A NEW POINT OF VIEW
Androcles and the Lion production involves props and audience participation,
When Tim Carroll took over as artistic director of the Shaw Festival last year, he promised to shake up the company.
In May, he talked to my colleague Carly Maga about some of those changes: from staging productions in unconventional spaces to coaxing longtime festivalgoers to see new kinds of work.
While these shifts involve everyone who works at Shaw, it’s the ensemble who is on the front lines of delivering them: the 63 performers acting in the festival’s 11 productions, most of whom are company veterans.
The show in the current season that most obviously pushes actors and audiences out of their comfort zones is Carroll’s production of Androcles and the Lion, written in 1912 by George Bernard Shaw himself and never — it can safely be said — staged quite like this before.
Major elements of the production will happen differently each night. The 14-strong cast selects one of its members before each performance to serve as MC. The Lion is played by an audience member. Other spectators throw juggling balls on the stage floor that cue various actions, from recitations of parts of Shaw’s preface to the play, to an actor singing a song or revealing what they were thinking at the moment the ball hit the deck.
Niagara Falls Review critic John Law says the show “sheds new light on the process of theatre” and that it’s like “friends workshopping Shaw in your living room.”
It’s a “completely different way of working and frankly a little terrifying,” says Patrick Galligan, the 14season festival veteran who plays Androcles. Like many actors, Galligan says, “I like to rehearse in a particular way . . . We like to have posts and fixed points to the play, and determine at the beginning where we’re going to go.” But in Carroll’s approach, “there is little in the way of a plan.”
Galligan embraces this, saying he’s “come to a point in my career that I want a different approach, something that scares me and challenges me, and is not comfortable.” This is not surprising: he was a member of the committee that hired Carroll. But surely this approach to perfor- mance must be prompting conversations within the ensemble?
“It’s absolutely a talking point, are you kidding?” Galligan says. “It’s fiercely debated. There are people who are resistant; there are people who are enthusiastic, but if we were all on board from the get-go, it’d be more like a cult than a creative environment.”
Carroll says working with an ensemble over the span of years was the main reason he applied for the job. As has been widely noted, he’d never directed a play by GBS nor at the Shaw Festival before he was hired there.
Not every show he directs involves as much unpredictability as Androcles, but Carroll says the same philosophy underlies all his work: that “there is no excuse for mindless repetition, that everything can be different every night, no matter how much has to be fixed for choreography or safety or any other reason.”
Asking the performers to move from playing characters to expressing their personal thoughts and feelings onstage is “important mostly for the audience,” he says. “The audience changes its view of everything they’re watching when the actors expose themselves. I know it’s a big challenge to the actors; I think audiences really respond to courage.”
Participation is not forced on the audience. During the pre-show, the actors circulate and chat with spectators, determining who wants to play and who doesn’t.
“There’s nothing worse than asking for a volunteer and having silence, and then having to say ‘Anyone . . . come on?’ Only a fool would leave his actors open to that,” Carroll says.
Carroll is also running company classes so that the actors who aren’t in the shows he’s directing this season ( Saint Joan and Androcles) can experience his approach. Other artistic leaders advised him about this: “Your work has to set the course for the organization. It’s more important than the hands you shake or the dinners you attend or the budgets you crunch.”
Levels of acceptance have differed. “Many of the actors fall on this like a man dying of thirst coming to an oasis; some of them look at it like a 5-year-old looking at a plate of food they’ve not tried before. I say to them what I said to my kids: Just try it! I think it’s fair to say we’re seeing the benefits but, of course, I’m the boss.” Androcles and the Lion plays at the Court House Theatre, 26 Queen St., Niagaraon-the-Lake, through Oct. 7. See shawfest.com or call 1-800-511-7429. Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Carly Maga.