The forest has a personality. The forest searches. The forest dreams…

Toronto's "Best Movement Based Theatre Company" (2006 NOW), Theatre Rusticle  presents a poetic and darkly hopeful tale inspired by one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest plays. Birnam Wood weaves together the dreams and nightmares of a forest that witnessed acts of greed, power and the unimaginable with our own inimitable physical style.

Set in an upside down forest where the roots reach to the sky and tree branches press deep into the earth, Birnam Wood is the story of a cold night in which six disembodied Tree spirits seek sleep and home only to be greeted by their dreams and nightmares. They dream what they have seen in the centuries of their lives ~ the story of a great hero, the love of his life and how he fell from grace and took the whole world (including their forest) with him. Through acts of dreaming and remembrance, the forest regenerates itself. In a world where Nature has been destroyed, there is renewal. Birnam Wood is about what and how Nature remembers. It is about our ecology and how to attend to a world out of balance. It is a ghostly bedtime story. It is a love story.

Last seen on Toronto stages in September 2007 with the multi-Dora Award nominated April 14, 1912, Theatre Rusticle returns after a season of touring and development.   Inspired by Shakespeare’s, Macbeth, Birnam Wood is an imagistic, physically aggressive and original work, created collaboratively and through the memory of the participating artists. It is not a re-invention of Shakespeare’s text, but one that springs from his imagery and leaps into a heightened imaginative and emotionally resonant world. At the centre of this piece is the question of Nature’s memory. If an ancient Tree in the forest of Birnam could tell its story what would it be? What greed, love, desire, destruction and human folly have those trees witnessed? If wood could speak….

Theatre Rusticle has collaborated with Harbourfront Centre and was last seen at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Vancouver in 2008. Their work has been hailed as “sheer brilliance” (The Globe and Mail), that “ sails into uncharted terrain where theatre meets dance, words meet movement and set design is an extension of your imagination” (The Vancouver Province).

Birnam Wood
Presented by Theatre Rusticle in association with Theatre Passe Muraille

$20-$25 * Students/Seniors $15 * Matinees PWYC

http://www.theatrerusticle.org * theatrerusticle@hotmail.com

Featuring: Hume Baugh, Maev Beaty, Wesley Connor, Viv Moore, Matthew Romantini & Lucy Rupert.
Scenic & Costume Design by Lindsay Anne Black
Lighting Design by Michelle Ramsay
Direction & Conception by Allyson McMackon

Warnings: Haze & No Latecomers or re-admittance

Birnam Wood is generously supported by: The Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and OAC’s Theatre Creator’s Reserve through Nightwood Theatre