As live theatre holds a mirror up to the audience, the Stratford Festival’s 2025 playbill is a bold reflection of today’s global landscape. Themes of Harmony, Love and War are extracted from the pulp of the Shakespearean cannon, Canadian plays and musicals.
How do we talk about war and our human experience during a time of such global conflicts without amplifying those conflicts between us? Bias and animus gather and stream through our online ecosystems, while dramatic storytelling through live theatre provides the catharsis we need. When we settle into our comfy seats at the theatre, we immerse ourselves, even escape into new worlds that reveal, in an allegorical sense, a teaching or inspiration and moral application that can be both healing and instructive.
The Art of War is a Canadian play that explores the experiences, challenges and costs of war on a human and artistic level. As the protagonist documents his observations of war through paint on a canvas, he exposes the relationship between art and identity, and the psychological impact on our identities as Canadians. Ransacking Troy hypothesizes alternatives to the wars of men via women banding together to create a better world. Using the epic battle of Troy as the setting, the women of the play intervene in the fraying of their society for a less “testosterone-fuelled conclusion.”
The Festival delves into the influence of women through the hopeful and optimistic nature of the musical, Annie, and the new adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. Both stories represent spirited, imaginative young women whose idealism is uplifting and encouraging. Both focus on the possibilities of tomorrow. “The sun'll come out tomorrow” sings Annie, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow, you're only a day away.” Her good cheer wins over “Daddy” Warbucks who assures her, “I'm not giving up. Don't you give up.” Anne of Green Gables extols the virtues of curiosity, ambition, “trying and failing,” and how friendships beautify life. Her optimism is infectious as she shares that, "Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it." We need to see and experience these stories and, like the adult characters in these plays, be reminded of all the youthful and positive opportunities of tomorrow.
As You Like It is a timeless comedy that challenges us to be okay with liking or not liking to whatever degree we want, but to recognize the power of nature and the nature of identity. The universality of love and happiness regardless of where we call home or in which camp we reside, is one of joy and pain, love and loss, self-discovery and forgiveness through which we can find genuine connection.
Both As You Like it and Sense and Sensibility revolve around the complications of love in the face of social class, and how we present different versions of ourselves to mask our true selves. These stories explore the timeless pressures between our social images and personal truths; the conflicts between our romantic ideals and emotional authenticity, amidst social and gendered expectations, which are only ameliorated by the connections we make through empathy and honest dialogue; liberating us to be who we really are, without artifice.
The machinations of those who seek power are also explored in the aristocratic pre-revolutionary setting of France in Dangerous Liaisons, by those who believe, “Love is something you use, not something you fall into.” And in the musical comedy, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, in which two conniving playboys scheme to seduce and swindle rich ladies in a swanky Riviera town. Macbeth is the ultimate study in how power corrupts as he expresses, “Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.” Set amidst biker wars in the 1990’s, Macbeth’s more cynical view of “tomorrow” is revealed right from the start when he asserts that “Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.” This moral inversion is one that we can all feel within the divisiveness of modern politics, and in how this ambiguity has metastasized across our body politic. While Macbeth’s unchecked ambition destroys individuals and his community, in the end, we are rewarded with restoration of order and stability.
The trappings of jealousy are also explored in the realm of King Leontes of The Winter’s Tale, where false assumptions about others precipitate calamity. Betrayal begets tragedy, but the transformative nature of time enables a chance for renewed hope. When the King is told, “It is required you do awake your faith,” we feel this is a message to us all—that we must never lose faith in what we hope is possible.
As we witness and feel the anguish of war, our humanity shines through in Forgiveness, the award winning memoir of Mark Sakamoto, whose personal narrative of the human toll of war on families, the ensuing disconnection, struggle, yearning and anger, eventually leads to a choice of forgiveness over hatred. Forgiveness is the antidote, the thread that weaves the tapestry of this powerful 2025 Playbill, and the value that we most need to espouse in order to move forward from conflict with harmony and love.
For tickets and more information, visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca