Stratford Festival actors discuss villains
Stars from three different plays dig into their characters’ motivations
Many actors will tell you it’s more fun to play a villain than a hero. The roles are meatier and the lines are better and according to three actors at the Stratford Festival this season, playing obviously flawed characters gives them a lot to work with.
Lucy Peacock never had to look that deep for the motivation of her character in Erin Shields’ Paradise Lost, at the Studio Theatre. She plays Satan, the leader of the rebel angels thrown out of heaven at the start of Shields’ adaptation of John Milton’s epic poem.
Still, Peacock says her first job was to find what you’d have to call the humanity in the character. “It would be too trite to just say ‘that’s Satan, and she’s bad.’”
Peacock’s Satan is the play’s protagonist, and often breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience and try to explain what’s going on — both inside the story and behind her actions.
“Her heart is broken,” Peacock says. “She feels she’s been betrayed, abandoned. There’s so much loss and grief and rage and the evil comes up out of the rage. And she’s working with that rather than work with her own devastation. I think what she’s looking for is commiseration in her direct addresses to the audience.”
I ask her if she thinks her character is evil.
“On the inside I don’t necessarily because I have it all sorted out — why she gets there. She turns from an activist into a terrorist, and that’s evil. But what’s evil? That’s kind of open for interpretation.”
With that in mind, does she think her character is bad?
“Is she bad? Yeah, she’s bad. Yeah. She’s wicked. She likes to be bad. She’s embraced that, but she is so strong and powerful and smart and complicated that she can make bad look good — for a time.”
Morality is far less clear in Eduardo De Filippo’s Napoli Milionaria!, at the Avon Theatre. Written at the end of the Second World War, it’s the story of a family struggling to survive in the physical and economic devastation of Naples, Italy.
Amalia, the matriarch, turns to the black market and thrives there when she discovers a talent for business. Along the way she makes choices that enrich her at the expense of other people, but Brigit Wilson, who plays Amalia, says she could never bring herself to condemn her character.
“I always feel as an actor that you are always an advocate for the character. So you should never pass judgment, the moment you do that you let the audience off the hook.”
Researching the role, Wilson learned about the humiliating options presented to women under both German and Allied occupation, when food was scarce and rationed and prostitution was rampant. Amalia, she decided, had a choice between evils and chose the less devastating option.
“Black-market trade was immoral. Was she selling her daughter and herself? No, that was immoral. My ethics and personal values would be challenged, and Amalia decides the black market is something she could live with.”
Just as Wilson found herself playing a character who had to rationalize her choices to preserve her family, Jonathan Goad is playing a character who has to rationalize murder for the greater good of his country.
The dirty secret of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is that it’s really about Brutus, one of the ringleaders of the conspiracy to murder Caesar. It’s the story of the journey Brutus takes, both in making his decision to kill Caesar and afterwards, when his decision plunges Rome into chaos and civil war.
“One way that Brutus overcomes the moral dilemma is by seeing it an abstraction,” Goad says. “He doesn’t talk about it as murder but as a sacrifice for the greater good, which is of course absurd.”
Power is the issue at the heart of Julius Caesar, and Goad sees power forming both his character’s sense of himself and his motivations.
“Many people in the play refer to themselves in the third person, but none more than Brutus. These men of power are like gods on earth, and they create images of themselves, a notion of manhood and their particular role in society, which becomes inhuman and unobtainable.”
“Brutus has a pretty high opinion of himself. Not that he’s smug or has an inflated sense of ego, but that he’s lived a stoic life that is principled, that is about the common good.”
For Goad, Brutus is an all too recognizable figure: A good man who does bad things, and ultimately the author of his — and the play’s — tragedy.
“I don’t think he sees himself as bad, and objectively I don’t see him as bad, but ultimately he makes a choice from which much badness comes — he brings about war and strife and civil breakdown of his treasured Rome.”