Where This Comes From: My Shakespeare Influences
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I got the Shakespeare bug in high school, with a monologue every actor knows: "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks" - Romeo, from Romeo and Juliet.
In university, I worked with Domini Blythe, an English-born actress who had trained and performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London before coming to Canada. She used to tell me she could trace her own acting lineage all the way back to Shakespeare's company. Whenever I'd quote something she'd taught me, she'd correct me: "That's not me. That was passed down to me" - from her mentors, who'd had it passed down to them, and so on.
Not long after, I studied with Neil Freeman, a professor at York University and later in BC, who did extensive work with Shakespeare's First Folio. He taught actors to read the Folio itself as a source of inspiration — a way to hear how a line might be emphasized or spoken, and to use that as a launching pad for their own performance.
I then worked with Repercussion Theatre in Montreal, Shakespeare in the Park, playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Cloten in Cymbeline.
Before I moved into a career in film and television, I performed for two seasons (1995–96) at the Atlantic Theatre Festival, working under Michael Langham, who had just retired as head of the Drama Division at The Juilliard School — playing Caliban in The Tempest, Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard, and Sebastian in Twelfth Night. Langham was part of the original company that founded the Stratford Festival in Canada, later served as its artistic director for close to a decade, and went on to lead the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis before heading to Juilliard. He's been a lasting influence.
After several years working in film and television, I went back to my first love and spent two seasons at the Stratford Festival of Canada, training with the Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre. A great deal of the process I teach in the Shakespeare Road Map comes directly from that training, along with everything I learned from Michael Langham, Domini Blythe, and Neil Freeman.
From there, I worked with Shakespeare & The Queen's Men, a research project out of the University of Toronto that recreated the working process of The Queen's Men, a troupe of actors who toured England just before Shakespeare's own rise, and who some believe Shakespeare may have been part of. It explored how theatre was actually produced and performed in Shakespeare's time.
I spent the following eight years as Artistic Director of Repercussion Theatre / Shakespeare in the Park in Montreal, where our productions toured to more than 10,000 people every summer across the city and its parks. Part of our mandate was hiring actors straight out of theatre school and coaching them through acting Shakespeare, which is where a lot of my experience working with younger actors comes from.
Along the way, I was named a finalist for the Christopher Plummer Award of Excellence in Classical Theatre, a nomination that came directly from Christopher Plummer himself ... an honour I've never taken lightly.
The Shakespeare Road Map is where all of this comes together: distilled into the most efficient way I know to look at a piece of Shakespeare's text, analyze it, embody it, make it your own, and build the best performance you can with all of that inspiration behind you.
Paul