You Can Teach Young Dogs New Tricks
Measure for Measure / Riffs on Shakespeare: The Possibilities
The Montreal Young Company
The National Post
"Young actors," says Bill Glassco over lunch in a Montreal bistro, "generally become lazy and cynical very fast." He's talking about actors in the immediate post-graduate stage; those in the disillusioning years that generally follow their emergence from drama school.
He himself has taught for some years now at the National Theatre School in Montreal, and like most teachers in such a position he has been impressed by the dedication and enthusiasm of his students. He has then, all too often, watched it fritter away. "I want," he says, "to harness that idealism while it's still there."
The result has been his formation of the Montreal Young Company, made up of 12 players with no more than five years of professional experience apiece, eight of them Glassco's former students. The company has just concluded its first season of two plays in repertoire, and the results have been more than promising. Both the plays presented were English: Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; and The Possibilities, by the contemporary British playwright Howard Barker.
All the actors in the company were anglophones, which in Montreal puts them in an artistically beleaguered position. In some ways it's fitting that Canada's top theatre school should be in Montreal; French-Canadian theatre is legendarily rich. But NTS attracts students from all over the country, and half of them are likely to emerge from it feeling disenfranchised. Where, I asked Glassco, do English-speaking graduates -- including those who've grown up in the city -- go to work?
He shrugged, gently (he's a gentle man): "Most of them," he said, "end up going to Toronto." There is regular English theatre in Montreal: there's the Centaur, of which Glassco speaks with guarded respect, and there's the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, which is where the Young Company staged its first season. (Arriving at the Bronfman after a day spent mooching around the city, and being greeted at the box-office in English, was a considerable culture shock.) All the same, older English actors could probably use a lifeline as well, and I asked Glassco why, in light of this, he was keeping the accent so firmly on youth.
He gave some of the expected replies: "Young actors inspire me ... It's easier to gain their trust and you don't have a lot of bad habits to break down."
But he also has some other, longer-term considerations in mind: "If the young actors benefit from this work, they should be our leading actors when they're in their 40s." He cites the example of Soulpepper, most of whose leading spirits first came together as members of Robin Phillips' Young Company at Stratford some 15 years ago.
Glassco himself is a Quebec native, but one who has spent most of his career in Toronto, as a founder member of the city's small- theatre movement. He founded Tarragon, and was one of the architects of what is now the Canadian Stage Company. When he left the CSC he felt the time had come to return to Quebec; at the moment, he officially lives in Quebec City, though he's in the process of pulling up sticks and finding a home in Montreal.
At 64 he is obviously his young company's patriarch; the rest of his staff is as youthful as his actors. This includes his associate director, Chris Abraham, 25 and already a recognized name on the alternative theatre circuit. They directed a play apiece; appropriately Glassco took the old play and Abraham the new one.
The Possibilities isn't that new; Barker wrote it about a dozen years ago. He's a playwright about whom I have very mixed feelings, and The Possibilities did nothing to resolve them. Indeed, since it consists of 10 independent sketches it can accommodate some various reactions in itself. Each of the playlets has a background set somewhere on a scale between crisis and cataclysm. Only one of the 10 -- involving a London vendor of forbidden books -- evokes a time or place that is the author's own.
This is probably to the good since, although Barker's plays are typically scathing in their attitude to contemporary society, they are seldom very precise in their depiction of it. Asked for more believable detail, the playwright and his adherents (who tend to be vociferous) are apt to inquire contemptuously "What do you want? Realism?" To which the answer, I'm afraid, is yes; if I'm being asked to take seriously the playwright's view of the world around us, I want some approximation to the ways in which people in that world actually behave.
Most of the time here, though, we are in fable-land; a world of stark situations and starker dialogue. One scene involves a Czar Alexander (which of the several, we are not told) on the eve of what will plainly be a bloody battle. Like Henry V before Agincourt he talks to a common soldier about their common humanity; he even gets the soldier to undress him, to demonstrate what a pathetically ordinary being he is. He then, presumably to reassure himself that he is after all the emperor, has the man taken away and flogged.
Often we are in some nameless village, typically in one that is about to be invaded and destroyed and whose inhabitants are pleading or planning for some means of relief and escape. One play gives us a gloss on the Biblical story of Judith, the Hebrew heroine who gave herself to her own people's invader Holofernes and then slew him. In the aftermath of the event, she sets about demolishing all her compatriots' comfortably patriotic assumptions.
