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The Theatre and Performance program is excited to announce that Tim Welham will be directing the fall production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. This will be Tim’s first time working with the program. 

A Midsummer Night's Dream is equal parts comedy and tragedy. It explores the deep recesses of human need, joy, passion, and desire. There are two distinct worlds in the play: the world of Athens, and the world of the Fairies. The story charts how these two worlds twist together during one memorable midsummer night.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a celebration of love, identity, possibilities and progressive empathetic values. In our production the story starts with a queer relationship in open defiance of a homophobic, patriarchal law, and after journeying into a magic forest of dreams, ends in a triple wedding, full of joy, laughter, forgiveness and revelry. In an increasingly polarized world, a fever dream of magic fairies, young lovers and warrior queens feels like much-needed medicine to our troubled times.

The play opens with Duke Theseus of Athens planning a wedding to his captured war bride, Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons. They are interrupted when Egeus, a nobleman, proclaims that his daughter Hermia cannot marry the woman she is in love with, but must instead fulfill an arranged marriage to Demetrius, a man of Egeus’ choosing. The audience is immediately presented with the homophobic, patriarchal society of Athenian nobles, in which women are prizes and possessions passed between men. When Hermia dares to challenge the patriarchy, demanding agency over her life, she is threatened with exile or death.

After Hermia and Lysandra flee Athens to escape being persecuted for their love, we enter the fairy world, where gender and sexuality are explored freely and without judgement. The Fairy Queen Titania, under Fairy King Oberon’s love spell, falls in love with Nikki Bottom, an Athenian commoner. The story contrasts Lysandra and Hermia’s chaste and innocent relationship with Nikki Bottom and Titania’s sensual and passionate affair. Highlighting these two relationships poses questions of agency, discrimination and bias to the audience, and forms the thematic bedrock of the production.

Meanwhile, the amateur acting troupe of Athenian commoners, led by stage manager Patty Quince and featuring Bottom, Flute, Snout and Snug, meet in the forest to rehearse Pyramus and Thisbe as a wedding gift for Theseus and Hippolyta. These characters are the heart of the production, and their genuine, overenthusiastic attempt at putting on a play teaches the young Athenians what it means to love, and to be in service to another human being.

Tim is currently the Text Coach at the for the 2025 season, where he has served for the past seven seasons. He is currently focusing on the productions of As You Like It, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Sense and Sensibility, Dangerous Liaisons and Ransacking Troy.

When not at the festival, he teaches Shakespeare at the in Montréal and works with their graduating students on audition preparation. He has also taught through the Stratford Festival's Education Department, and for the Birmingham Conservatory, Windsor, Western, À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ, Guelph, Toronto Metropolitan and Brock Universities, Centaur Theatre, and the NTS DramaFest.
As a director, selected credits include:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard III (TMU / Ryerson School of Performance)
• By a Thread (Buddies in Bad Times Cabaret)
• The Tempest (Hoax Theatre, UK)

Tim holds an MA from the Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, and a BFA from Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly Ryerson Theatre School. 

Auditions for the fall show will take place September 3rd, 4th and 5th.