Theatrical Maverick With a Golden Voice

Thoughts on shakespeare: Remembering John Neville
Obituary
The National Post

Actor had illustrious career in London before revitalizing Canada's Citadel, Neptune and Stratford theatres

John Neville, who died Nov. 19 at the age of 86, was a maverick with a golden voice, a combination that made him a major theatrical force, first in England and then in Canada.

It was the voice, allied to matinee-idol good looks, that first brought him to prominence in London. He was a member of the Old Vic company from 1953 to 1958, a period in which the Vic worked its way through all the plays of Shakespeare. Neville progressed from playing Fortinbras in the first season to Hamlet in the last, taking most of the major juvenile roles, with a few wilder parts thrown in. He acquired quite a fan base, including a notoriously vocal contingent of teenage girls in the gallery.

The five-year plan was a major part of my own education. I entered high school in London during this time, and must have seen more than half of the plays. My first sighting of Neville was as Orlando in As You Like It, a role in which I seem to remember him displaying more voice than personality. (I may have been distracted by his Rosalind, Virginia McKenna, the most beautiful sight my 11-year-old eyes had yet beheld.)

It soon became obvious, however, that there was more to Neville than a pretty larynx; his Mark Antony in Julius Caesar was as cynical as he was eloquent. He kept his end up as Troilus, effectively the straight man in Tyrone Guthrie's riotous Edwardian production of Troilus and Cressida, and his Hamlet proved touching, intelligent and unsentimental. His Ophelia was an actress straight out of drama school named Judi Dench, whose career was to intersect with his on many future occasions. But the performance from this period that I remember most fondly was his Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, whose folly had a delicate innocence about it that I have never seen equalled.

He always claimed that character roles, when he could get them, were what he most enjoyed. He was a Londoner, who relished the opportunity to use the accent he had grown up with. It was Neville, before Michael Caine, who first showed us what Alfie was all about. In 1963, in the stage version of what had first been a radio play, he was a beguiling rogue who, in a role full of direct address, delighted in engaging and bantering with the audience.

He bought a similar zest to acting in musicals. But there were other boundaries he was interested in breaking.

Like many actors, he would talk about the neglected role of the actor in shaping theatrical policy, and the necessity of bringing the theatre to the people, and vice versa. Unlike many actors, at least at that time, he did something about it. He started directing plays, beginning with a competent Henry V at the Vic. Then, in the mid- '60s, he became one of three artistic directors at the new Nottingham Playhouse (Peter Ustinov was one of the others). The triumvirate broke up, as triumvirates tend to, and Neville was left in sole charge. His regime was strikingly successful in staging old plays, encouraging new ones and reaching out to the community.

It also recharged him as an actor. The role that had made him a star at the Vic was Richard II; he repeated it at Nottingham in a performance that Richard Eyre, who was later to have his own distinguished and adventurous regime at the Playhouse, but was then a beginning director in nearby Leicester, has described as "still one of the best Shakespearean performances I've ever seen. John was tall, aquiline, a natural aristocrat with feline grace who disguised well the roaring boy underneath." Learning of Neville's death, Eyre emailed me: "I'm very, very sad ... I was very fond of him." Neville had given him some of his own early breaks, and, many years later, when Eyre was running the National Theatre, he had cast Neville as Sir Peter in The School for Scandal.

It was one of Neville's rare British stage appearances in the latter part of his career. The excitement of Nottingham seems to have disenchanted him with London and, eventually, with Britain. In 1971, he was invited to Ottawa to direct a guest production of The Rivals, and essentially, he never went back. He became a Canadian citizen, and artistic director of, in turn, the Edmonton Citadel and the Halifax Neptune. He revitalized them both artistically and economically. In 1986, he took over the Stratford Festival, which he ran for four years; this theatre, too, he took out of the red.

The move to Stratford may have seemed predestined, but it wasn't inevitable. He'd been invited before, and had refused. Still a star, he had remained outside the Canadian establishment, as he had outside the English. (He was also on, to put it mildly, unfriendly terms with his immediate Stratford predecessor, John Hirsch, another theatrical rebel but of a different stamp.) Neville's Stratford programming was initially adventurous - all the late Shakespeare plays in one season - though, as often happens, it got progressively safer (The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream in one year). He also virtually began the festival's commitment to, and eventual reliance on, American musicals; he played Higgins in My Fair Lady, and seemed to be having a lot of fun. His wasn't one of Stratford's highest-profile regimes, but it was a good one.

Since then, he'd been most visible in films (the title role in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and TV ("the wellmanicured man" in The X-Files). Perhaps his most notable theatrical contribution in recent years was to organize The Ibsen Project, rehearsed readings in Toronto of the last three Ibsen plays, two of which he directed or co-directed, and in one of which he acted. These were exciting and made one want to see the plays in full-scale productions, something for which we're still waiting.

He was, I think, a great director of theatres rather than of plays, though I do remember a good Three Sisters at Stratford. As an actor, he could sometimes rely overmuch on those resonant and melodious tones; I felt, though I was in a minority, that this was the case with his mournful Don Armado in a Stratford Love's Labour's Lost. But when his mind and his sense of humour were fully engaged, he could be remarkable.

Neville suffered from Alzheimer's, to which he succumbed at Wellesley Central Place in Toronto. His family held a private service this week, with a public memorial to be announced in the new year.

His career was unusual, maybe unique, not least in the way it split into two halves and between two countries - each, it seemed, largely unaware of his achievements in the other. I feel lucky to have witnessed some of both, and to have seen a man so devoted to putting his talent where his ideals were.