After marking 40 years of Shakespeare performances in Toronto’s largest park last year, Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park is back for the summer, this time with a timeless tale of life, death, and revenge—Hamlet. 

Dream in High Park continues to be an essential Toronto summer experience. Tucked away from the bustle of the city, theatre-goers come prepared to spend the evening under the stars, and watch a re-imagining of a classic Shakespeare play unfold.

This year is the second time ever that the iconic tragedy will be performed at Dream in High Park, and at the helm is Jessica Carmichael, the annual event’s first-ever Indigenous director. Based in Montreal, Carmichael attended Dream in High Park for the first time last year, and the experience left an impact. 

“I was absolutely enamoured by the audience,” she says. “People love to keep coming together. The gathering, the event of sitting down and sharing a story outdoors, being inside our world together, to listen to a story and to talk and eat, I think, is an incredible legacy that Canadian Stage has given to the city.”

Known for her work at the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, Carmichael was set on directing Hamlet for Dream in High Park, and was delighted when Canadian Stage accepted. Carmichael studied the play in school, but she began to understand it in a whole new light when she lost her younger sister to cancer a few years ago.

“It’s been a devastating loss. It’s rocked and changed my life in ways that I still have no way to explain…I’ve lost the one person that’s my best friend in my whole life, and I felt very misunderstood and judged. Suddenly I went, ‘Oh, that’s Hamlet.’ That’s exactly what Hamlet is going through. No space to grieve, in extraordinary circumstances.”

As Carmichael writes in her director’s note, Hamlet is a play that has always been steeped in grief. Shakespeare lost his 11-year-old son a few years before writing the play, and his father died the year Hamlet was written. This version of Hamlet hones in on the grief that runs through the story, especially in Hamlet (played by Qasim Khan) and Ophelia (Beck Lloyd), asking “What if grief had been given a chance?”

Carmichael tells us that she spent 8 months working on the script for this adaptation, cutting it down from its original 4-hour runtime, and including her own writing and other texts seamlessly woven into Shakespeare’s original dialogue. 

“In the world that we live in, especially North America where there’s a lot of grief illiteracy, there’s no space for people to grieve,” she says, adding in her statement that the play is for anyone who has felt abandoned while they were grieving. 

“I hope the audience takeaway is to go ‘How can I listen better? Have I been listened to? How would I like to be listened to? How can I make space for people to feel heard and valued?’’” 

As with any iteration of Dream in High Park, the environment is a vital component of the production. The High Park Amphitheatre stage is embedded into nature, and this production of Hamlet incorporates elements of the natural setting.

“We’re in the park—that’s another character. That is the character,” she says. “I’ve leaned into it with the designers, and the way I crafted the script. Nature can’t be stopped…the land will respond. That’s a huge piece of where we’re going with the vision of the show.”

With most of the shows this summer beginning at 8pm, as the sun sets, the story of Hamlet grows increasingly intense. Audiences are enveloped by the darkness and immersed in the tragedy unfolding before them. 

But before that, everyone gets to experience the joy of gathering together in an outdoor space under the summer sky, something that always feels a little magical. Blankets, pillows, and picnics are aplenty, and the atmosphere is always buzzing with excitement. Carmichael is thrilled to be part of this decades-long legacy. 

“People continue to return in generations, return in families. I saw that last year—young and old. There’s no better place to make theatre…what an audience to play to.”

‘Hamlet’ at Dream in High Park is running now until September 1. Tickets are available here.