THE ST. LAWRENCE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL – the little Festival that could!
Ten years on
by Ian Farthing
If you’d said to me 10 years ago that I was going to be the artistic director of a successful outdoor Shakespeare Festival in small town Eastern Ontario, I would have just laughed in your face. At that time I had never even set foot in Ontario, was a total city boy and had not even had the opportunity to work on a Shakespeare production professionally. Shakespeare? In Prescott? Ha!
But one day a friend called me up from the UK to say that a mutual friend of ours was directing a show in Canada and I should audition. Being a Brit, she had no idea that travelling from my home in Vancouver to Toronto was almost as far (and certainly almost as expensive) as going back to the UK. Long story short, I ended up going for the audition, landing the gig and spending my first summer working at the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival in Prescott, ON.
