A life with Shakespeare

Final season for the Bard’s Bus Tour

For the past 35 years, Jeremy Smith’s life has been gravitationally bound to Shakespeare. It has yielded some exhilarating moments, some heartbreak, and at times endemic exhaustion. His first brush with the Bard came when he was in Grade Nine with The Merchant of Venice. He had been going to a French elementary school, but was now in an English high school and had a Grade Five level of English language comprehension. He quite literally had no idea what he was reading. Fast forward to Grade 12 and a school trip to Stratford to see Hamlet. When Colm Feore strode onto the stage, Jeremy was enthralled. The darkly brooding character in a combination of Goth and Emo ignited a passion for Shakespeare that led Jeremy to enroll in the Queen’s University theatre program. While at Queen’s, he discovered the character Puck, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and that became his alter-ego, gradually seeping into his own life as he shed his introverted reserve.

It was while he was at Queen’s in his third year in 1995 that he decided to abandon his studies and form a touring theatre group. “I had seen outdoor theatre in Toronto under the Bathurst Street Bridge in 1992, and I wanted to play Puck, and I thought ‘why don’t I just do that for the summer?’. I just wanted to tell a story, and also at the time there wasn’t a professional summer theatre in Durham where I grew up,” he said. With his parents’ blessing and their help, he formed Driftwood, a summer theatre company staging Shakespeare’s plays outdoors. “Shakespeare’s language is extraordinarily beautiful. He wrote some really excellent plays that he created to be entertaining. He wrote about the human condition in ways that remain unparalleled. We’re still doing his plays 400 years after he died. There’s something about them that captivates us, and if it can be performed in a way that’s meaningful and clear, it’s some of the best writing ever.”

Jeremy describes himself as a theatre artist and a storyteller. He says he is not a historian and sees his theatre company’s mandate to make Shakespeare’s work accessible and relevant to his audience. “When Driftwood is producing Shakespeare, we’re looking for ways to make a connection to the audience. That means providing artistic context and being clear in telling your story.” This is Driftwood’s 29th season, and they have staged summer outdoor theatre in communities from Kingston in the east to Ingersoll in the west. They have produced some of the more well-known plays such as Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream several times, but have also done lesser-known works such as The Winter’s Tale.

Previous seasons have seen the company perform in 30 locations in a grueling summer schedule, with the attendant challenges of doing outdoor theatre and ensuring cast, crew and equipment show up on time and in the right place. “Outdoor theatre is poised along the edge of a knife. The weather can be a wonderful boon, but it can also represent significant challenges. Increasingly we are finding there is more erratic weather and greater spikes in temperature, and the winds we get now are stronger.” Sometimes the weather works its own magic. Jeremy tells how a fog rolled in during the final scene of Romeo and Juliet, with Romeo lamenting over Juliet’s body before taking his own life.

This is the final season of the Bard’s Bus Tour, a decision that was made last year. For this last season, Jeremy has written a one-man play about his life with Shakespeare. It takes the form of a conversation with the Bard of Avon about how for the past 35 years nearly every facet of Jeremy’s life has been linked to the playwright. He lays his heartbreak and exhaustion at the feet of Shakespeare, but also some of his most uplifting experiences. He speaks about rehearsals in stifling hot weather, of dealing with a swarm of mosquitoes during a performance, of sets being destroyed by wind and rain, of being made to rehearse the role of Iago in skivvies after one of his practical jokes went a little too far. But he also proposed to his now wife after a performance of Romeo and Juliet and learned they were expecting their first child while on route to direct a high school play in London. Running a theatre company played havoc with Jeremy’s personal life. He’s missed birthday parties and friends’ weddings, he’s had to deal with mounting debt as shows were cancelled due to weather, and many’s the time he’s asked himself whether it was worth it. He said the pandemic was a great personal gift to him. It allowed him to spend more time with his family, and Shakespeare was nowhere to be found in his life for much of those two years. He did come back though, and Jeremy had the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first time he had been acting in 15 years and the first time his daughters saw him on stage.

This final play, Living With Shakespeare, is Jeremy’s way of celebrating the past 30 years of touring, as well as to come to terms with the ending of a season in his life. The dialogue is a combination of his own words melded seamlessly in with those of Shakespeare. It expresses his deep love for what he has been doing, and for all the people who have been part of his journey. That voyage has come to an end, and there is a new path to be charted. His home base is now in Picton, and Driftwood Theatre Company will continue. “Driftwood will now be able to focus on different things. We’d like to focus on the creation and development of new stories. We have lots of excellent storytellers who are creating stories now, and I think it’s important to be celebrating those stories.”