Thoughts on shakespeare:
Remembering Douglas Campbell
Obituary
the national post

In 2001 the Stratford Festival, making its way chronologically through Shakespeare's history plays, arrived at the two parts of Henry IV. The year before, I had asked Richard Monette, Stratford's artistic director, whom he had down to play Falstaff, and he said "Douglas Campbell." I'm ashamed to say that my face fell a little. Wasn't this casting a little predictable? Hadn't Campbell already played the fat knight at Stratford many times, in The Merry Wives of Windsor as well as in the Henries? Actually, Monette informed me, Campbell had indeed played the Falstaff of Part One several times, but he had never before tackled Part Two.

Anyway, if I had been expecting something hackneyed or casual from Campbell's performance, I couldn't have been more wrong. The Scottish-born actor, who died on Tuesday in a Montreal hospital at the age of 87, had come to Canada from Britain for the very first Stratford season in 1953, and had stayed to become, fiercely and loyally, part of the festival and part of the country. Falstaff turned out to be his Stratford performance, and his rich, rumbustious contemplative voice and personality lit up the role. There's a moment in the tavern scene in Part One when Falstaff has to talk himself out of the charge of having run away from a disguised Prince Hal. "By the lord," he says "I knew him as well as he that made ye." A barefaced and outrageous lie, it's always cited in the textbooks as one of the great Shakespearean comic moments. Campbell is the only actor I have ever known who actually made it funny. He took full physical, vocal and spiritual possession of it, and he timed it impeccably. It was the perfect marriage of freshness and experience.

He came of a great tradition. He had also married into it, and he helped perpetuate it: His first wife, Ann Casson, was the daughter of one of one of England's greatest actresses, Sybil Thorndike, and their son Benedict is himself now one of Canada's leading actors. By his mid-thirties, when he first came here, Campbell had played leading roles at the Old Vic in London, including Othello. This was a part he repeated at Stratford in 1959; he had respectful rather than ecstatic notices, but Martha Henry, who saw his performance three years before making her own Stratford debut, remembers it as being great. She added that he was also a great Hotspur -- in one production of Henry IV in which he didn't play Falstaff -- and he must indeed have had just the right fire-breathing quality. Another leading Stratford actress, Seana McKenna, has similar memories of his King Lear: "I've seen many Lears," she told me yesterday, "but his is the voice I always hear."

She heard it quite a lot at the time, because she was his Cordelia, in a production that went on an extended tour after its Stratford run; " Lear for a year," she calls it, and she recalled how complimented she felt when John Hirsch, the director, cast her, saying that she was "a chip off the old block." In fact, she played Campbell's daughter in three separate plays. "He was," she said, "a great spirit. It's tempting to say he was larger than life, but he was life. He was passionate and fierce; opinionated, loving and stubborn. He was unabashed. He was a man of the theatre, he breathed it, he acted it."

Full-throated and full-blooded both on and off the stage -- he was an ardent socialist -- he seems, too, to have been very practical and unpretentious about his career. "He went where the work was. It was typical of him to have moved to a new city -- Montreal -- in his eighties." McKenna also reminded me that in Vancouver, the Bard on the Beach theatre has named one of its two auditoria after him. And, she added, "he gave great bear hugs." Tyrone Guthrie, the festival's first director, must have brought Campbell to Stratford in part because he sensed that they shared the same pioneer spirit. He was, initially, in all the great comic roles, but by his third season he was also playing Oedipus. He also directed: I remember, from his later years, a production of The Alchemist that was frankly nonsensical, and one of The Country Wife that was brilliant, hardheaded and hilarious. That powerful voice could also be used for singing; he was a fine Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and offstage -- just -- I remember hearing the voice ringing out in the ritual pre-performance singing of O Canada at the Tom Patterson. When he adopted a country, he really adopted it. There was probably a period, at Stratford and elsewhere, when his full-blooded style seemed old-fashioned. Later it came to seem timeless -- a quality much-needed and, when it isn't there, much-missed. It was in full flower the last time I saw him onstage, about five years ago, in Hamlet, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. He was the First Player: perfect casting.