He Mined the Energy In the Text

Thoughts on Shakespeare: Remembering Michael Langham
Obituary
The National Post

Michael Langham, who died this past weekend in England at the age of 91, was the second artistic director of the Stratford Festival. He ran it from 1956 to 1967, and returned many times later as a guest. He was, with the single exception of Trevor Nunn, the most consistently inspired Shakespearean director whose work I have known. There's remarkable unanimity among those who worked with him about what he actually did. Brian Bedford summed it up perfectly: "He mined the energy in the text."

Bedford, who was in half a dozen of Langham's later productions at Stratford and elsewhere, also says "he made every second of the play important. He had a strong opinion about how it should come out of the actor. Like a dog with a bone he wouldn't let ago." According to Diego Matamoros, a member of Langham's young company at Stratford in the '80s, "he understood what each character did in the play; how the story got told." Martha Henry, whose Stratford career began under Langham's auspices in 1962, says, "He knew the play better than anyone. He was demanding but not rigid. You felt that he'd actually known Shakespeare and walked hand-in-hand with him." And Michael Bawtree, his dramaturge at Stratford and later the director of the Atlantic Theatre Festival in Wolfville with Langham as his associate and eminence grise: "He had an incredible eye for the psychological implications of language; an instinct for looking behind the words." I'd say, as an audience, that he made the text reverberate.

Langham was British, born in 1919, and the formative experience of his life came when he was serving during the Second World War. He was captured, and -- almost as a survival tactic -- started directing plays cast from his fellow POWs. This military beginning must have made him fearless.

He emerged with a commitment to spartan aesthetics and community service that was expanded, but not fundamentally altered, when he met his mentor, the flamboyant genius Tyrone Guthrie, who groomed him at the Old Vic in London and then appointed him his successor at Stratford. Langham's first season was the last in the Stratford tent, and included a triumphant Henry V, marking the festival debut of the 26-year-old Christopher Plummer, inaugurating a long collaboration. Plummer has said that he literally owes Langham his career: "Without his talent, taste, intellect and wit, God knows where I might have gone with my life."

Langham himself, after his Stratford reign, went to the Guthrie Theatre at Minneapolis, to the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and to running the acting program at the Juilliard School in New York. He did some of his finest work in Wolfville, much of it in collaboration with his wife, the actress and director Helen Burns (who survives him).

Stratford now has a directors training program named after Langham, and there was always hope that he would return to the festival. He was talking of directing Hamlet, which he felt he'd never got right, and of returning to The Merchant of Venice. The sharpness and the mental energy, as I and others discovered in phone and other conversations in the last couple of years, remained unblunted and undimmed. He was past 90, and still had much to give us.