The events are stark and so is the writing; writing in the wake of Brecht and Edward Bond, Barker has completely mastered the style of bleak elliptic irony, both capitalizing on the simplicities of folklore and exploding them. You sometimes get the feeling that he could do it in his sleep; that having settled on a style and a world- view, he is tearing off variously sized strips of it, and closing himself off to any alternatives. It is a very self- satisfied style. All the characters are in extreme situations, and the plays implicitly ask us to decide what would we do in their place. But the tone makes us disinclined to reach it.
One possible moral to be taken from the whole is that killing is justified so long as the victim is himself a killer and the avenger (or, I think Barker would say, the instrument of justice) is a woman. Anyway, it happens, over and over again, and it does seem a possible response to much recorded history, especially that of the last century.
Abraham staged it excellently, a series of spotlit vignettes against a dark and smoky background, and he caught the caustic, implacable style to perfection. All the actors got it, though some naturally communicated it better than others.
Among the best was Salvatore Migliore as Barker's most striking creation, a silkily-spoken travelling torturer (it's not apparently a job in which it's wise to stay in one place too long, and there's always a demand) who outwits some clumsy attempts at retribution. Mariusz Sibiga made a fine grotesque of the book-vendor, too paranoid to sell anything to anyone. Graeme Somerville, imperially insecure, and Paul Fauteux, justifiably watchful and worried, were excellently matched as Czar and victim. The simple characterizations and complex issues enabled an obviously thoughtful young company to play to its strengths.
They were also surprisingly well matched to Measure for Measure. There is only one character in this perplexing moral comedy, the "ancient lord" Escalus, who absolutely has to be old, and another, the Provost of the prison, who probably should be; the players here, Shawn Campbell and Eric Davis, had no trouble finding the necessary weight -- an old rep company characteristic that it's good to see re- instated.
Of the play's central trio, Isabella, the novice who refuses to surrender her chastity in return for her brother's life, is young by definition. Angelo, her puritanical would-be seducer, has in recent years been played so, and it makes sense; both he and Isabella are in part victims of their own too-confident inexperience.
The Duke, whose voluntary exile makes the city of Vienna the victim of Angelo's enthusiastic clean-up campaign, denies having "the aims and ends of burning youth," but that means he probably is young and that he, too, is trying to pretend to be above it. Playing the part this way enabled Graeme Somerville to play a plausible self- questioner who was also a reasonable romantic lead. And this is what the Duke is; at the end he gets the girl. His being so may offend modern sensibilities, him being such an authority-figure and all (Howard Barker must itch to rewrite this play, or maybe he already has) but there it is.
Isabella doesn't explicitly say yes, and most directors make her silently reject him. But she doesn't say no, either, and Glassco's production, one of the most intelligent of this play that I've seen, showed that the happy ending is the right one; you can only refuse it by doing injustice both to the text and the audience.
It could have used a bit more setting up; Shakespeare is too busy with the plot to give the actors much help, and Somerville's Duke (a long but paradoxically under-written role) was sometimes more concerned with explaining the text than embodying it.
The Isabella-Angelo duets -- the most prolonged scenes of sexual exploration in Shakespeare -- were transfixing. Robin Wilcock played Angelo as a spoiled golden boy, one of nature's self-flagellators, "most ignorant," as Isabella tells him, "of what he's most assured." She, similarly brainy and similarly innocent, was played most forcefully, and finally most sympathetically, by Sarah Mennell. The comic scenes -- set in and around brothels, jails and police courts - - were excellent, with Salvatore Migliore's Pompey a superbly knowing androgynous pimp and Paul Fauteux' Elbow a wonderful local constable, blinkered and blathering.
All that was wrong was the constant use of music to underline tensions that were being created anyway. It blunted the drama and sometimes came near to killing the comedy. But the actors, plainly and hearteningly, are there and there must be more where that came from (which means all of Canada, though they have to audition in Montreal).
Glassco doesn't want to get bigger; to mount more plays per year or run his own space. He does want now to build some bridges with the Francophone theatre. If he can make this, and the rest of his scheme, work in future years, he will be doing us all a very good turn.