Kites and Shakespeare

Three weekends ago, we spent a wonderful Saturday afternoon at the annual Bard on the Beach festival in Vanier Park, Vancouver. This is one of Canada's largest Shakespeare festivals, held each summer from June through September and currently in its 20th year. There are four Shakespearean plays featured over the four months, held in two tents against a backdrop of mountains, sea and sky. This year's events are The Comedy of Errors, All's Well That Ends Well, Othello, and Richard II.

We went to see The Comedy of Errors with Shonna, Angharad, Juanita, Peter and Jolana. Ben and I arrived a couple of hours early to get in the queue, ready for when the doors would open 40 minutes before the performance (we had prebooked tickets but it's open seating). We ended up about third in line, so while Ben held our place I wandered over to the nearby 34th Annual British Columbia Kiteflyers' Association Festival and took some photos! Btw, the mountains in the background are the local ski fields where we went snowboarding and snowshoeing in winter...


Here are some photos of the Bard venue, and us reserving our seats 40 minutes before the show with the rest of the eager masses - this is an honesty system using sticky notes provided by festival volunteers! We were in the larger of the two tents, which has only 520 seats - the smaller venue has 240 seats. You can see the larger tent from the outside in the last photo below (right side). Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed the comedy and hope to go back for All's Well That Ends Well sometime. What a fantastic festival!!


PS. This is the 200th post on this blog!!