Remembering Stratford veteran David William
Elisabeth Feryn/Reuters
One of the late David William's favourite plays to act in or direct was Richard II.
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Robert Cushman, National Post · Friday, Aug. 6, 2010
In 1960, there was a BBC television series, unthinkable in today’s climate, called An Age of Kings. It was a 15-part serial, drawn from Shakespeare’s chronological sequence of English history plays: from Richard II to Richard III with three Henries in between. They were screened at fortnightly intervals: too long a gap, but necessary because each complex instalment was transmitted live. They were recorded on transmission, of course, and shown worldwide; and they’re now available as a box set on DVD. Seeing them again has been a treat and a revelation. The revelation lies in the sheer intelligence and capability of everybody concerned. There was a core company of about 20 young actors, who could feel their way around a Shakespearean text with a confidence that today would also be unthinkable. Among the ensemble are a few future stars: Judi Dench an enchanting French princess in Henry V; Sean Connery amazingly good as Hotspur; Eileen Atkins embodying the malignant Elizabethan view of Joan of Arc. And kicking the whole thing off as a mellifluous Richard II, there’s David William.
William, who later moved to Canada and who died last week, is best known here as a director; he did many productions at Stratford, and was the festival’s artistic director from 1990 to 1993. His regime came between those of John Neville (another golden-voiced English actor) and Richard Monette. In fact, he maintained a threefold identity as director, actor and scholar. His essay on The Tempest, a “preface” in the style of an earlier triple threat Harley Granville-Barker and published in that same Age of Kings year of 1960, is one of the best things written about that play. He described it, most succinctly, as “the noblest of the revenge plays.”
His acting and directing were often thought of as scholarly as well. An Oxford graduate, he had started his career in small roles at the Old Vic and rapidly gained a reputation for his verse-speaking. He was known, too, as an intellectual dandy, and this may well have influenced his casting as Richard II. His Richard certainly gave the impression of being in love with his own voice, but that’s legitimate for the character. He ascended, as Richard should, to the status of minor prophet: unworthy perhaps as a man but still the vessel for a curse that it takes seven more blood-soaked plays to expiate.
Richard II was a favourite play for William; he directed it, meticulously if unexcitingly, at the National Theatre in 1972. His directing career had really taken off 10 years previously when he revivified London’s Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, a place that no one had taken seriously in ages. He started with a delightful Midsummer Night’s Dream (in which he, typically, played Oberon) and followed it with a Love’s Labour’s Lost whose reviews were orgasmic; the late Bernard Levin wrote that the pleasure it gave him could only be compared to sexual pleasure.
None of his work in Canada, where he first worked in 1966, aroused responses that heightened. In fact, of the three Stratford productions of his that I saw, two were boring. One was a Romeo and Juliet, with two future Stratford ADs, Monette and Marti Maraden, as the lovers, and with a built-up multi-levelled set that practically screamed 1950s. The other was T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, a piece of High Church martyrology that only he would have programmed; though, as he pointed out to me, it did very well at the box office, suggesting that some spiritual cravings were indeed being served. The Stratford production of his that I enjoyed was the robust Elizabethan comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday, a play that he’d previously directed with great success in London. And for all his ascetic image, comedy may have been where he was happiest. As often happens he was far less of a purist, certainly far less of a puritan, in practice than in theory. He directed Troilus and Cressida, as part of a Stratford “war” season in 1987, as if the words “conservative” and “academic” had been hurled in his direction just once too often, and he was determined to disprove them. He was roundly damned for doing so but, judging from those same reviews, most of his supposedly outrageous inventions were perfectly in keeping with an outrageous text.
His less controversial Stratford work, over a period of three decades, included a mellow Twelfth Night, with Monette and Martha Henry as visually persuasive twins; and highly praised versions of The Winter’s Tale and Ben Jonson’s scabrous Volpone. Jonson suited him; my favourite acting role of his was Ananias, the scruffy Puritan fanatic in The Alchemist whom he played, with quivering shoulders and a Cockney accent, twice: on television, directed like An Age of Kings by Peter Dews, and onstage in a riotous modern-dress production by the man I suspect was his idol, Tyrone Guthrie -- a great show, and William more or less stole it. As Stratford’s chief, he was hardly in political-theatrical fashion but he was, in his own way, adventurous. He once wrote scathingly of “our suburban concern with ‘relevance,’ ” but along with Racine and Euripides, he championed Canadian plays, especially those of Michel Tremblay, whom he programmed in three successive seasons. He also, for better or worse, helped institutionalize the Stratford musical.
A few years ago, he came out of semi-retirement to play Boyet, the senior courtier, in Maraden’s production of Love’s Labour’s, and was elegant as ever. He was never in the theatrical mainstream, not in Canada, and certainly not in Britain. A supposed revolution in Shakespearean acting took place in the 1960s, emphasizing irony and intellect; he certainly had both those qualities but he was too old-school to be really part of it. He was though, a late flowering of the tradition whose know-how made that revolution possible; and his presence in An Age of Kings puts it on permanent record.