Man as Masterpiece; Between Stratford's First Season and his Final Lear, William Hutt Became the World's Best

thoughts on shakespeare: remembering william hutt
Obituary
the national post

William Hutt was Canada's greatest actor. Everybody knows that. But he was even more than that. The bulk of his career was spent at the Stratford Festival playing Shakespeare. By the time he played his last role there -- Prospero, fittingly enough, in The Tempest, the great valedictory play -- he had become the finest Shakespearean actor in the world.

This was a matter of taste and talent, of course, but even more of strength and endurance. Actors who go on acting into their eighties usually settle for gnarled or delicate cameos. Hutt didn't have to settle. In his last decade of life he still had the resources to play Prospero and King Lear, each for the fourth time. And with experience there naturally came unrivalled authority. He knew his way around these texts as nobody else could, but he never stopped exploring them. Playing his last Lear in 1996 (he was 76, which is theatrically old but chronologically young for the monarch who admits to being "fourscore and upwards" ) he husbanded his resources but spared nothing in voltage when his rages actually came around. Power was allied to finesse. In Lear's last scene, as the king's mind wandered around the brute fact of his daughter's dead body, his technique was quicksilver. Writing about his penultimate Prospero (1999) I cited "the taut, flexible viola voice, the sustained and witty phrasing, the architectural prowess that built each speech into an ongoing wave of sense and sound, the fusing of these to create a character." At the time this was rumoured to be his farewell performance; it turned out to be anything but. When he did play his last Prospero it was different again, less bravura (probably of necessity) but more intense. "Our revels now are ended" wasn't peaceful; it was angry.

That Hutt should have had such a career is itself a tribute to the Canadian theatre. It has thrived on continuity, a tradition that he himself helped to establish. He was in the very first Stratford season in 1953, playing small parts but already attracting notice. This steadily grew, "steadily" at this point being the operative word. In 1957 he had his first major success, as Polonius in Hamlet. In 1967, playing the title role in Richard II, he became, in Stratford and Canadian terms, a star. He sometimes ent off to London or New York or even to other Canadian theatres, but there were still very few Stratford seasons he missed. At some point in the 1970s he became recognized as the festival's doyen, an authoritative figure offstage as well as on. From what I have read, and what I saw myself as a visitor, he was not yet a great actor, though he was obviously a remarkably accomplished one, one who could time a throwaway line in comedy as perfectly as he could unroll a bolt of rhetoric in tragedy. The performance, for me at least, that lifted him into a new dimension was his Feste the jester in Twelfth Night (1980); astoundingly relaxed in speech or song, he cast a spell every time he opened his mouth.

The two sovereign English classical actors of the twentieth century were the chiselled, elegant John Gielgud and the volcanic Laurence Olivier. Hutt, more than any British actor, was the natural heir of both of them, combining their qualities; and he grew to be as good as either. (He also, by all reports of his towering Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, had moments of challenging Dame Edith Evans.) He surpassed Olivier as James Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night; his sudden plea to his morphine- addicted wife -- "can't you stop now?" -- was an immensely moving cry from the heart, that took you by surprise even on a second viewing. He couldn't surpass Gielgud as the bar-room poet of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land but he equalled him; the tiptoed way that he manoeuvred around his rich host's elegant carpet to get himself a drink was a masterpiece in itself, even before he got to the long speeches. It was extraordinary in itself that he should be attempting so new and taxing a role in his eighties, and for a company (Soulpepper) with which he had never worked before; it was thrilling that he brought it off so consummately.

He said after his last stage performance that he wanted to go on acting on the screen, and he had a marvellous epiphany in the TV series Slings and Arrows as an old actor finally getting his chance at playing Lear. (It might be counted as Hutt's Lear No. 4 .) He was, to a certain extent, playing himself; if you knew him it was hard not to see the kind, witty, sharp-tongued, theatrically wise Bill Hutt who knew Shakespeare in general, and that play in particular, inside out. In one sad respect the role was unwittingly prophetic; the actor he played was dying of cancer, and it's leukemia that has now taken Hutt himself. The speed of his passing is a shock, but maybe a good one. It capped a life and a career supremely well spent.