We went to parties of which there seemed to be many. Not only were sexual relations between staff and students not frowned upon, they were public. It was not uncommon for a faculty member at a party to be seen on the dance floor in a full French kiss with a student. We didn’t think this odd at the time. What I did find odd was the gay men who might also be seen in a full French kiss. Some of them, like Bill Gaskill, were the new hot directors and writers of the British theatre. The English didn’t seem to find this odd, just hick Canadians like me. Homosexuals in Canada were still fingering the doorknob on the inside of the closet; here they had kicked it open. It was the beginning of the Sixties.
The rehearsal class was the core of the training in most theatre schools at the time; classes in voice, movement, improvisation, and other technical areas would be in the morning, and the afternoon would be given to the rehearsal of a play or portion of a play. Dedicated to the classics as our program was, we rehearsed three Shakespeares, one Chekhov, one Restoration Comedy, and a verse play by Christopher Fry.
Our second rehearsal class was Much Ado About Nothing directed by Hugh Cruttwell, who would later go on to be principal of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). I was cast as Balthazar who has to sing. When I protested that I couldn’t sing, couldn’t carry a tune, both Kristin and the singing teacher, John Dalby, insisted that I could. I just had to get out of my own way and let my natural instincts function. I wasn’t tone deaf they insisted, it is just that for lack of confidence. I tried to think my way on to a note instead of allowing the vocal response to happen naturally. Of course, they were right in their analysis. There was nothing wrong with my ear, but ever since my difficulty with ‘that tenor part’ in Ten Nights in a Barroom I had avoided singing almost as much as dancing. And yet I had sung in the school choir before my voice broke. In any event Dalby worked with me very patiently until, my goodness, I could actually sing on key. Or at least I could when alone in a classroom with just the singing teacher and when standing right beside the piano. I even managed fairly well at our final rehearsal before we moved into the theatre to present the play to the other students.
Only the other students in the school were invited, but of course they were the most terrifying audience of all. Any group of strangers would be far less intimidating. When we came to my song I could barely hear the piano; it was actually at the back of the theatre so the audience could hear it better than I. Well, I may have come within an octave of the right notes, but I doubt I was much closer. And soon what little sound the piano was making was drowned by the laughter of the students. Finally the song finished to an embarrassing round of applause. Don Pedro compliments Balthazar to which he replies modestly, “And an ill singer, my lord.” At that point the audience fell off their chairs. To this day I avoid singing at all costs, even the national anthem.
Another rehearsal class was Chekhov’s The Three Sisters directed by the acclaimed actress Catherine Lacey. Once the piece was blocked, she said very little to us, but listened to every moment with penetrating intensity. While the character of Vershinin suited me well with his passion for philosophizing, his bad marriage, and his love for an unattainable woman, I suspect I was somewhat mannered and a bit stiff if I were to go back and see the work now. Still, we were pleased with the emotional life we were able to create and taken aback when Norman’s end of show criticism began with “Why did you wear your hearts on your sleeve?” I’ve seen several student productions of The Three Sisters since and seen a lot of hearts on a lot of sleeves. It would be another few years before I had a better idea of how Chekhov should be played.
Following The Three Sisters we finally got to work with Michael Warre. Another misfit, Michael was a superb teaching director. He had been a rising star at the Old Vic, but had been shunted aside. “Be careful of alcohol,” he said, “or you could end up teaching at a drama school.” However he got to LAMDA, we were lucky to get him. He directed us in an obscure Restoration comedy by Thomas Otway called A Soldier’s Fortune. I played the ninety-year-old Sir Davey Dunce who has locked up his young wife so no other men can get to her, a common theme in Restoration comedy. Well, I thought I was pretty hot stuff. I put on my old man’s voice and staggered about the stage for about two weeks when Michael told me to throw it all away. Just do what the character does and forget about how he looks and sounds. ‘You have to be kidding,’ I thought. After all, the character was nearly seventy years older than I. But to my amazement I found that when I did all the things the character did, locking up and protecting his young wife, I became old. I didn’t have to act old. If you do what an old person does you will be old — a lesson that has stayed with me to this day.
Meanwhile I would sit in class and watch Michael MacOwan rehearse Shakespeare scenes. One day he was on form. Each time a scene was presented he found the exact thing to fix it — to bring the scene truly to life. At one point he noticed my watching and, knowing that I was a director, came over and explained to me that I should not do with professional actors what he was doing here with students. Students want to learn new ways of working, whereas professional actors have developed a way of working over the years and challenging their methods can be threatening. I nodded wisely, but was not to remain so wise when I got to the Chesterfield Rep the next year.
A short, nervous man, smoking feverishly as we all did, Michael’s eyes were not windows to his soul, they were wide open doors. His talent was also his curse. He couldn’t hide his emotions; the best he could do was soften them with drink. But when he was, in his term, “on form,” his emotional clarity was inspiring. And while I had met his wife and gone to his home once, I don’t think his wife ever came to the school. I remember his regretting one time that he was not paying her enough attention. I don’t recall whether this was around the time that he felt he needed to explain that he was not in love with a woman we had been discussing, he “was in love with someone else.” By the way he phrased it, I assumed he was not referring to his wife.
