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written and directed by Kat Sandler

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford

May 31-November 16, 2025

“How sadly things had changed since she had sat there the night after coming home!” (Anne of Green Gables, Ch. XXXVIII)

The Stratford Festival is presenting the world premiere of a new non-musical stage adaptation of Anne of Green Gables written and directed by Kat Sandler. Even though there is already a long list of fine stage adaptations of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 novel, the Stratford Festival commissioned this new adaptation, and Sandler seems to have taken the idea of “newness” as her guiding principle.

Most parents who take their children to see the play which is part of the Schulich Children’s Plays series will want to introduce them to one of their favourite children’s stories. Most children who have read the book will simply want to see the story embodied on stage. Sandler’s adaptation is likely to frustrate both parents and children. Rather than telling Montgomery’s story in a straightforward manner, Sandler has loaded her adaptation not just with one, but two, conceits sure to confuse and annoy both young and old.

Sandler’s first conceit is to begin the play as if it were going to be a reading for a book club. Actor Maev Beaty, dressed in a late 19th-century gown, acts as the fussy head of a modern-day book club. As we getting settled before the show, she consults with Josue Laboucane, dressed as a stage manager, about the set decorations. The plan of the book club leader is simply to sit in a chair and read Montgomery’s book to the audience. (There’s no reason she would need a stage manager for such a thing.) Soon five other people join the leader and the stage manager on stage and object to the idea of simply reading the book. They want to imagine the story happening before their eyes, so they squeeze their eyes shut and clench their fists and suddenly Green Gables, Marilla, Matthew and Anne appear.

Throughout the rest of the show this group of seven onstage Anne fans act as narrators to the story and participate in it. Beaty, for example, plays the role of Rachel Lynde, Stephen Hao plays a horse and Jane Andrews while Laboucane plays Moody Spurgeon and Mr. Phillips among characters. Sandler’s notion is that the group of Anne fans gets so involved in the story that they are literally drawn into it. Yet, since they also narrate the action, the group is not fully drawn into the story since they can also see it from the outside.

Given Sandler’s confused view of the chorus, it would be far better simply to begin the show as in David Edgar’s famous adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby (1980), with a troupe of actors who set out to tell their story as effectively as possible, everyone narrating or acting as necessary. What makes Sandler’s chorus annoying is that she spends too much time trying to draw humour from the chorus itself rather than simply focussing on the story. Do we need to know that one of the seven, supposedly a member of the audience, is trying to keep up with reading the novel while he is also acting and narrating? Sandler thinks disputes between chorus members over how to play a scene are funny, but they are merely distracting. Beside all of this, Sandler’s setting up of the book-club-turns-performance scenario takes so long we wonder when the play about Anne of Green Gables is ever going to start.

If saddling the children’s story with this first conceit were not enough, Sandler adds a second conceit in Act 2. One of the chorus members wonders what Anne’s story would be like if it happened in the present. Then, over the objections of the book club leader (and how exactly is that possible?), the old furniture and appliances of the Cuthbert household are replaced with modern ones. Designer Joanna Yu now dresses Marilla and Anne in jeans and shirts.

This updating negatively affects the story in several ways. For one it makes the story less believable. Anne applies for and receives a scholarship to Oxford University in England, not Redmond College in Nova Scotia. For someone who has studied in a one-room school in small-town PEI for only a few years to win a scholarship to go to Oxford is too improbable. Through Act 1, Anne had dreamed of having a dress with puffed sleeves to wear. Later, Matthew endures the embarrassment of buying just such a dress to please Anne. The trouble is that by the time Sandler has Matthew buy the dress such clothing is more than 100 years out of date.

What will grate most on fans of the novel is Sandler’s having Diana confess to Anne that she not only loves her but is in love with her in terms of sexual attraction. The first point is that Sandler’s invention goes contrary to the facts of the Anne novels. Diana and Anne may have sworn “eternal friendship”, but anyone who knows Anne of Avonlea (1909), the first sequel to Anne of Green Gables, will know that when Anne spies Diana holding hands with Fred Wright, she realizes “Diana and Fred are in love with each other, … Oh, it does seem so . . . so . . . so hopelessly grown up”. The second point is that not every close relationship between friends has to be sexualized to be “modern”. The novel celebrates the bond of sisterhood that Anne and Diana create for themselves, an idea that is already modern for its time.

Indeed, the main issue with trying to see what Anne would be like in the present is that it goes contrary to the entire point of the novel. Anne, who grew up without parents or friends, finds both. Montgomery shows that Anne, Marilla and Matthew gradually become a family despite Anne’s not being related to them. Anne becomes sisters with Diana despite not being related. Redefining what a family is and what a woman can do in 1908 is a sign of the novel’s modernity. To reset the novel in the present is to diminish how unconventional the novel really is.

The changes Sandler has made will certainly not endear anyone to her new adaptation. What works to counteract the effect of Sandler’s changes are the universally praiseworthy performances of the entire cast. Chief among them are Caroline Toal as Anne, Sarah Dodd as Marilla and Tim Campbell as Matthew. Toal successfully depicts Anne’s changes as Anne progresses from 11 to 16 years old. Boisterous volubility gradually gives way to serious reflection. Dodd is excellent as the stern, practical Marilla, whose outward severity hides a slowly growing affection for Anne. Campbell is a wonderfully warm Matthew, whose taciturnity conceals his immediate liking for a girl who is so much his opposite. Campbell is so good at showing how Anne helps to bring Matthew out of himself that Matthew’s death is the most moving scene in the play.

Maev Beaty does well both as the comically befuddled book club leader and as the Cuthberts’ prejudiced neighbour Rachel Lynde. It is a pleasure when Beaty’s Rachel finally comes around to realizing what a positive influence Anne has been. Julie Lumsden is an enthusiastic Diana Barry and steadfast supporter of Anne through Anne’s various trials. Sandler is unfortunately not very interested in Gilbert Blythe so that Jordin Hall does not have much to work with in portraying him. In Sandler’s version Gilbert comes across more strongly as a boy who is smitten with Anne than as Anne’s intellectual rival in school. Sandler further diminishes Gilbert’s role by omitting any mention that Gilbert gives up his teaching post in Avonlea so that Anne can have it and thus be closer to Marilla.

Sandler ends her version with Anne looking out at the sunset from her room at Green Gables under the east [sic] gable, wondering what the future will bring. While this is meant to be poignant, it is fitting that such a confusion over direction should end an adaptation that ignores the fact that Montgomery’s story needs no updating. The tale of an unconventional girl transforming the lives of those around her for the better is already modern, which is why it has inspired readers for more than a century. Sandler’s adaptation will inspire no one, except, perhaps, to reread the novel and recapture the magic of Montgomery’s work so absent on stage.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Sarah Dodd as Marilla, Tim Cambell as Matthew and Caroline Toal as Anne, © 2025 David Hou; Tim Cambell as Matthew, Caroline Toal as Anne and Sarah Dodd as Marilla, © 2025 Ted Belton; Julie Lumsden as Diana and Caroline Toal as Anne, © 2025 David Hou; Josue Laboucane as Mr. Phillips, Jordin Hall as Gilbert, Caroline Toal as Anne and Stephen Hao as Jane Andrews, © 2025 David Hou.   

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca