Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (11 page)

Truth to tell, I hadn’t planned on starting a new life when I went to England. My intention was to spend a year at theatre school in London, return to Canada on the Easter break to prepare the next Straw Hat season, and then move back to Canada in the summer. Karl and I had arranged that he would look after the beginning of the next summer season, we would overlap in the middle, and I would be in charge for the last part of the season.

London in 1960. A joke going around England at the time involved explaining British politics to an American tourist. “We have a Labour Party, which you could call ‘socialist.’ And we have a Conservative Party, which you would call ‘socialist.’” Today the joke might go something like this: “In Britain we have a Tory Party, which you would call ‘conservative,’ and a Labour Party, which you would call ‘conservative.’” In the years between World War II and Margaret Thatcher, England may have been a fairly poor country in relative terms, but as well as being culturally vibrant, it was remarkably egalitarian. Despite a top income tax rate of 96%, the wealthy continued to work and to live well, while a sense of reasonable economic equality contributed to a collective sense of community. Money was appreciated but not flaunted. When I asked my future father-in-law why he didn’t drive a high-end automobile, which he could afford, he replied that it wouldn’t look good to the staff of the department store that he owned.

Education was heavily subsidized. Most students accepted to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, for instance, were able to get grants from their county that covered both tuition and living costs. Working-class kids like Albert Finney and Harold Pinter were able to go to the best drama schools. Theatres and concert halls always had cheap seats that most could afford — ‘in the gods,’ maybe, but accessible to most of the population. Of course all this has changed. Britain now has one of the lowest income tax rates in the world, high tuition costs, and the greatest inequality in the developed world. Thanks, Margaret. And then David Cameron tripled tuition fees and savaged the remainder of the welfare state.

There were highly organized services for finding living accommodation and inexpensive transit to get to them. The accommodations themselves were very modest by current standards. Many people, and certainly most students, lived in rooms or bedsits, single rooms with tiny kitchen facilities and shared bathrooms. The rooms and bedsits were usually in large city houses that had been broken up into small units. Everything was rented; there was no such thing as a condominium. Fortunately, I had a slight leg up. Not only did I have my father’s allowance for one more year, but I had a grant from the recently formed Canada Council for the Arts. I was able to obtain a small flat close to the school in Earl’s Court. A walkup over a law office, it had a small kitchen and eating area, a bathroom, and a living/bedroom. I don’t think it ever occurred to me or any of my fellow students to notice that we didn’t have televisions or even radios.

The school itself was in a large house at the corner of Earl’s Court Road and Cromwell Road, a corner that was being widened when I was there, a process that took the entire year to complete. In quaint English fashion, the address was Tower House, Cromwell Road. No number. The main floor held two studios, one for scene work and a larger one for movement. The second floor had more classrooms or studios and a green room or lounge, while the top floor was given over to offices and the elocution side of the business where the real money was made. In the basement were change and locker rooms. Two blocks away was a small proscenium theatre, which was later converted into an exciting, modern theatre with a convertible arena-style stage not unlike Stratford, Ontario, though much smaller and more intimate. A few years later I was fortunate to direct two productions in the new theatre.

The premises may have been modest, but the faculty was stellar. In 1960 the school was a couple of years past its prime, but strong nevertheless. Past its prime because the truly great teachers were doing less of what they were truly great at and the Principal, Michael MacOwan, had more off days than on. Norman Ayrton was a brilliant movement teacher, but, unfortunately, preferred to direct, and while he may have been an able metteur en scène he was not a very inspiring teaching director. The great Iris Warren was still the amazing voice teacher she had been for some years, but now delegated more and more of her classes to her young assistant, Kristin Linklater. Eventually, when released from the shadow of Iris, Kristin would become the gold standard in voice instruction in North America, but for now she would do the legwork all week and Iris would come in on Fridays and do miracles. But for jewels in the faculty it would be hard to beat Bertram Joseph and Ronald Fuller, misfits both except in a drama school.

Bertram Joseph, on the faculty of Bristol University at the time, made a lifelong study of how Elizabethan actors acted. Since no descriptions of Elizabethan acting have survived, if there ever were any, his work had to be entirely inferential. For instance he would find records of how the rhetoricians spoke, sometimes saying things like “unlike the actors,” whereby he put together a pretty good idea of what an actor of the time did. Ronald Fuller, looking for all the world like the classical cliché of an old professor, had made a study of what it was like to live in certain historical periods, especially Elizabethan. Not perhaps of great academic interest, his work brought the Elizabethan world to life for young actors. And finally, there was the amazing Brian Way who taught improvisation. Another misfit — Brian had been jailed during the war as a conscientious objector — he is well known for his innovative work in theatre for children, but less well known for his contribution to actor training through improvisation.

One hears about theatre schools where, on the first day, the Director tells the nervous first year students to look to the left and look to the right and then says, ‘Only one of you will be here at the end of the program.’ Well, here we were, a large group of new and senior students, listening to Michael MacOwan who seemed even more nervous than us. And what did he say to us? I remember it to this day. “If you weren’t talented you wouldn’t be here.” “Relax . . . be happy.” “You don’t have to prove yourself,” and other words to that effect. Our collective sigh of relief filled the room and informed the rest of our time at the school.

Theatre schools differ in many ways, but one of the most significant hinges on this elementary principle: are the students to be made to feel comfortable and encouraged to grow, or are they to be challenged, broken down, and rebuilt? Perhaps inspired by that initial first day at LAMDA I have always espoused the former and been suspicious of the latter. There was a time at my own school in Vancouver, Canada, the William Davis Centre for Actors’ Study, when we seemed to be a reclamation centre, putting together unfortunate former students from another academy in the city, whose personal confidence had been battered and mutilated by teachers working from that other philosophy.