Michael introduced us to John Vivyan, a writer whose work on Shakespeare seems to have faded to black. How does this happen? How can work of such insight and scope be discarded by the artistic and academic communities? Vivyan’s central thesis was that Shakespeare has a consistent ethic that runs through all his plays; he even showed how the structure of Shakespeare’s argument or story developed through the five acts turning the play to tragedy or comedy. My, what would Robert McKee or Linda Seger say about that, these screenplay experts on dramatic story who insist that all drama is three acts, even Shakespeare? But to oversimplify Vivyan’s argument, each play was either a comedy, when the protagonist would eventually do something positive, a tragedy when they would do something negative, or a mercy play where the protagonist who had done something negative would redeem himself and be forgiven — The Winter’s Tale, for instance. The tragic action generally involves resorting to violence in the pursuit of the protagonist’s goal. Macbeth kills Duncan; Brutus kills Caesar. Most of the plays, leaving aside the histories, follow one of these patterns. The interesting apparent exception is Hamlet. We are often told Hamlet is a play about a man who can’t make up his mind. Olivier himself makes this point. If so, then Vivyan’s thesis is in difficulty. In no other play is indecision given such moral force. Sure, Henry VI and Richard II are challenged by indecision, but these are not thought of as tragic flaws. But I guess the argument is that when put in a position where action is required, it is tragic if you cannot take action, if you are Chamberlain instead of Churchill. But there is another way to look at Hamlet, and that is that the tragedy is that he does — finally — make up his mind. He does kill Claudius and like all other Shakespeare tragedies he comes to a bad end for so doing. Looked at in this way, Hamlet is a play about what a character does before he commits the tragic act; Macbeth is mainly about what happens after the tragic act, while Julius Caesar, placing the act in the middle, shows the arc from each side.
We ended the year doing Christopher Fry’s The Firstborn. We w
ere thrilled when the famous author himself came to talk to us. We had been puzzled by many things in the play. Surely he would have the answers. Well, no, actually. Every time we asked him something he would say something like ‘maybe,’ or ‘perhaps,’ or ‘it could be.’ Clearly the characters had risen unbidden in his imagination and he was as innocent of their motives as we were.
In retrospect many things are remarkable about this seminal year in my artistic life. I was exposed to an amazing array of talent, both inside the school and out. Some principles have stayed with me for decades: the natural voice, the search for reality and spontaneity, the use of verse in the service of the actor, the playing of actions as a means to develop character, and likely others buried deep in my subconscious. But when one looks back on those schools now, particularly after spending some time years later auditing programs in New York, there seems to be one curious omission. We were never taught how to act. There were no classes in acting. A North American scene study class is structured in such a way as to demonstrate principles and methods of acting on a regular basis. A scene is presented to the class and analyzed by the instructor. Students might even take notes. We did nothing of the kind at LAMDA. All we did was act and if we ran into difficulty we were coached; we were helped to work through our unique needs and problems. We were not taught general principles of acting. If our character was not required for a particular rehearsal, we worked on our own; we didn’t sit and watch other students being coached. Yes, voice and movement teachers would come into rehearsal from time to time to assist in the application of their work to the playing of character, but still there were no lessons as such. The work was largely individual. Which system is better? Well, looked at in one way, can you imagine a hockey camp where two players take a turn on the ice while the other players sit and watch, after which the coach gives a lecture on the merits of the two players on the ice? Some of the difference between LAMDA and, say, the HB Studio in New York was pedagogical, but some was likely financial. The American schools had to find a way to interest larger classes in shorter time spans.
But before completing my year I had two further things to attend to. I had to find something to do in the coming autumn and I had to do another season of summer stock in Ontario. I had really thought that whatever I did in the fall would be in Canada, but, what the heck, while I was here in England why not see if anyone would like to hire me. In 1961 I needed no visas or other papers to work in England. My Canadian passport was sufficient; I was a British subject. I could even vote. The British rep system was in full force at this time and it would be for another decade or so before Margaret Thatcher would wreak havoc on the entire British way of life. And so with help from Carolyn who could type far better than I — ah, the days of one’s female partner typing for one have long passed — we wrote forty letters, one to every rep company in the country. I got ten replies, four interviews, and one job. In September I would join the Civic Theatre Company in Chesterfield as Associate Director. And during the Easter break from LAMDA I returned to Canada to prepare, although I didn’t know it at the time, what would turn out to be our last season of the Straw Hat Players.
The Last Season
Why the last season? It could have been because both Karl and I were becoming increasingly occupied in other areas, me in England and Karl in law school. Karl went on to have a successful law practice and become a Toronto City Councillor, and as we all know I went on to smoke cigarettes for a living. But in 1961 we were still committed to the Straw Hat Players. Other factors would conspire against the future of the company.
