As the final production wraps up for Calgary’s The Shakespeare Company at the beginning of June, the company has already begun preparations for its 2024-25 season.

It’ll be a funny one.

Richard Beaune, the new Artistic Director for The Shakespeare Company (TSC), is bringing a trio of the Bard’s comedies to the stage in 2024 and 2025, all appropriately centred around the theme of arrivals.

It’s a selection of plays that metaphorically mirror Beaune’s arrival to Calgary after serving as the Artistic Director for Prime Stock Theatre in Red Deer since 2021.

“Initially, it started because I am arriving, and I’ve been really warmed by the reception that I’ve been receiving and how welcome I’ve been made to feel in theatre community in Calgary. That was on my mind as I was ruminating over scenes,” he said.

“The fact that my arrival signifies a new chapter for the company, and it’s an opportunity for us to revisit what we do and how we do it. So the arrival [theme] became an important thing.”

He said that it was a theme that could be built on for his first season as Artistic Director, with a series of audience favourite productions starting with The Comedy of Errors.

“Once that idea came to me, and then Twelfth Night is another play with the arrival of two people in a strange land, and in The Games of Love and Chance, as a play where these two people arrive in a strange place, under strange circumstances. So, it just kind of rolled and started to build,” Beaune said.

“I’m trying to look at the first five years of my programming as an arc that reflects the structure of a five-act play.”

A pair of the productions will be shown in a rare format for the Calgary theatre scene, with The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night being staged as dual repertory productions—something that Beaune said would show off the skills of TSC’s team and artists.

The repertory format was a callback directly to the original way that Shakespeare’s own company staged productions, Beaune said.

“They would shift from show to show to show to show, and there is something about working in that format that that puts an actor right at the heart of what I think acting should be. That’s the ability to transform mercurially, the ability to transcend your own personal life experience and move into something larger, and then that allows the audience to then do so as well,” he said.

“So for me, that’s really key to why we want to go to the theatre, is we want to see a human being pretending to be a different human being and that gives us the potential to become a different human being as well as an audience.”

It would also highlight the collaborative process the company will use to bring to life the work of the classic plays of Shakespeare and of Pierre de Marivaux.

“I wanted to create a different feeling in the company that the actor was a participant in the creation of the work, really, because the actor is that last realm of of communication with the audience, and they receive the story through the actor live on stage,” Beaune said.

“It was really key for me, from the very start, to put the actor at the forefront of the work. When you’re doing Shakespeare, there’s a level of resonance because the language is so rich, because the stories are so exciting, and the characters are really intriguing. Shakespeare does all of those things.”

Translating works for the stage

Among the other unusual aspects of the season is that Beaune will be presenting a translated work of Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance—a classic French romantic comedy from the 18th century based around swapped class identities and gender roles.

That translation was done by Beaune, who wanted to escape previous dry translations to bring the wit and humour to English speaking audiences.

“It’s a play I’ve loved for a long, long time. But when I went back to the English translations, it just felt really dry, and I thought there is more fun to be had here,” he said.

“I started working on the translation and had an opportunity… [for] a really great process for writing that translation, where I was able to write a draft, and then work with actors in a workshop phase, where they were able to find this the bodies of their characters through some exercises that we did.”

He said that those exercises allowed the actors to find the essence and physicality of the characters, which then allowed him to go back to the work to capture the poetic qualities of the words as originally written by Marivaux.

“I think we ended up with a really fine translation, because of that team effort,” he said.

That translation was originally performed in Red Deer in 2022 by Prime Stock Theatre, which received critical acclaim for its modern take on the more than 300-year-old play.

Beaune said that the production of TSC’s 2024-25 season takes the company back to the original mandate to put on productions of Shakespeare and other classic works for Calgary audiences.

“I still want to do contemporary work that’s inspired by classics as well, but we don’t have any in our first season yet. We might look for opportunities to add some more programming as the year goes on, but probably not until my second year,” he said.

“One of the great assets in doing Shakespeare is that you go back in time, and you can look at an experience of a character who lived in a world that is so utterly different from our own. We know that, but the experience of the characters is still so human. I think there’s something really valuable in experiencing that, but Shakespeare is not the only classic writer that’s out there, and there’s a whole other world of great material that we can draw from.”

Finding the physicality in timeless works

Like Beaune’s translation, he said that a collaborative process to help actors not just speak the words on stage but physically inhabit their characters would come across in the Shakespeare plays as well.

“I’ve always felt that Shakespeare should feel very physical, it should be dynamic and should live inside the bodies of the actors. So I really work hard when I’m directing to bring the language into the body of the actor, so that it sits in a more of a full body experience than just from the neck up speaking words that they intellectually understand,” he said.

“I want them to go to feel the language as well, when you’ve got a playwright who can write great stories and great characters, and wrap it all together in this beautiful poetry—there’s no other playwright who is quite so good at doing all that.”

He said that for audiences, when actors embody the poetry they actually embody the stories that Shakespeare was telling.

“If you feel in your body the feeling of the language—and I’m not talking about the meaning of the words but the feeling of the words—then you’re going to have a much richer experience, and the audience then feels the play, not just hearing it or thinking about it or seeing it, but they really do physically feel it, and then they emotionally feel it,” Beaune said.

“It’s a much richer experience.”

The Comedy of Errors, directed by Bronwyn Steinberg, runs from Sept. 27 to Oct. 18, 2024.

Twelfth Night, directed by Richard Beaune runs concurrently with The Comedy of Errors from Sept. 28 to Oct. 19, 2024.

The Games of Love and Chance, also directed by Richard Beaune, runs from May 2, 2025 to May 17, 2025.

All of the productions are at Vertigo Theatre.

Details on ticket packages, including discounts for people looking to see both The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, will be released later this summer.