Nestruck on Theatre: The case for more screens in Canadian theatres

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There was some wonder and amazement on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, last month when a user named Roz Chalmers shared images of a captioned performance of the Canadian play Kim’s Convenience in London, England.

At the performance in question, the dialogue of Ins Choi’s popular play set in a Toronto convenience store was displayed in English on one screen (hanging above an Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation sign) and Korean on another screen (hanging above a Toronto Blue Jays banner).

Why hadn’t this happened in Canada, asked some folk on social media, so that all Korean-Canadians could get a chance to watch and understand the Korean-Canadian phenomenon on stage?

As for me, I commented thusly: “If I were somehow in charge of all of Toronto theatre, the number one thing that I’d do would be caption as many shows as possible to bridge linguistic barriers. Regularly in Standard Chinese, Tagalog, Spanish and French (maybe Tamil too?) and then, show-specifically, others.”

Well, of course, shortly after I tweeted that, I noticed that many Toronto shows on stage at the moment are, in fact, employing captions or surtitles to increase access.

Earworm, a Nowadays Theatre production (and Globe and Mail Critic’s Pick), has just extended a week at Crow’s Theatre to March 3, adding several more performances in Farsi with English surtitles. (The show is performed in English at other performances.)

L’Amour telle une cathédrale ensevelie, a Franco-Haitian, opera-theatre-concert hybrid, is playing this week at the Fleck Dance Theatre in French and Creole with English surtitles for four performances from Feb. 22 to Feb. 25. The Nous Théâtre production is being presented by the Théâtre français de Toronto, which makes all of its shows accessible to English speakers in this way, in association with Crow’s Theatre.

And then there’s Luke Reece’s show As I Must Live It at Theatre Passe Muraille, which is performed in English and captioned in English for its entire run. This means, per TPM’s website, that “spoken dialogue and all elements of sound are projected onto a screen to enable access for audiences who are deaf and hard of hearing.”

What these accessibility measures all have in common is that they make performances understandable by the English-speaking majority in Toronto and the portion of it that is in the deaf and hard of hearing minority. But I continue to wish more theatres in the linguistically diverse city I inhabit used these technologies to reach beyond anglophones – with the goal of reaching out to both locals with other mother tongues and tourists visiting family in mind.

Theatres in Europe have long been very good at catering to these audiences. When I more regularly travelled overseas, I would often go to see surtitled performances of productions in languages I did not understand.

And European theatre has only got more accessible linguistically since those days as technology has advanced beyond surtitles on screens mounted above stages. Berlin’s Schaubühne, a favourite theatre company of mine, now not only offers performances with English, France and German surtitles that the whole audience can see, but additional performances with “mobile surtitles” you can read off your smartphones or borrowed devices in (this month) English, French, Croatian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese.

Obviously, it is not cheap to commission artful translations of texts, but even the modestly sized Factory Theatre did it last season, investing in a Tagalog translation for Filipino-Canadian playwright Marie Beath Badian’s romantic comedy The Waltz. That show is now on tour at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa, where you can catch a performance with projected surtitles in that language on Wednesday evening.

I was happy to learn that the Stratford Festival, the biggest not-for-profit theatre company in Canada, will make a rare foray into surtitles in a language other than English with its upcoming bilingual production of the new play Salesman in China, which is about Arthur Miller’s 1983 production of his play Death of a Salesman that he worked on with the Beijing People’s Art Theatre.

This new play by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy (with Chinese translations by Fang Zhang) will be presented in English and Mandarin – with surtitles in both of those languages. “The entire play will be translated, so when they speak English, the surtitles will be in Mandarin and when they speak Mandarin, they will be in English,” publicity director Ann Swerdfager tells me, nothing, however, that the exact details are still being worked out with the show that runs Aug. 3 to Oct. 26.

As real-time translation technology continues to improve, perhaps the day is not far off when you’ll be able to walk into a theatre and put on your live-captioning glasses to enjoy any show anywhere in the world in your language of choice. In the meantime, surtitles are the one type of screen I can get behind seeing more of in Canadian theatre.

What else is opening this week

– Aladdin last played Toronto in 2013 on its way to New York – and I had some notes for the Broadway-bound show. Now, the Disney show is back in town on tour (though March 17) courtesy of Mirvish and I’ll be checking it out on Wednesday to see if the creators of the hit production took any of my notes.

- The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon, a play by W.O. Mitchell that began live on the radio in 1951, is on stage at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary through March 10. This classic show is sort of a Damn Yankees –but with curling instead of baseball, and Lizzie Borden playing skip for the Devil. This new production directed by Christian Goutsis coincides with the Scotties Tournament of Hearts. Hurry hard, don’t walk to get tickets.