Thoughts on Shakespeare: Christopher Plummer
Ryerson University
The National Post

For nearly 50 years now Christopher Plummer has been the right man in Canadian theatre at the right time. I am thinking particularly of his association with the Stratford Festival, and of his return there this year, in the festival's own 50th season, to play King Lear. He was last there in 1996, in Barrymore, but somehow that doesn't quite count. It was virtually a one-man play (the one other actor delivered his entire performance from offstage) and it was a semi-commercial production that had no organic relationship to the rest of the season. Also, it was done at the Avon, and Plummer had always been identified with the Festival Theatre platform stage which, in his glory days at the festival, was the only Stratford stage there was.

Plummer's last appearance on that stage -- his last until now in Stratford Shakespeare -- was as Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, back in 1967. That's quite a gap, but somehow Plummer has remained a presence at Stratford and a presence in Canada. (He is in Toronto to receive an honorary doctorate from Ryerson University and to address the graduating class this afternoon at 2:30 in the Ryerson Theatre.) That is partly because he's on the Stratford board of governors and has been a faithful member of the audience. It also has to do with his unique position in the festival's history. He first appeared there in 1956, Stratford's fourth season and its last in the tent that preceded the building of a permanent theatre. He had actually auditioned for the first season in 1953, but Tyrone Guthrie, the director, had turned him down. Not, apparently, for any perceived lack of talent; it was more a matter of temperament. About the time he was doing Barrymore in New York, Plummer told me that Guthrie "had thought me a bit of a playboy." He added: "He was absolutely right."

It was Guthrie's successor, Michael Langham, who invited Plummer to Stratford. He was already somewhat established outside Canada; indeed, he was on Broadway, acting with Julie Harris in Jean Anouilh's Joan of Arc play The Lark. The part that brought him to Stratford was the title role in Henry V. This made him, in his own words, "the first Canuck to lead the company." (It had previously been headed by visiting luminaries such as Alec Guinness and James Mason.) It was Langham's first production as director of the festival, the start of what is to date its longest and probably most distinguished regime, and the Stratford careers of Langham and Plummer were to reman intertwined, right down to the 1967 Antony, which ended an era for both of them.

The Henry V was a historic production in several ways. With Quebecois actors playing the French roles, it seemed -- as the two warring countries made peace in the last scene -- to symbolize Canada's own hopes for national unity (1956, remember). And there at the centre of it was a 26-year-old actor with a clear shot at international stardom and with, as Langham described it, "the chemistry of a romantic classical actor -- a lot of sex, great charm, a natural comedic gift." In Plummer's own words, the Henry V "zapped my career. From that time on, my name was above the title."

That cannot literally have been the case at Stratford, which has generally been very alphabetic and democratic about these things. But over the next 10 years he was undoubtedly the festival's star -- Stratford's, and therefore North America's, top classical actor. He was Stratford's first Hamlet and Macbeth; he took in supporting character roles such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Twelfth Night) and Bardolph (Henry IV); and he especially shone -- in fact, glistened - - in the great swashbuckling roles: Mercutio, the Bastard in King John, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, and -- at the apex of panache -- Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. He may have been the last actor to play these characters without seeming implicitly to apologize for them.

Perhaps they connected to his offstage image. Plummer was born in 1929 in Toronto, where, he has said, "the remnants of Prohibition were in the air. I sniffed it at once, at the age of one, and said, "This city is not for me." Safely removed to the more congenially cosmopolitan atmosphere of Montreal, he discovered ("when I was 15 and could safely run away from home") the delights of nightclub life, and he credits the great cabaret performers he saw there -- Piaf, Chevalier, Garland, Sinatra -- with awakening his interest in acting. ("I couldn't believe all these wonderful people could hold an audience of drunks.")

Once a star he got caught up in the group he has called "the good two-fisted drinkers of our time": an international list that includes Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney, Jason Robards Jr. and -- a recent casualty -- Richard Harris. Of them all Plummer, certainly when judged by his work in the classics, has been the great survivor. (He claims that one thing that preserved him is his love of food; he got too hungry to be a really dedicated drinker.)

So we had an actor who put in several rigorous seasons as leading man at Canada's premier theatre, became a movie star and was recognized as such, both on and off screen. (The Sound of Music -- still and perhaps ironically his most famous film -- came out in 1967, the same year as that Stratford Antony. One chapter began as another ended.) He was the local boy made good on a prodigious scale, at home and abroad. The fact that he and Stratford got started about the same time, and that Stratford then practically was Canadian theatre, had something to do with it. Nobody else has had quite the same impact, though Colm Feore and others have come close; William Hutt, the festival's undisputed doyen, is a different kind of actor.

And this year he has been back. Richard Monette, Stratford's director, who as a young actor played Eros to his Antony ("we all wanted to become him ... I was in awe of him ... terrified ... little did I know that years later I'd be offering him a job"), collared him a couple of years ago across a restaurant table in London and told him he should really come back to play Lear or Prospero. He, then, marvelling at his own temerity, ("I wasn't even drunk") asked him if he was perhaps afraid of playing Lear. The answer came back like a flash: No, he wasn't. Nor does he seem to be. The performance he gave on the August first night was superbly authoritative; it did not come across as the performance of a visiting star. It was obviously a homecoming, and the audience rose to it as such: the work of an actor at home in Shakespeare -- his vocal colour and control were exceptional -- and at home on that stage. (This, in Jonathan Miller's production, had its famous facade naked and unadorned. No set designer was named, but in fact it was designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch -- 50 years ago.)

He was believably this old man, this old king -- subdued for long periods, as if trying to get along with his daughters, then erupting volcanically. And since then, apparently, the performance has only ripened; Monette says that on the last night, on Wednesday, Plummer gave a truly great performance, much larger than it had been at the opening.

Also, it seems, more vulnerable. Domini Blythe, who as Goneril is on the receiving end of this Lear's most devastating outburst, had not only never worked with Plummer before, she had never even seen him on stage. She approached the experience with the expected mixture of excitement and trepidation: "I had heard that he was extremely temperamental. I'd also heard, though, that he loved women, and would only be difficult with men. In fact, he turned out to be wonderful to everybody -- very kind and non-judgmental."

She thinks his Lear took three or four weeks of performance to solidify. And then "three weeks or so ago, he just flew. It was all highly refined, and he achieved such freedom. At times when I'm on stage with him, he becomes so old and fragile. His eyes look like the eyes -- glazed and dull -- of people I've seen in residences. I've been watching him build it. It's not technical, it's organic."

Blythe has an anecdote that may or may not be significant: "Chris likes to chat to people backstage at 6:30 or so, for about 10 minutes. And one evening I happened to mention that my dad, who's 80 and adores the play, was over from England and would be in tonight. I also said that Dad had been in Donald Wolfit's Lear [Wolfit was the English actor-manager whose Lear was considered by many people to be the best they'd ever seen] in the 1940s, and Christopher's face just changed. He said, 'That was the first Lear I ever saw. I was 16 and they brought it to His Majesty's Theatre in Montreal.' And he asked me where was my father sitting. The next morning, my father told me that Christopher's Lear was the greatest he'd seen since Wolfit's. And that was the night that he took off, for me."

It may just have been coincidence, of course. But it's good to think that an actor who incarnates a theatrical tradition in Canada should be so in touch with tradition himself. Monette says that "the world may remember him for The Sound of Music, but the theatrical profession will remember him for his classical work." Blythe says "he's one of the few actors who came out of this country who became well-known internationally but still kept the status of a great stage actor." He may even be the only one.