A word needs to be said about Iris Warren and her work and how, in my view, it has been distorted in the decades following, mixed as it has become with some now quite suspect Reichian and Freudian psychology. If ever there was such a thing as an alpha female, Iris was it. A giant of a person, large in body and spirit, she commanded any room she was in. At the time, what she was teaching was revolutionary. The voice was not a muscular ‘instrument’ to be strengthened and manipulated but a natural function to be unblocked and freed, becoming in its natural state both strong and emotionally expressive. Centering the breath and the voice so that the emotions and the voice originate together and flow with a minimum of restriction would allow actors to be expressive, clear, and natural. In her view other voice teachers stressed physical gymnastics and in the process disconnected the voice from natural human feeling.

And mostly she was right. Of course, actors no longer needed to fill three-thousand seat theatres as they did in the nineteenth century. Volume was less an issue now and with realism being the dominant dramatic form, natural expression was more highly valued. If one listens to recordings of Sarah Bernhardt or Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the great classical actors of an earlier era, natural speaking was not then in vogue, to say the least. So whether Iris’s work was a revolution in human function or a revolution in artistic intention is, I guess, moot. She was the right person with the right idea at the right time.

Iris died of a heart attack in her fifties. She was not able to supervise her legacy, which has been enthusiastically carried on by Kristin Linklater, of course, but also by David Smukler and Lloy Coutts in Toronto; Dale Genge, Gayle Murphy, and Trish Allen in Vancouver; as well as many others working throughout North America. Different aspects of Iris’s work have been stressed by different teachers, but the most worrying aspect is the concept of ‘release.’ While ‘release work’ has become a staple of voice work in North America, I don’t recall Iris ever using the term. But in North America the term is applied to the notion that the student needs to release their repressed inner self, repressed by the physical armour of the body that has developed as a protective mechanism from childhood. This ‘release’ will often be highly emotional, accompanied by crying and great personal distress, but without this release the voice will remain caged and limited. Or so goes the theory. There are a host of intellectual difficulties with this concept. For one, is there really such a thing as an ‘inner self’ or is this an outdated Freudian idea that is neither true nor useful? Second, are the barriers to the release of the voice truly a kind of locked character armour, an idea of the mostly discredited Wilhelm Reich, or are they far more likely to be physical tensions built up by misuse, needing to be freed, yes, but not holding the mysterious emotional connotations the Reichians would have us believe? And finally, when the ‘release’ occurs, is it truly a connection to the repressed emotional life of the student or is it just as likely to be a response to the suggestive ideas of the teacher leading to, yes, an emotional outburst, but one that is not what it seems? Any emotional outburst will result in a strong vocal connection leading everyone to think there has been a ‘breakthrough,’ but somehow those breakthroughs seldom seem to lead to long-term change. But the truly worrying part is that often the student will believe that they have encountered some hidden truth about their life, some repressed suffering, when in fact they have merely responded to suggestive elements in the here and now. This process is not unlike the hysteria that developed around the idea of repressed memory of sexual abuse, which imprisoned hundreds of innocent people and tormented the lives of the so-called victims.

But in fact, Iris herself did none of this. I do recall breakthroughs in her classes as people found a connection to their voices, a connection they could often replicate. But the release work was not so much emotional as technical, finding how to relax the tongue for instance, or the throat. And yes, we did emotional work to connect ourselves to the voice. But what emotion did she use? Laughter. Walking through the halls of a school where she was teaching one often heard unrestrained laughter. Walking through the halls of a school where her adherents are teaching one often hears unrestrained crying and hysteria. I suggest something has gone wrong.

In general, and for me in particular, LAMDA was a happy place in 1960. For all he was erratic, Michael was a caring father figure and Iris a sympathetic matriarch overseeing a household of diverse, often eccentric talents. Norman, in addition to his other activities, administered the school calmly and efficiently. For all its drawbacks, a lack of heat and soundproofing for instance, the converted house contributed to a sense of family. And the school attracted its share of talented students. Donald Sutherland had come and gone before I got there, but Janet Suzman was in her second year and would go on to play major Shakespearean roles at Stratford, England. Talented Canadians in the regular program included David Calderisi who would later work for me in rep and back in Canada, Ken Kramer who went on to found and run the Globe Theatre in Regina, and Carolyn Jones whose relationship with me would turn out to be even more intimate. The talented Susan Williamson would work with me later in Dundee, Scotland, and eventually settle in Canada married to Henry Woolf. Also in our one-year program was Dan MacDonald who would play Petruchio for me at Theatre New Brunswick many years later and would be President of two of Canada’s performer unions.

Shakespeare came at us from every direction. Michael Mac introduced us to iambic pentameter while doing scene and text work. I say “introduced us” for while I had learned about meter in high school I had, until that time, no idea why it was there or how Shakespeare used it. Why iambic? Because it’s the rhythm of life, whether it’s human footsteps, horses’ hooves, or a human heartbeat. It’s also the rhythm of the English language, or at least the English language as spoken by the English. Or the Scots or the Welsh, but not necessarily the North Americans. A common error in North America, thankfully gradually dying out, is to believe that Shakespeare needs to be spoken in an English accent. The truth is, what we now think of as an English accent is a nineteenth century development and is no more like an Elizabethan accent than North American speech. The closest extant dialect to Elizabethan might well be in Newfoundland. But, and it’s a big but, the English do tend to speak syllabically giving differentiated stress to each syllable, while North Americans tend to stress all syllables equally. In order to profit from the meter North American actors don’t have to speak with English pronunciation, but they do have to differentiate syllables in a way that may not feel natural. Only then can they set the rhythm of a line and ring the changes in meter that drive the emotion and pulse of a speech.