this fusion. But after society has been shattered by the worst of man's nature - the blinding of Gloucester - and the king is on his own, without even the comfort of companions, we take the camera to the natural world and leave the safe studio behind. We open ourselves to nature along with Lear. We got luckier than he did: a foggy day at the bottom of the Scarborough Bluffs didn't let us see the cliffs but gave our images a magic quality. And then a sunny day at Toronto's beaches let us see our prison (actually the Waterworks) and gave the end of the play - shot as the sun went down - the natural progression of the sunset.

The shock of the storm and Lear's refusal to give in to its power leads to his realization that there are people who have to deal with this every day. Before his death, Lear - who has given away his golden crown - fashions a new one out of leaves and flowers, and faces the hypocrisy of the world.

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

Although all Shakespeare's plays can be effectively performed on bare boards, we wanted to show how cut off Portia was from the mercantile life of Venice. We therefore videotaped the Belmont scenes at a magnificent estate. The merchants' ventures on the high seas suggested a waterfront location for Venice; and for the courtroom scenes we chose a grand, old church.

Costumes are a big challenge in every Shakespeare production. Sixteenth century doublets tend to distance the characters from today's audience, while modern clothing clashes with Shakespeare's poetic and heightened language. This MERCHANT is clothed in the Empire period: the turn of the 20th century. However, two characters in the play wear costumes unrelated to a specific time. Shylock is dressed as a religious Jew, with the addition of the yellow circle required by the laws of Venice. And the Prince of Morocco wears traditional ceremonial robes. In this MERCHANT, Brian Tree - as Shylock and Narrator - links the racial prejudice of Venice in the late 1590's with similar hateful behavior in modern times. And as he does, we see a modern skyline behind him, over the timeless sea. In each A TASTE OF SHAKESPEARE production, we include one visual moment to connect Shakespeare's story with our life today.

ROMEO & JULIET

When we were ready to shoot our third production, whose story contains a number of outdoor scenes in balmy weather, it was winter in Canada, and the writer/director, Eric Weinthal was living in Los Angeles. So Eric hired actors and a crew in L.A., and the producers, Ada and Doug Craniford flew to L.A. with Brian Tree who would portray the Friar. The courtyard of Pasadena City Hall became the town square of Verona. The space under a staircase at City Hall became the tomb where Romeo and Juliet kill themselves. The Capulet's house was The Mermaid, an estate high up in Topanga Canyon, where dogs and coyotes howled all night, especially during the balcony scene.

On location in The Mermaid, (the Capulet house) shooting the moment in the party
scene when Juliet asks the nurse the name of the young man she was talking to



Director Eric Weinthal lining up a shot of the sleeping Juliet in the tomb

The shocking part of this play is how young Juliet is: "She's not fourteen." says Lady Capulet. Juliet will be fourteen in "A fortnight and odd days." In most stage productions, the actress playing Juliet is in her twenties, since the demands of the play make it hard to find a fourteen year who can play the role; yet this is needed for the full impact of the story to come through. We decided to look high and low for an actress of the right age and we finally found fifteen- year old KATE ELLIS, who not only looked the part, but also gave the best reading for the role. This was her first paid acting job. ROYCE HERRON, who plays Juliet's Nurse, is also a teacher. She was the first to suggest using our TASTE OF SHAKESPEARE scripts in the classroom, for students to act out and thereby make the essence of the play their own. The point of A TASTE OF SHAKESPEARE is to lead students toward understanding and appreciating Shakespeare's whole plays (not just our abridgement). However, our script could be one step in the process. If your school would like to order scripts of any of our productions, email Eric Weinthal.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Although Toronto was bursting with trees and flowers in July when we shot this video, the director, Dug Rotstein, opted for a studio shoot: no worry about rain; no bugs or creepy crawlers; no children (our fairies) getting lost in the dark. Dora award winning designer, Teresa Przybylski, created a fairytale forest as well as a stylized Athenian palace, painted three dimensionally on the walls and augmented by rented flowers and trees. The effect was magical, romantic, and threatening: the forest was a place to lose oneself, or to find more than one ever dreamed.

Our approach to the fairies was to make them semi-transparent, hiding in trees or free floating in the air. They were a part of the real action, but the story could also have happened without them. In our reading of the play, every change in the humans' behavior attributed to the fairies, was also psychologically sound. For instance, Lysander didn't just turn from Hermia to Helena out of nowhere: it happened right after Hermia insisted that he sleep farther off, and he was angered that she didn't trust him. The humans had reasons for changing their minds, but the fairies were definitely there. So the fairies were all shot against a blue screen, rarely interacting with the actors playing humans. The blue was then separated from the "fairy elements", and we were free to create enchantment with the computer at Bone Digital Effects.

Fairies could fly anywhere, become tiny, become a lot or a little transparent, and disappear at will. Fairies only became human size and solid when they fell in love with a human (Titania) or had to be saved from that love (Oberon). The studio and blue screen gave us the control over light and props to make the magic that Shakespeare describes in the play but which cannot be done on stage: such as creating elves small enough to creep in acorn-cups and hide them there." Of course even a bare stage can be magical because it is Shakespeare's language that creates the true spell, to make us see and feel a world he cannot show.

HAMLET

For our first production, we wanted to show how little is needed in the way of costumes and set, because everything is provided by Shakespeare in the text. So we stripped the production down to bare essentials. One location: a high school auditorium - a theater space - because HAMLET is very much concerned with theater, with play acting, and with life imitating a play. In this production, three of the actors function as actor/narrators, playing multiple roles. They act out the key scenes, then switch to narrator mode: summarizing, commenting, and questioning all that is going on; inviting the viewer to join in the endless debate about Hamlet's motives. The fourth actor, playing Hamlet, is the only one who doesn't narrate. The others try to puzzle him out; but he is too busy analyzing himself.

This introduction to HAMLET gives the main story, leaving out some of the subplots. It provides only a taste of the richness in the whole play. It acts as a road map winding through the twisting plot and the twisted plans of the characters. Our first production, also our lowest budget, was rehearsed in two days and then shot in two (long) days! Stratford Shakespeare Festival veteran BRIAN TREE stepped in at the last moment to replace another actor. He learned twenty pages of script in a day, and contributed so much to the production, that we designated him our good luck charm.