This it a proper look outside the backstage window (there are actually three). Unfortunately, it’s not raining, though it did get cloudy and a bit foreboding.
The theatre sits at the bottom of another a large hill over which you can wander for hours without encountering much of anything. We don’t quite have the English tradition of walkabout in Canada, but you can pretty much walk from the theatre’s back door straight into wilderness. And unlike in England, in Canada, once you leave civilization, there are just vast expanses of forest for kilometres and kilometres, criss-crossed by narrow and deep-rutted logging tracks.
The woods are very different than any I’ve seen in Europe (except maybe Russia or Eastern Europe). Older, mossier, more alive but more foreboding. I’ve done a lot of hiking in a lot of different kinds of woods and you can go from elegant and stately old stands into tangled, twisted, and terrifying in an instant.