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It’s a Canadian moment that many people will remember: Princess Diana visiting AIDS patients at the Casey House in Toronto in 1991.
Thirty years later, that visit has been given a theatrical treatment in the form of Casey and Diana. The play debuted back in 2023 at the Stratford Festival in 2023, and now, it will grace the John Hirsch Mainstage at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre starting this week.
For any actor, stepping into the shoes of Princess Diana is a tall order, with performances on the large and small screen dominating the cultural memory. That was a pressure that Winnipeg’s Catherine Wreford felt when she was cast in the RMTC’s production.
“I was not wanting to take it at first because it was so iconic,” she remembered in an interview on Morning Light.
Ultimately, it was her family that made Wreford decide to the take the role. “I wanted to tell this story of how much I connect to Princess Diana’s story.”
That connection exists in multiple ways for Wreford, who, among other theatre credits won The Amazing Race Canada alongside fellow performer Craig Ramsay a couple of years ago. Like many Canadians, she can connect to the exact moment in time in 1997 when she found out that Diana had been killed in a car crash.
“We were listening to the news and like, everybody was just crying and bawling,” she recalls. “I just remember like, this was the beginning of an era of awful things, but also new things. It was quite crazy.”
After being cast in Casey and Diana, which the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-produced with Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius, Wreford dove into researching Diana more fully to bring her truest version of the character to life. The more she did that research, the more she saw the similarities between herself and Diana.
“I’ve had a lot of the same experiences as she had,” Wreford explains. “I was engaged to Jeff Goldblum, so being high up and having to like, have somebody dress me... I understand where she’s coming from and frustrated because she just wants to do it herself and, you know, having to sit properly and having to eat properly and dress properly... that, for me, was like, that comes up in the show.”
The other part of Wreford’s life where she finds common ground with Casey and Diana is her own experience with terminal illness. Diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor back in 2013, Wreford has long outlived her two-to-six-year prognosis. As she portrays Princess Diana holding the hands of AIDS patients who at the time were only given a 9-month prognosis, she draws on her own journey. “I’ve been there holding people’s hands when they’ve died... it’s not shocking to me to just hold their hand and listen.”
Without her own experience with terminal illness, Wreford doesn’t know if she could have taken on such an iconic character. “I mean, I could try,” she says, “but I don’t think I would even have auditioned for it at all if I hadn’t been through this.”
“I also want to do more telling of this kind of story, of like stories of AIDS or cancer or these things that are hard to talk about so people can actually talk about it. Nobody talks about AIDS anymore – it’s still here! It’s still in Winnipeg, it’s still in Manitoba. We need to talk about it, we need to bring it up. Same with cancer – especially brain cancer. It needs research, it needs money. So, I want to do more stories about that.”
Audiences can see the story of Casey and Diana at the John Hirsch Mainstage of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre starting on March 20 and running until April 12. For tickets and more information, visit the RMTC’s website.