‘Aren’t you sorry you forced me to learn English?” If that sounds more like The Tempest’s Caliban than anything in As You Like It – well, don’t expect Cree- and Lakota-heritage writer and performer Cliff Cardinal’s “radical retelling” to resemble the original. Instead, it features Cardinal himself, performing and deconstructing the kind of “land acknowledgment” with which public performances in North America are nowadays introduced. To Cardinal, the ritual is a vacuous apology in lieu of reparations or reversal of the original offence. But, if we’re in the acknowledgment game – well, there are plenty of other issues around Indigenous life, and the lives of those of us in the audience, that could use some acknowledging.
What follows bears scant similarity to Shakespeare, only a little to theatre, and slightly more to lecture-meets-standup; Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette leaps to mind. Like Nanette, Cardinal’s show majors in making its audience as uncomfortable as possible, as he arraigns us with Britain’s history of genocidal violence, the feebleness of our presumed allyship with oppressed groups – and, latterly, with the discovery of the remains of hundreds of Indigenous children at school sites around Canada. He prowls the stage, wired, angry, cracking bleak jokes, as one disgruntled festivalgoer after another makes for the exit.
