Back to Summerworks on Wednesday night, this time at the Theatre Centre, to see a double bill of works derived (loosely) from Shakespeare plays.  Both works were experimental but in utterly different ways.  Lady M (Margaret) is 60 minutes of carefully crafted physical theatre intended for both Deaf and hearing audiences with great attention to detail and a minimalist aesthetic.  i am your spaniel, or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson is longer at around 90 minutes and is a mad cap series of vignettes exploring Shakespeare’s punctuation, patriarchy, capitalism, life as a trans person and yoghourt among other things.

Let’s start with Lady M (Margaret).  It’s WW1.  Macbeth and Duncan are serving as privates in a highland regiment on the Western Front.  Margaret has already lost one child.  The boys come home on leave to Scone.  Margaret is pregnant again but whose child is it and what will be the repercussions of that?  What will happen to them and to it?  There are few words; in English or sign language.  Just a few key ones at key moments.  The drama is in the movement.  Sometimes it’s highly kinetic as in, for example, the battle scenes.  Sometimes it’s tender.  Sometimes it’s almost processional; hieratic even.  And there’s dance which perhaps serves to remind us that this is storytelling through movement rather than words.  It’s also clear that enormous attention has been paid to details; movement, gesture, expression, props and costumes.  Every detail is right even down to whisky coming in pint bottles not 75cl!

Performances and direction are admirable.  The piece was created and directed by Scotland based Ramesh Meyyappan and the detailed Personenregie is as good as the overall concept but it would be nothing without stunning performances by Dawn Jani Birley (Margaret), Sturla Alvsvåg (Macbeth) and Joshua Bosworth (Duncan).  Birley encapsulates a kind of grim despair reinforced by many physical references to the Shakespeare play (obsessive hand washing for example).  The men are extremely athletic but also, at times, very subtle in their body language.  The creative team deserve high praise too, especially Jung-Hye Kim (sets) and Carlyn Rahusaar Routledge (costumes) for the highly authentic look of everything, Andre du Toit (lighting designer) and Jenna Green (composer and sound designer) for really adding visual and aural intensity to the drama and, not least, Daniel Levinson for some of the most realistic and scariest stage fights I’ve ever seen.

At the risk of downplaying the power of the piece I’ve avoided spoilers.  The drama builds in a slow,  inexorable way but with twists.  I’m really glad I didn’t know the plot in advance.  But do go see it.  It’s compelling theatre of a kind that isn’t much seen on Canadian stages.  There are performances Thursday and Friday evenings and two on Saturday.

spaniel (for short) is utterly different.  It’s a drag show by two performers with lots of tech (which quite often malfunctions; probably deliberately).  It has a chaotic, improvised feel that makes one suspect that no two performances would ever be quite the same.  There are themes and they do interact but they come and go at such a pace that connections perhaps only become clearer on reflection.  For example, close analysis of the punctuation and orthography of Helena’s Act 1 soliloquy in the First Folio leads naturally enough to a discussion of patriarchy à la Engels explained by using a package of Oikos brand yoghourt as a physical metaphor for the family as economic unit in capitalism.  As you do.

The characters in MSND and their relationships are constantly used to draw our attention to this or that manifestation of patriarchy and/or capitalism and/or dogginess.  The term “mechanical” ushers in a discussion of the proletarianisation of Elizabethan craft workers which leads to a discourse on government sponsored training of welders for a military refurbishment centre in Winnipeg and to a discussion of Enclosure, Peasants’ Revolts and their repression which, somehow along the way produces juicy doggy tidbits.

And it is quite doggy.  When female Shakespeare scholar Gislina Patterson, played by an undereducated trans man named Gislina Patterson, turns into a spaniel her time frame changes.  The nano-second attention span begins to make sense and her relationship to Dasha Pett; hitherto her hench person (and as genderly ambiguous as Oberon’s) but now her “master” allows an exploration of “power”, “love” and “obedience” from a dog (or perhaps proletarian) point of view.  There are also some very cute spaniel videos.

And I haven’t even managed to fit in dubious child acting gigs, a maniac in an armoured bulldozer, Elizabethan pharmacology, moon symbolism in the Amazon myth or municipal corruption in Winnipeg.  Let alone the stuff I don’t remember.

So there it is.  Does one choose Gislina and Dasha’s madcap eclectism or the dark, focussed, elegance of Lady M?  Or see both as I’m glad I did.  It’s still possible to see them as a double bill tonight and Friday or there are other performances of both on the weekend.

And that’s my last Summerworks show for this year and what an interesting process of discovery it has been.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz (Lady M), Henry Chan (spaniel)