| It begins.
Iam Coulter doesn’t use Coles Notes. The same, unfortunately, can’t be said of me, who moments before interviewing him was poring over the character summaries and plot synopses for Henry VI Part III, the latest and largest production for Coulter’s Shakespeare Company. The notes are, of course, a standard trap for many weak souls, especially when faced with Shakespeare’s histories, but it’s a weakness the company’s artistic director and founder doesn’t share.
"I read a play, and I do my research," says Coulter.
The Shakespeare Company’s founder picked a fine time to do her homework.
Though Coulter is making the odd cut to the play’s characters and plot, the production itself will be her company’s most ambitious work to date, with 16 actors filling the Calgary Opera Centre – a complex web of English aristocracy and battle-fodder foot soldiers. Among other connections to Shakespeare’s War of the Roses play cycle, Henry VI Part III paves the way for the hunchbacked villainy of Richard III.
Though Coulter acknowledges that many audiences are more comfortable with Romeo and Juliet than Shakespeare’s histories, she points out that many of the histories’ titles originally included explicit references to the works as tragedies. Far from being a dry historical account, Henry VI Part III is a bloody war drama replete with backstabbing and deeply human melodrama.
"I looked at this play as an action drama," Coulter says. "I’m not trying to reproduce history in the play, I’m trying to tell a story about human beings, their relationships, passions and losses. The word revenge comes out in this text more than any other in the folio – that was my first major clue as a director. It’s definitely a play about how people are ruled by their passions as opposed to reason."
Coulter’s enthusiasm for the play doesn’t, in fact, entirely come from her personal bias as a Shakespeare devotee. Rather, she says, it was a 1994 production of Henry VI Part III by England’s Royal Shakespeare Company that was largely responsible for that devotion, affecting her in the kind of visceral way that continues to fuel theatre across the world.
"It was in their small theatre with a young ensemble company, slotted to go on a world tour after opening, so it was done minimally as well," she recalls. "It was somewhere between 15 and 20 actors, and when curtain call came around I couldn’t move. I was so stunned and affected by what I’d seen. It was beautiful, haunting, and I didn’t know at that time of my life that Shakespeare would become what I would be devoted to. That play played a major part in my realizing what Shakespeare can be to a modern audience."
Even aided by her research, Coulter admits that she doesn’t quite have the assured synopsis of Coles Notes ready just yet.
"It’s a funny time to answer that question," she says. "It’s a week before opening and there’s the scramble to pull everything together where you feel intimidated by the massive scope, coming to the end of this journey and putting it together. It’s a question I’ll probably be better able to answer the last night at the end of the run, at the cast party."
Henry VI Part III runs until May 6 at the Calgary Opera Centre (1315 7 Street S.W.). For tickets call (888) 222-6608 or visit www.ticketweb.com. For more information, visit www.shakespearecompany.com.
EIGHTY YEARS AGO
Rose is a fictional character, but that doesn’t make her story a lie.
In fact, far from seeing the titular character of Martin Sherman’s one-woman show Rose as a counterfeit version of the Jewish playwright’s collected family memories, director Maria Kliavkoff sees her as a natural extension of a dying oral tradition.
"Part of what (Sherman) is lamenting in this play is that there’s a generation of people who are growing up without an oral tradition," she says. "That secrecy can be insidious, it prevents the subsequent generation from knowing the whole scope of what has happened. (Sherman’s) family was able to pass it on and thank God he’s been able to preserve it."
Rose’s story, told simply by an actress who remains seated for the entire length of the play, is a fascinating history of Jewish oppression, extending from Jewish pogroms in Russia through the Second World War and into the ambivalence of the American immigrant experience. Played by Gayl Veinotte in Broad Minds’s upcoming production, Rose is a woman whose recounting to the audience is a sincere and moving portrait of lost communication and the difficulty of grasping even our own memories with any certainty.
Accompanied by projections and archival film and music, including recorded singing of the Israeli national anthem by freed concentration camp survivors, Veinotte’s performance will still ground the production in what is essentially an extended monologue. From Rose’s own ambivalent encounters with the nascent Jewish state to her equally troubled relationship with her children and their own devotion to Israel, Martin’s script is a profound portrait of 80 years of Jewish history.
"What’s so captivating about the story, when you read it, is that the story is so alive, (Martin’s) words are so brilliant and dynamic, the picture is there before your eyes," Kliavkoff says. "I defy an audience member not to see what (Rose) is talking about."
An instructor in Mount Royal College’s theatre program, Kliavkoff was drawn to the production because, simply, it was an offer she couldn’t refuse. Having narrowly missed the play’s 1999 London production starring Olympia Dukakis, she instead became enamored with the script after purchasing a copy before her flight home. Showing the importance of the retreating oral tradition that Martin’s play laments, Kliavkoff’s own infatuation with Rose demonstrates the profound power of words, even unadorned ones. For the veteran director, it was precisely those words that put her back in the theatre.
"(Broad Minds’s artistic director) Tarra Riley took me out to lunch last spring," recalls Kliavkoff, "and she said, ‘So here’s the deal: I want to get you back in the game. What’s the script you couldn’t refuse?’ This was the script."
Rose runs from May 2 to 12 at the Pumphouse Theatre. For tickets or information, call 263-0079 or visit www.broadminds.ca.
ONCE UPON A TIME
With the release of a slew of postmodern takes on fairy tales, most of them computer generated, it seems only fair for the stage to take a crack at the land of "once upon a time," too.
First produced in 1977, Virginia Kidd’s Happily Ever Once Upon is a play with a decided jump on its animated inheritors. Finding familiar fairy tale characters like Cinderella and her Prince Charming, Red Riding Hood and Rumplestiltskin in dire straits, the Bragg Arts Theatre Society’s latest production bends the familiar world of the Enchanted Kingdom into a postmodern pretzel. After all, who wants to let computer-generated ogres and poorly received imitators take all the credit? For fairy tales, it’s time to get real.
Happily Ever Once Upon runs at the Wintergreen Lodge May 4 to 6 and 11 to 13. For tickets or information, please call the Bragg Creek Real Estate Centre at 949-2333 or 540-0540. |
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