Bartholomew Fair Cover.indd - Stratford Festival

A Cosmos of Creativity
Shakespeare lies at the centre of our dramatic
universe. Here at Stratford, we celebrate him in
our theatres by honouring honouring his text and by by placing
it in the context of the work of his predecessors,
contemporaries and successors, so we can better
understand his breathtaking achievement. In doing
so, we range freely through the best and most
enduring works of the dramatic canon.
This season, you can explore the diversity of
Shakespeare’s genius in three such very diff diff erent erent
plays as Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and
Julius Caesar. You also have a rare opportunity
to compare his work to that of his friend and
rival Ben Jonson, whose Bartholomew Fair is a
brilliant satire of life in London, Shakespeare’s
adopted city, or with that of Jean Racine,
whose Phèdre is searing drama from a diff erent
dramatic tradition. Both these plays are
masterpieces in their own right – and to see
them performed is to discover how radical
are the diff erences between the world’s
greatest playwright and his nearest peers.
Shakespeare’s unprecedented
exploration of the human comedy paved
the way for such subsequent dramatists
as Anton Chekhov, Edmond Rostand and
Oscar Wilde, whose work also features on our
stages this season. His infl uence reveals itself
even in our two musicals, one of which shares
its ancestry with The Comedy of Errors while the
other draws directly on Romeo and Juliet.
Our own writers here in Canada owe no less to
Shakespeare and the extraordinary creative ferment
of his age. George F. Walker’s Canadian classic
Zastrozzi uses the Jacobean revenge tragedy as its
point of departure, while Sunil Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy,
newly revised for our production, is rooted, like
some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, in the tensions
between parents and children. So too is Morris
Panych’s The Trespassers, a brand-new play that
receives its world première here this season.
We are delighted to welcome you to this, our
57th season. We hope you will enjoy exploring with
us the astonishingly varied dramatic universe that
Shakespeare helped to create and that will always
honour him as its centre.
Antoni cimolino
General Director
De s m c A n u ff
Artistic Director
We dedicate our 2009 season
to the memory of
richard monette
Artistic Director of this Festival
from 1994 to 2007.
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