Kate Besworth's Done/Undone asks hard questions about racism and misogyny in Shakespeare
Bard on the Beach commissions a filmed play that looks critically at the way its namesake’s works are staged
Harveen Sandhu and Charlie Gallant switch between multiple roles in Done/Undone.
Bard on the Beach streams the film Done/Undone from August 12 to September 30. You can watch it on the big screen at the VIFF Centre’s Vancity Theatre on August 30 and 31.
HOW WELL DO Shakespeare’s plays stand the test of time? Are there some that shouldn’t be staged in the 21st century? And do people even enjoy Shakespeare?
These are radical questions to be asking—not just for a summer festival devoted to staging the Bard’s works, but for a playwright who’s spent much of her life in and around his works.
So it is with Done/Undone, Kate Besworth’s thought-provoking new play, soon to be streamed via Bard on the Beach, the company whose stage she’s taken as an actor in shows from The Merchant of Venice to The Taming of the Shrew. Besworth points out that her relationship to Shakespeare dates back even further than that, though.
“I grew up in Stratford, Ontario. I ushered for five years at the festival!” the playwright says in an interview. “But honestly, I think these are the questions we need to be asking. Why do we enjoy the things that we enjoy?
“I do love Shakespeare and so much of his poetry is so wonderful,” she stresses. “but in terms of looking critically at how he has become the symbol of western literature and symbol of playwriting greatness, there’s room to be critical.”
For years, Besworth has debated the pros and cons of Shakespeare with her fellow artists. And when the pandemic began, and the world shifted, she started creating a play that would interrogate the racism, misogyny, colonialism, and other problematic aspects of the Bard’s classics, from multiple angles.
The ideas for her first professionally produced play stemmed from years of interpreting Shakespeare’s works as an actor.
Playwright Kate Besworth
“Being a female actor, you are aware that in a Shakespearean play that you have one or two roles that you could get—as opposed to the 18 for men,” begins Besworth says, referring to the parts she divides into “the ingenue and the friend of the ingenue”. “And then, if you’re a person of colour, in terms of playing a person who’s actually written as a person of colour in a Shakespearean play, I think the percentage is 11 out of over 1,200 characters in his canon that are people of colour.”
Bard on the Beach has grappled with those issues both on-stage—whether it’s in gender-bending roles (think Moya O’Connell as Coriolanus) or diverse casting and settings (an All’s Well That Ends Well set in India). It also follows in community mandate devoted to equity, diversion, and inclusion.
The company first commissioned Besworth’s script as a live play, but with the fest shut down due to the pandemic for its second summer in a row, it’s now shifted to a film that will stream on demand.
Done/Undone stars Charlie Gallant and Harveen Sandhu as multiple characters. In a series of vignettes, they play academics debating the relevance of Shakespeare on a Canadian TV show; audience members with opposing views; and two actors about to head onstage for Hamlet. Sandhu herself steps into the role of William Shakespeare, who ponders his impact on the world.
“I wrote the show with no actor in mind, and then when we got into workshopping it, we started looking at, well, what does it mean having Harveen’s body in this role mean for the scene, as a brown woman?” Besworth says. “Or what does it mean having Charlie’s white male body in this role? So it was really explorative and collaborative with the two of them.”
Through the creative process, Besworth says she’s learned a lot about her own relationship to Shakespeare, and the way theatre companies can move forward with his works in an era of anti-racism movements and seismic social shift.
“In the play, one of the academics says something that is my point of view on things: We can be critical and still love something,” Besworth says. “And in fact, being critical is a form of love, because it’s paying attention to the work, paying attention to the issues in the work, and taking care of people while doing that.
"For me it comes down to how we put on his plays," Besworth adds, "because I don't think they’re ever going to stop being put on. There are 21 Shakespeare companies across Canada, and there is value for an audience there. But what's important is how we approach the text as directors and as theatres programming them—to be rigorous in terms of looking at the inherent racism and sexism."
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