After captivating audiences as Anne Shirley in her triumphant Stratford Festival debut last season, Caroline Toal is portraying another feisty heroine in another iconic venue. She is Viola in Canadian Stage’s production of Twelfth Night, directed by Gregory Prest in the Dream in High Park.
For Toal, this has meant stepping outside of her comfort zone. The Toronto-based, two-time Dora Award-winning actor has built her career originating roles in plays of more recent and Canadian vintage. “Most of my work has been new works” with companies such as Young People’s Theatre and The Howland Company, she acknowledges. In them, she is known for delivering dynamic, physically expressive, and emotionally vivid performances.
Despite a long string of critical and popular acclaim (Anne of Green Gables enjoyed such sold-out success that it was extended well past the scheduled season) Toal’s demeanour is warm, reflective and humble. Although she previously stepped in at short notice to play Bianca in Shakespeare BASH’d’s The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night feels like her first true immersion: The Taming of the Shrew “was quite fast, and I didn’t really know what I was doing, to be honest. So this feels like my first Shakespeare.”
And the challenge has proven invigorating: “It’s been really fun to work with the language… to learn how to work with the poetry of Shakespeare. That’s been rewarding and exciting.”
Becoming Viola
The Shakespearean comedy begins when Viola (Toal) survives a shipwreck and believes her twin brother Sebastian (Navtej Sandhu) has drowned. Disguising herself as the young man Cesario, she enters the service of Duke Orsino (Farhang Ghajar), who sends her to court the grieving Olivia (Ghazal Azarbad) on his behalf. Olivia falls for Cesario, while Viola secretly falls in love with Orsino. When Sebastian unexpectedly arrives in Illyria, mistaken identities multiply, drawing in Sir Toby Belch (Rick Roberts), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Mike Shara), Maria (Alicia Barban), Malvolio (Steven Sutcliffe), Feste (Ori Black), Antonio (Justin Otto), Curio (Ray Jacildo) and Valentine (Deivan Steele) … before the play resolves in joyous comic confusion.
Viola has long fascinated scholars as a heroine whose disguise transforms how the world sees her, without fundamentally changing who she is. Toal found her way into that paradox through what she calls Viola’s “open heart.” When Toal was cast, her Shakespeare-loving friends enthused “you are “Viola!” Rather than simply take it as a compliment, she wondered what they meant and how she truly connected to such an iconic character.
Active study and reflection led her to the quality she now sees at Viola’s core: “My way into her is through her open heart. The character of Viola…she’s so open-hearted. She leads from her heart, and I like to think—hopefully—that I do, too.” That quality, Toal observes, feels important: “In the world we live in today… what I’m trying to focus on, to keep hope, is ‘Where is the love?’” And the answer, accessible only to the openhearted, is that “the love is in all different forms”.
Disguise and emotional truth
This insight shapes how Toal approaches Viola’s disguise as Cesario. Rather than just a comic device, she views it as both protection and liberation: “When she dresses as Cesario, she’s able to experience the world in a different way. She’s able to be freer in what she says and how she acts.”
This resonates personally: “My true self is a very soft person. I’m very sensitive, and in my life, I’ve had to not always have that at the forefront, in order to not get hurt, or to protect myself. In a way, her dressing as a man is the same thing.” Yet the disguise also creates an unexpected paradox: “It’s also weirdly freeing for her. She gets to speak freely and tell her truth… Although she’s dressed as a man, she gets to be herself more, and people fall in love with her.” Toal believes this tension—of “hiding a part of yourself, but then in some way, through the hiding, things are revealed”—lies at the heart of the play. “It’s something I’m still working through with the character, and it’s very interesting.”
It’s also central to Prest’s production. Toal loves that the actors are earnestly exploring the emotional truth of Viola’s predicament: “Viola begins the play believing Sebastian is dead, before falling in love with someone she cannot honestly tell how she feels. My character is deeply upset. We are really working with the reality of that depth of love and the pain it causes.”
The comedy remains, of course, but its roots are the genuine human feeling of loss: “I’m excited for people to see our production because of the grounding of that, too.”
Anne, Viola and Shakespeare in 2026
That search for—and expression of—emotional truth is something audiences who admired Toal’s Anne Shirley will recognize in her Viola. While Anne and Viola are separated by centuries, Toal discovered unexpected connections between the two iconic heroines: “[Viola’s] extremely resilient and hopeful and very, very whip-smart. So in that respect, she feels like a grown up Anne, who’s a little more grounded.”
But where Anne taught Toal to trust her character completely, Shakespeare’s Viola and has challenged her in a new, more self-conscious way: “I hope I’m good!” she smiles.
Toal believes Shakespeare’s greatest gift was his understanding of human nature. “Shakespeare plays are performed again and again because he writes about the most basic human emotions.” For this production, the focus is love in all its forms: “We’re focussing on all the ways love makes you feel (for lack of a better term) absolutely crazy. That’s universal from 400 years ago until now, and I think it’s the reason the play feels so timely … because it really is!”
But Twelfth Night, she notes, is not exclusively interested in romance. “We see all different forms of love: the love between brother and sister, the loss of thinking someone you love is gone, the kind of infatuation that makes you do insane things, and the love of friendship. Even with Toby and Aguecheek, although it’s very funny, you also see the love between them as friends.” That, she believes, is why the play “will always be timeless.”
As it happens, Toal will soon be spending more quality time with Shakespeare—in revisionist form. Following Twelfth Night, she will reunite with Mike Shara in Canadian Stage’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), before shifting gears once again in the dark comedy Jackpot Twins, a co-production between Mirvish and Company Theatre. “I’m really excited about that,” she grins. But that is a while away, and for now, the Dream and its “incredibly talented” cast remain at the top of her mind.
“It’s wild,” she enthuses. “I’m really excited for people to see this production at the hands of Gregory and all our designers and all the incredible people who work on it, because I think this production has a lot of integrity. And I hope people enjoy it as much as I’m enjoying being a part of it.”
Twelfth Night runs until September 6, 2026 at the High Park Amphitheatre. Tickets and additional information are available through canadianstage.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
