Stratford Festival - The Forum

My Account

Shopping Cart

Book Accommodation

Calendar

Plays & Tickets

The Forum

Store

Visitor Info

Videos & Photos

Education & Training

About Us

Support Us

Food for Thought

Speaker Bios

Jane Freeman (Table Talk, Romeo and Juliet)

Dr. Jane Freeman attended theatre school at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and has completed a BA and a BEd in English and drama at Queen’s University, a master’s degree in English and European Renaissance drama at the University of Warwick and a PhD in Shakespeare’s rhetoric at the University of Toronto. Her areas of specialty are Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare’s rhetoric, oral/written communication and classical rhetoric. She has worked on numerous theatrical productions in a range of capacities including actress, stage manager, adjudicator and director, and was the production coordinator for Robert Lepage’s production of Macbeth at Hart House Theatre. She taught Shakespeare at Acadia University in Nova Scotia for two years before returning to Ontario to join the faculty at the University of Toronto. She is the founding Director of the School of Graduate Studies’ Office of English Language and Writing Support, a Senior Fellow of Massey College and a member of the Massey Corporation. A frequent guest lecturer for the Stratford Festival and host of the annual Shakespeare Lecture Series at the Toronto Reference Library, Dr. Freeman is a member of the Festival’s Senate, the Chair of its University Task Force and past Chair of its Education and Archives Committee.

David G. John (Table Talk, Mary Stuart)

David John was born in Aberdare, South Wales, and emigrated with his parents and sister to Canada in 1955. He studied at the universities of Toronto and Vienna. Until his recent retirement, he was for 38 years a professor of German language and literature at the University of Waterloo, with a brief interlude at McGill. While his research and writings address a wide range of German poetry, prose and theatre since the 18th century, his specialty is classical German drama, particularly the works of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. His approach to refreshed interpretation is founded in original manuscripts in German and Austrian archives and informed by modern performance theorists and a multicultural perspective. Dr. John’s major books address 18th-century German comedy and the comic figures Harlekin and Hanswurst, Goethe and Schiller’s collaboration on Egmont and, most recently, intercultural stagings of Goethe’s Faust I and II in the former East and West Germany, the U.S.A., the Philippines and India. It was on the Weimar National Theatre stage, under Goethe’s direction, that Schiller’s Maria Stuart premièred. Throughout his career Dr. John was also active in university administration and arts management. He chaired Waterloo’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies for 10 years and served eight years as Associate Dean of Arts, was founding Director of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies and, with John Hobday of the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation, was instrumental in the founding of the Waterloo Centre for Cultural Management. He also served as President of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German (CAUTG) and the Canadian Association of Arts Administration Educators. In 2012 he gratefully received the Hermann Boeschenstein Medal, the CAUTG’s highest honour. Dr. John and his wife, Kathryn, married for 40 years, have three children and two grandchildren.

Alexander Leggatt (Table Talk, Blithe Spirit)

Alexander Leggatt is professor emeritus of English at University College, University of Toronto, and a frequent contributor of program notes and table talks to the Stratford Festival. He took his BA at the University of Toronto in 1962 and did his graduate work in England at the Shakespeare Institute, leading to a PhD in 1965. From 1965 to his retirement in 2006 he taught English at the University of Toronto. He has written many books and articles on English drama, particularly the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His books include Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1974), Shakespeare’s Political Drama (1988), English Stage Comedy 1490-1990: Five Centuries of a Genre (1998) and Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Violation and Identity (2005). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (2002). He has given lectures and conference papers in several countries around the world. He has held the Guggenheim and Killam fellowships; in 1995 he was given an Outstanding Teaching Award by the University of Toronto Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and in 1998 the Faculty Award in the University of Toronto Faculty Association Awards of Excellence. In 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Graham Roebuck (Table Talk, Measure for Measure)

