CLASSIC ROLES
Actress Cant opens up
As Heather Cant makes her Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan debut, she is thrilled to take on two great parts — Mrs. Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Gertrude in Hamlet. She shares her thoughts with Cam Fuller on the productions ahead.
DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENT
“I think there’s something beautiful about summer repertory theatre. Every time I’ve done it, there’s a real sense of a magical community coming together. We have a lot to get done in a short period of time so everybody is bringing their best game every day.”
MERRY MODERN
In Merry Wives, the Page parents think they know best who their daughter should marry. At the same time, the wives respond to Falstaff ’s romantic overtures by devising a series of humiliations for him. The common thread for Cant is who you should be able to love. “In some ways, it’s very relevant to the world we’re living in right now as we have a lot of those conversations,” she says. It’s about “being able to give freedom to people to love who they want to love juxtaposed against teaching someone boundaries for providing their affection where and when it is actually wanted.”
GETTING GERTRUDE Hamlet’s mother marries the man who murders her husband. But Cant doesn’t fault her. “There are some exceptions, for sure, but most of the time, particularly as an actor, I find that I can’t make choices that judge the character from the outside. I have to find a reason for what they’re doing and, for me, for Gertrude, that comes from a place of love. A genuine love for Claudius and a genuine love for Hamlet and a desire to find a way to be happy and move past her grief.”
OVERFAMILIARITY?
“To a certain extent, you have to play some homage to what people’s expectations are going to be because you can’t just cut, for example, the ‘to be or not to
be’ speech,” Cant says. “So it’s finding the balance for new interpretation and also honouring what people’s rightful expectations are.”
MONUMENTAL
“You go back to your life and you see how these characters have wrestled and made choices and made sometimes wrong choices and sometimes good choices and that informs how you interpret those big philosophical questions in your own life.
“One of the really beautiful things about Hamlet is that it asks giant questions and gives us no answers.”