The Star asked writer/director Ravi Jain, whose acclaimed adaptation of Salt-Water Moon returns to the stage this week, to explain the “rules” of revising classic theatre for a modern audience.

Classic plays are universal. They transcend time, language, borders and cultures. At the core of a classic is a central question that addresses fundamental reflections on who we are as humans.

Classics have been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve just directed an adaptation of Hamlet with my company Why Not Theatre, I will be directing an adaptation of The Cherry Orchard at the Shaw Festival next year, and I’m currently remounting the Canadian classic Salt-Water Moon, which I directed for Factory Theatre and is now part of the Off-Mirvish season. It opens Tuesday at the Panasonic Theatre.

I’ve come to understand that classics often carry the baggage of their own history. They bring with them expectations, memories and even the story of the story itself — Oh, Olivier’s Hamlet was spellbinding! There will never be another like it. Without knowing it, when watching a new production of a classic, many artists and audiences who have seen earlier versions seek the carbon copy of what they remember, like revisiting a museum over the years to view an artifact that’s been preserved over time. These individuals have assumptions about the way a classic should be done, and the success of a new director’s interpretation is measured by valuing tradition over invention.

Then there are the people who are free from those traditions, for whom the story can be new: the contemporary audience who, like me, didn’t grow up going to the theatre. It wasn’t until later in my life, when theatre became a passion, that I came to spend many years learning the “rules” of classics in mostly Eurocentric training institutions. At the same time, a vast part of my training was in devising contemporary theatre and the exploration of new forms to engage audiences, like putting my mother onstage with me in A Brimful of Asha.

I feel like my job as a director is to be the bridge between these two audiences — honouring traditions of the past while envisioning possibilities for a new future.

Directors who interpret the classics often rely on an idea of realism, where the time and place of a story needs to be obeyed, and where casting, costumes and sets must be authentic to this time and place. For so long this way of thinking has limited who gets to tell stories and how we tell them. Yet the heart of the theatre is imagination and when let loose, it can make both the old and the new experience something together as if for the first time.

With Why Not Theatre’s Prince Hamlet, I cast actors in a way that defied convention. Men played women, women played men, race didn’t matter and Hamlet was played by a woman, Christine Horne. Horatio was the central character of the play, and was played by Dawn Jani Birley, a deaf actress, who won a Toronto Theatre Critics Award for the role.

By changing the perspective of the storyteller we were able to break expectations, discover new aspects of the story and contemporize it — without changing the story itself. The play was made new through the voices who spoke, or signed, for both the uninitiated as well as for the owner of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

For Salt-Water Moon by David French, a beloved Canadian story rooted deeply in the history of Newfoundland and its culture, I stripped the play down to its essence: two lovers under a star-filled sky. There was no wooden porch or yellow dress, no props to speak of — just two actors in modern clothes living out a story taking place 100 years ago.

As a nod to east coast storytelling traditions, I opted to add a narrator/singer, who read French’s beautiful stage directions and played the music that accompanied the story. The production is a playful conversation between past and present, one with the utmost respect for the story’s history and who it represents. With a cast of two actors of colour, the production offers an audience the chance to reflect on a different perspective of what it means to be Canadian today, amplifying the play’s universality and ability to be as relevant now as it was back then.

The theatre is about right now. It should speak directly to the heart of what we are feeling and questioning about the world we are sitting in while we experience it. It is always contemporary. It must be. When adapting a classic, we need to know the traditions and history but we must also be fearless in breaking convention in search of the contemporary relevance. An irreverent reverence for the text and traditions is the paradox you just have to sit in.

Not everyone will like what you do, and not everyone will agree, but when you do it right, you not only reveal something deeper about the play but, more importantly, you reveal something deeper about the audience themselves.