Oddly, Karl has no recollection of one incident which I vividly remember, or so I believe; perhaps I imagined it. Shortly after my return from England, Karl and I were sitting in the coffee shop across from the theatre in Port Carling. It was a lovely summer day and Karl was giving me an upbeat assessment of the season so far when, surprisingly, the bank manager spied us and sat down to join us. Small town folk tend to be friendly, but shouldn’t the bank manager be in the bank on a business day? After a few pleasantries he asked, “What plans do you have for your overdraft?” We were both stunned. I have no idea how we answered since neither of us had any idea that we had an overdraft. It appeared that our Business Manager had fallen behind in his bookkeeping and had not informed Karl that we were about $5,000 in the hole (about $35,000 in today’s dollars).
Karl may not remember this incident, but he does remember that we had to lean on personal resources, my father in my case, to get us out of this difficulty. And perhaps that led to his decision at the end of the season to leave the company, although he gave me another reason at the time, a reason that still scratches my thin skin when I think of it. As I have said Karl was away for the second half of the season. He was back in time to see our final play in Peterborough, my production of The Fourposter with Nancy Kerr and Timothy Findley. Despite some obstacles we had in mounting the production, wet paint on the floor on opening night and Tiff’s problems with lines, I was very proud of the show by the time Karl saw it at the end of the run. A few days later we met to discuss the future and confirm his plan to leave the company. Why? As he put it, he was tired of productions not living up to his expectations. And I had so thought he would have loved that production. Of course I never let on that I was upset or even surprised by his reaction and we continued our plans for me to become the sole producer. Karl insists now, probably rightly, that his difficulty was not my production of that play in particular, which was likely fine, but the continued compromises required of a company such as ours at that time, relying as we were on box office alone. Subsidy for the arts in Canada was still a few years in the future.
Speaking of lines, I will make a vain plea at this point for the return of the prompter. At some point in the sixties and seventies, the stage manager abandoned his/her traditional place in the wings stage left, or as the English still call it ‘prompt side,’ and moved to a booth at the back of the auditorium. Earlier, many lighting boards, along with their operators, had moved to the back of the theatre, a sensible move as it is a significant advantage for the lighting operator to have a good view of the stage. But soon after, the stage manager joined the board operator at the back. Was that a good idea? I remain to be convinced. How can you “manage the stage” when you are nowhere near it? Surely the move has added to costs, particularly in small theatres, where additional onstage personnel are required when their work could have been handled by an onstage stage manager. Further, we have restricted that staff from ever appearing on stage themselves — all with the noble purpose of professionalizing our work? But what has been the result? Theatres can no longer afford actors. We have wonderful lights and sound and scenery, but no actors. Five is a big cast. The Straw Hats did plays with ten or twelve characters, the Canadian Repertory Theatre in Ottawa in the forties and fifties did plays with up to thirty in the cast. We have hamstrung our writers and put our actors out of work. Maybe it’s time to rethink some of our policies.
But to return to the prompter. Of course, all actors should know their lines by opening night. But we all know that sometimes they don’t, sometimes rehearsal conditions have been so sparse that the actor really hasn’t had a fair opportunity to prepare, sometimes a wonderful actor just has difficulty learning lines, and sometimes a perfectly well-prepared actor has a momentary brain fuck. In days gone by a well placed prompt from the wings, often unnoticed by the audience, insured that the play would continue smoothly. What happens now when an actor ‘dries’? Panic! Panic through the whole building; even actors in the dressing room, hearing the moment over the program sound system, freeze, praying for a solution. The terror for the actor himself is almost duplicated by the other actors on stage wondering how in hell they are going to get out of this. And yet none of this is necessary. If the stage manager were still in the wings, she could prompt, or an assistant could be in the wings and prompt. Yes, the audience might hear the prompt, but often they wouldn’t notice even though a good prompt was alway
s clear and loud enough that the actor could pick it up without difficulty.
I can’t imagine how Tiff would have got through the opening night of The Fourposter without a prompter. In this case the prompter happened to be me for reasons I don’t recall. Tiff suffered both from a short rehearsal period and a general difficulty with lines. But a prompter saved the day and soon the play ran smoothly.
There is an additional advantage in having a prompter. Not only is it important that actors know their lines, it is important that they are not worried about their lines. If you are on stage constantly wondering and worrying whether your lines will be there when you need them, you are not immersing yourself in the imagined situation, you are not doing your real job of acting the character in the situation. A prompter in the wings can put your mind at ease, allowing you to focus on the important work. And, strangely, in so doing you are more likely to remember your lines.
As a result of my late arrival in the season, I directed only one other play that summer, Picnic by William Inge. Quite a beautiful play, Picnic deals with the frustrations and constrictions of small town life, frustrations that may be universal. Unfortunately the film of the play turned the theme on its head with a truly sentimental Hollywood ending. I’ve directed the play twice since, once in Dundee and once at the William Davis Centre. For Straw Hat I was fortunate to have in the cast my childhood idol, Ted Follows, and his wife Dawn Greenhalgh (perhaps better known now as the parents of Megan Follows of Anne of Green Gables). Years later they would play husband and wife for me in the political radio drama 24 Sussex Drive. They gave strong performances and the production was one of the highlights of my time with Straw Hat.
Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir Page 12