Thoughts on Shakespeare: The Stratford Festival Conservatory for Classical Theatre Training
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

"The theatre," says Richard Monette, artistic director of the Stratford Festival, "is not very generous. There's a lot of envy. But I don't know of any actor who doesn't want to pass on what he knows, and teach other actors." The Stratford Festival Conservatory for Classical Theatre Training has begun operations this year, and it's founded on that idea. It also springs from a widespread feeling that the classical actor is an endangered species, and, in particular, that the standard of Shakespearean verse-speaking is not what it was.

Now, it's probable that verse-speaking has never been what it was. I am certain that in 1660, when the London theatres reopened after 18 years of enforced closure by the Puritans, there were senior play-goers lamenting that a glorious tradition had been irrevocably lost, and that, on the lips of these new actors, the good old plays were barely recognizable.

Actually, these play-goers would have had to be very senior to have seen the plays in their original glory. Shakespeare's own company, the King's Men, had stayed in business right up to the lowering of the boom in 1642, but he himself, his star actor, Richard Burbage, and most of their contemporaries were long gone. So even before the ban, phrases like "call that a Hamlet?" must have been echoing 'round the taverns. (And this, by the way, is the definitive answer to anyone who talks about doing the plays "as their author intended." Even if we reconstruct an Elizabethan platform stage, even if we cast boys in the women's parts, we still have the fact that roles were written for specific performers who are no longer available.)

On the other hand, the late Nicholas Pennell, a regular leading actor at the Stratford Festival, used to say that "there is a direct link between the person playing Hamlet now, and Burbage." The plays do make specific technical and intellectual demands, and any actor who can meet them may reasonably be reckoned part of a "tradition."

Monette, who passed the Pennell quote on to me, also elaborated on it, with special reference to William Hutt, the Stratford doyen who, two seasons ago, played his fourth King Lear, and this year takes on the farewell role of Prospero in The Tempest: "Young people were inspired by Bill's Lear -- just as he had been by seeing Olivier and Gielgud."

Hutt is in his mid-70s, but he still speaks directly to a far younger actor like Albert Schultz. Schultz first attracted attention in the 1980s as a member of Stratford's Young Company, the precursor of the Conservatory, and he is now one of the moving spirits of Soulpepper, Toronto's new classical co-operative, which has its own training program: "I'm a huge fan of Bill's," he says. "He makes the text remarkably accessible and immediate." Personal example is the best form of teaching, but it doesn't have to be left entirely to chance; which is why we have schools. The Stratford Conservatory, a cherished project for years before it came into existence, is post- graduate, intended for actors who are already professionals. (It actually pays them.) It operates for seven weeks before the season starts -- next year they hope to double it -- and its students then pass into the company proper. There are 12 of them, whittled down from an initial 1,800 applications, and from auditions held coast to coast. ("We do this right," says Monette, "though we never get credit for it.")

Five of these apostles have been in the company before; the others are new. The project has cost $6-million, half of it coming from personal and corporate donations, and the rest a matching grant from the Ontario Arts Council.

There are classes in dance, movement, and swordplay, but the focus is on the text: on its meaning and on its rhythm. The two go together; in Monette's words "the Shakespearean pulse follows the heartbeat; it's very natural."

But there are technical standards: When an actor gets the stress of a line wrong, some of us feel physically affronted -- partly from a frustration that nobody on the production appears to have noticed.

Verse-speaking, though, is not about abstract music. Michael Mawson, the principal of the Stratford conservatory, insists that his purpose is "mostly to investigate the ingredients that lie behind the text, so that it's not just `stand and deliver.' " But he sees only a limited application to Shakespeare of the idea of "subtext" (which roughly means that the real thoughts lie between the lines). Elizabethan drama is relentlessly articulate, and its characters mean what they say.

Of course, you have to be a particular character with a particular story to arrive at those lines, and it is this level of subtext -- what he defines as "why you're saying this" -- that Mawson finds essential. It may be that the use of words at all, rather than the difficulty of these particular words, is the stumbling block for moderns. "Perhaps," he theorizes, "society needs less and less language: Most of what we communicate today can be done by body language."

Perhaps. But there is plainly a hunger for those old words; those 1,800 Stratford applicants didn't come from outer space. Shakespeare, we are told on all sides, has never been more popular; he is -- the ultimate accolade -- very big in Hollywood. An English professor in California has announced that the acting in Shakespeare films is incomparably better to what it used to be. It would be interesting to know which badly-acted old movies he has in mind (the Olivier trio? Julius Caesar with Gielgud and Brando? Welles' Chimes at Midnight?), but trendy philistinism is, after all, what you would expect from a Californian academic.

"If you can play Shakespeare" says Monette, "you can play anything." Schultz would amend that to "if you can play Shakespeare well," but I think all parties would agree that that's implicit. Mawson muses that it's not only Shakespeare who may be slipping away from us. Young actors whose highest dream is of snagging a lucrative TV commercial may find it hard to play a dramatist as recent as Pinter. In a recent review, I listed the great Pinter performances I had seen, and they were all given by classicists; Gielgud's delivery of the long speeches in No Man's Land was a wonderful bridge between the old and the new.

And maybe building bridges is what it is about. Soulpepper is devoting itself to modern classics this year as a prelude to a Shakespeare season in 2000. The Shaw Festival has just announced the extension of its mandate from plays written during Shaw's lifetime to plays written about it. Not many existing texts leap to mind, but there are two by Tom Stoppard that do; Travesties, and the new The Invention of Love, and the people at Shaw are better equipped to perform them than anyone on the continent.

And as for Stratford: To act a 400-year-old play, in verse, on a thrust stage, in front of 800 people, is as daunting a technical challenge as a young actor is likely to encounter; and technique is only the start of it. There will always be people, not just critics, making comparisons. But when it works, it works like nothing else; and audiences, too, can join hands with tradition.