Professor emeritus at McMaster University, Graham Roebuck is a scholar of early modern literature, history and aspects of mathematics and science. He has taught and written on the “Golden Age” of English literature and historiography – the age of Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Jonson, Bacon, Clarendon and other writers and thinkers of that era of astonishing achievement in the humanities and nascent sciences. At the Stratford Festival he has presented Table Talks, foyer talks and program essays on a wide range of the drama produced on Stratford’s stages. As Director of the McMaster Stratford Seminars on Shakespeare and the Theatre, now in its 54th successive season, he conducts lectures and discussions among a gathering of people from varied backgrounds and locations, drawn together by love of theatre and the life of the mind that theatre fosters. In addition to presentations on Shakespeare’s plays, he has discussed works by Aeschylus, Beckett, Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw, Coward, Frayn, Goldsmith, Wycherley and Pinter, among others. A past President of the John Donne Society and of the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium, he organizes the John Donne Society’s participation in the Renaissance Society of America. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His work in progress is an edition of the poems and translations of Sidney Godolphin, who died in battle in the Civil Wars of the 1640s – renowned in his own time for his poetic, philosophical and political genius. An essay on Donne’s influence on the philosophy of the Anglican “Great Tew” circle that promoted religious toleration and liberal politics appears in The John Donne Journal, 2013.

Bill Rudman (Table Talk, Fiddler on the Roof)

Bill Rudman conceived and hosted The Musical Theater Project’s An Afternoon With Sheldon Harnick, the October 2012 concert that brought to Cleveland the celebrated lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! The founder and co-director of TMTP, Bill is a nationally recognized authority on the American musical. His radio program Footlight Parade is heard locally on WCLV 104.9 and coast-to-coast on 100 other public stations and Sirius XM Satellite Radio (under the title On the Aisle). He has created more than 40 concerts and cabarets for TMTP’s Song Is You! series and has produced recordings of classic American theatre and film songs featuring such vocalists as Peggy Lee and Maxine Sullivan. Bill’s current TMTP recording project, in collaboration with Harbinger Records, is a two-CD retrospective of Sheldon Harnick’s songs. Recent appearances include the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage and NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. This spring he spoke on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel at the Paley Center for Media in New York City. In 2000 Bill became the first recipient of the Robert Bergman Award for his work in arts education and community outreach.

Alan Somerset (Table Talk, The Merchant of Venice)

Alan Somerset is professor emeritus of English at Western University, where he specialized in Shakespeare and the theatre of his time. He created, and continues to maintain annually, the Jaques database, a catalogue-index to the productions and artists of the annual Stratford Festival seasons. This is available for consultation at the Archives and elsewhere through the Festival. He published this database, to 1990, as The Stratford Festival Story: A Catalogue-Index to the Stratford, Ontario Festival 1953-1990 (Greenwood Press, 1991). A sister project, Feste, undertaken by him at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre archives, continues to flourish and is available online. At the Stratford Festival, Dr. Somerset has served two terms on the Festival’s Board of Governors (1998 to 2004) and continues to serve as a member of its Archives and Education Committee. He has delivered numerous lectures to various audiences at Stratford, has written many house program notes and served as the Festival’s Visiting Scholar in 2006. He is the editor of Shropshire for Records of Early English Drama (University of Toronto Press, 1994, two volumes), as well as numerous articles, papers and reviews on early theatres, theatre history and Shakespeare. He is currently completing his edition of Staffordshire and Warwickshire for REED. From 1978 to 2009 he served as a member of the REED Executive Board, and he continues his involvement in its governance. Dr. Somerset continues to be engaged in creating, with Dr. Sally-Beth MacLean, the Patrons, Performances and Playing Places website (link.library.utoronto.ca/reed); this site has been available to the public for eight years.

Ann Wilson (Table Talk, Othello)

Ann Wilson is the Associate Dean, Academic in the College of Arts and a member of faculty in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Her academic work focuses on representations of gender and sexuality, with a particular focus on Canadian theatre and works produced in Edwardian England. Additionally, she has directed a number of productions in the Theatre Studies program at the University of Guelph, including Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Support for the inaugural season of
The Forum is generously provided by
Kelly and Michael Meighen

Connect with
Stratford

Stratford Shakespeare Festival