The elegance of Robin Phillips
Director brought new subtlety to Stratford
Of the ten artistic directors of the Stratford Festival, the two who have left the most decisive marks on the place are Tyrone Guthrie and Robin Phillips. Guthrie’s contribution is obvious. In 1953, he started it all off: the great platform stage itself (encased in a tent back then) and the idea of a company of Canadian actors doing world-class Shakespeare. Phillips, whose regime ran from 1975 to 1980, and who has died at age 73, gave the festival the logistical shape it still possesses: the long seasons, the crowded repertoire, the unveiling of seven or eight shows during opening week, the cross-casting between three, or now four, theatres.
Both of course left artistic marks as well. Phillips’ contribution, by common consent, was to introduce a new subtlety and elegance to Stratford design and Stratford acting. He had railed in his native England against what he described as “semaphore acting”; he found it in Canada too, along with “twirling,” movement for its own sake, endemic on the Festival stage.
He started as an actor, and was quite a successful one; as a willowy juvenile in the 1960s, he had a prominent role in the famous BBC serial The Forsyte Saga. But acting didn’t satisfy him; he switched to directing, starting at the Northcott repertory theatre in the West of England. A friend of mine in the company recalled how he would get down on the floor with his actors, who all emerged dusty and dishevelled while “Robin would get up, somehow still immaculate in white shirt and slacks.” His rise was meteoric; he hit the West End, and then Broadway, with a fairly terrible play called Abelard and Heloise and became a regular director at the Chichester Festival Theatre and for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which somehow never adopted him as one of their own. His work, including a Two Gentlemen of Verona set around a swimming-pool, was thought to be too lightweight.
At 33, he became the youngest artistic director Stratford ever had. Initially reluctant to take on the job, he relented and set about re-making the place in his own aesthetic image. According to Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s current AD, Phillips found the prevailing Stratford style “too robust, too boring”; in stripping that away he could take an actor like William Hutt, already Stratford’s doyen and “enable him just to speak.” In his first Stratford season, he directed a Measure for Measure that electrified everybody with its quality of being not so much heard as overheard. Martha Henry, who played Isabella in that production, says that he’s the only director she’s known who never said “I can’t hear you, make it louder.”
Cimolino, who eighteen years later acted in King John, Phillips’ last Stratford production, told me that “with Robin, the setting did much of the acting for you.” He clarified by saying that Phillips’ productions created a world: “He had a way of drawing the company into a comprehensive vision — and he would draw the audience in, rather than going to them.” Henry confirms this: “Acting for Robin, you knew if it was raining or snowing — you always knew where the play sat.”
And everything was there for a purpose. Henry once arrived for a Measure rehearsal to find a jug of water on the set, with a napkin in it. Nothing was said, but in the scene where Brian Bedford’s Angelo tried to seduce her, she knew instinctively when to draw the napkin out and mop her brow with it. Bedford, a star in London and New York, was one of the actors Phillips brought to Stratford; he played a mesmerizing Richard III in a production that worked magnificently as both character study and spectacle. Other stars he attracted were Maggie Smith, for four seasons, and Peter Ustinov who played an unexpected King Lear in a production carefully tailored for his qualities, comic and otherwise. But mainly Phillips worked with local talent. Cimolino, who attributes his own theatrical career to having seen Phillips’ Love’s Labour’s Lost when he was at school, says that “beauty is what one remembers, a calm, elegant freedom.”
The elegance could become an end in itself; and my own feeling is that the overall standard of Stratford acting, below star level, is higher now than it was then. Still, Phillips’ tenure remains in Stratford memory as a golden age. It had a brief sequel in the 1980s when he directed the festival’s young company in an unbroken sequence of acclaimed productions. The actors involved became the nucleus of Toronto’s Soulpepper company whose two initial shows, in 1998, Phillips also directed; one of them, Don Carlos, was his last legendary production, as rich and concentrated as anything he ever did.
After that, he did little work in major theatres. But two years ago he directed an invited-audience Twelfth Night with the young trainee actors of Stratford’s conservatory. According to Cimolino, Phillips seemed principally concerned in rehearsals with how they moved and looked, and yet the result “had some of the clearest text-work I’ve seen.” Henry, director of the conservatory, says it received a standing ovation such as she’s never known at one of these rehearsal-hall performances. As director of plays and of theatres, Phillips had a huge vision, one that he filled out, both on the stage and behind it, with extraordinarily painstaking detail.