Theatre goes goblin mode

Although they star in an upcoming local production of the Scottish Play, goblin thespians Wug, Kragva and Moog left it to director Rebecca Northan to handle publicity and interviews.

Were they also scared to utter the real title — saying “Macbeth” inside a theatre is believed to be bad luck — aloud?

“The goblins don’t know anything about our superstitions,” says Northan, an actor-writer-improv artist who last season performed and directed Murder-on-the-Lake, an immersive murder-mystery, for the Shaw Festival.

Northan, who co-created Goblin:Macbeth with Bruce Horak and Ellis Lalonde, can’t speak for her folkloric co-workers, but says the Halloweenish trio were inspired to mount the show after being impressed by Shakespeare’s firm grasp on the realm of fantasy.

Northan started at Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre, studying under artistic director Keith Johnstone, who in 1967 founded the Time Machine, Britain’s first improvisational troupe, according to biographer Theresa Robbins Dudeck, who was made Johnstone’s literary executor in 2012, moving his archives to Stanford University after his death in 2023 at age 90.

Though Johnstone didn’t live to catch the Goblins on tour — which has included stops at the Stratford Festival — he saw a comedic production of Macbeth that Northan had produced at the Loose Moose in the mid-1990s.

“He loved it, and at the same time said, ‘This is exactly how Shakespeare should be done for young people,’” recalls Northan of the late improv innovator.

“We still use that edited version of Macbeth for the goblins,” she says, adding that it was from Johnstone, a favourite professor at the University of Calgary, that she learned “to take care of the audience as though they are your best house guests.”

The result for the touring company Spontaneous Productions has been that Goblin:Macbeth plays as a gleeful genre mashup, and an adoring send-up, of the complete works of two British-born polymaths — Shakespeare and Johnstone, who hailed from Devon, not Avon.

The idea for the goblins started with the mask, Northan says.

Impressed by the creative output of Baton Rouge, La.-based mask fabricator Composite Effects, Northan showed Spontaneous Theatre co-founder Bruce Horak some work by the Louisiana firm, which makes more than 100 masks they categorize as “undead.”

Those ones were the stuff of reasonable nightmares, but the silicone goblin masks — devious, horrible, but still flexible enough to convey the pitfalls and glory of dramatic human emotion — caught their eyes.

“I turned to Bruce, and it just popped out of my mouth: ‘Don’t you think this mask does Shakespeare?’ and Bruce looked at the picture and he went, ‘Well, yeah, obviously,’” says Northan.

Soon after uncovering the masks, Northan and Horak saw their price tag, and — hoping to develop a stage version of Hamlet starring goblins — they applied for, but didn’t receive, funding from the Canada Council for the Arts for the production.

In 2022, Calgary’s the Shakespeare Company needed a last-minute replacement for a two-person production of Macbeth that was sidelined in Quebec by COVID-19 diagnoses.

“And then my phone rang, and (the company was) like, ‘What have you got?’” Northan says.

The masks and the creatures beneath them take the stage at the Tom Hendry Warehouse Wednesday through Nov. 8, dressed in costumes designed by Philip Edwards.

After retiring from a career in IT consulting in 2019, Edwards moved to Stratford, Ont., where Northan took note of her neighbour’s impeccable tailoring.

“He made his own dress shirts and blue jeans,” says Northan, who knocked on his door to offer him his first professional costume design gig on the strength of his sketches.

According to his obituary, published after Edwards died by choice in May 2024, his “most recent accomplishment was to design and produce costumes for the Stratford production of Goblin:Macbeth.”

Asked to disclose the behind-the-mask names of the performers Wug, Kragva and Moog, Northan declined, stating the hidden-identity intent of their Goblin universe, which includes Goblin: Oedipus and will soon include Goblin: Christmas Carol.

“The original dream for us is we want to be the Daft Punk of classical theatre,” says Northan.

Something seriously silly this way comes.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com