Once you’ve figure out how to make gold out of lead, you don’t just move on.
Metaphorically speaking, that’s the story behind New West’s newest theatre company: Alchemy Theatre.
The group launches its first production – Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – at the Bernie Legge Theatre in Queen’s Park Aug. 13.
Its eight founding members were first thrown together at that same venue this spring during a Vagabond Players production of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Governor General’s Award-winning comedy Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).
When the production wrapped up after a magical run, the cast just couldn’t bear to part.
“We wanted to make sure that we would all work together again,” said Karryn Ransom, who had played Constance Ledbelly, the play’s unlikely spinster heroine, “and the only way we could guarantee that is if we formed our own theatre company.”
To really sell Goodnight Desdemona – described by one critic as “Stratford-upon-Acid” – requires implicit trust among the performers, Ransom said.
That might have been one reason the actors in Vagabond’s production formed such a tight bond.
Another might have been the galvanizing experience of being shredded by an adjudicator at the Greater Vancouver Zone Festival in May.
“He hated our show,” Ransom said, “which we thought was bizarre because we’d had such a warm response from all the audiences.”
After the withering critique, cast member Boris Bilic, a 16-year-old high school student from Richmond, rallied the troupe with individual tributes and little plastic Oscar statuettes.
“We were all in tears,” Ransom said.
It was right about then the group decided to stay together by forming its own company.
Since Vagabond Players doesn’t put on a summer play, Alchemy will fill a niche with its inaugural production.
“They’re giving us the space, and they’re also financing it,” said Ransom, who has taken a break from acting and is producing the play. “It’s so cool that they’re doing that for us.”
Alchemy’s debut will be a pre-First World War, Downton Abbey-era version of Twelfth Night – a comedy of errors that centres on the mistaken identity of a pair of brother/sister twins separated by a shipwreck.
It’s a light and breezy beginning for the new company, but Ransom said the group has its sights set on edgier stuff in the future.
“The time is right,” Ransom said. “The demographics of New West are changing, and I think that this community is thirsty for theatre that pushes boundaries, not just your usual farces and murder mysteries. Those are great, but there’s got to be more on offer.”
If things go well this summer, Alchemy has its eye on Equus, a dark and controversial play written by Peter Shaffer in 1973 and revived in London’s West End in 2007, with Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe playing a young man who has a pathological religious fascination with horses.
The Bernie Legge Theatre won’t be the right space for that piece, Ransom said, and the company will be looking into opportunities at the new Anvil Centre and other venues around town.
Nudity in Equus will also likely keep Ransom – a French teacher at Burnaby’s St. Thomas More Collegiate – off the stage as well.
“I teach high school at a Catholic school,” she said with a laugh, “so, no, that’s not going to work.”
