Every inch a king
PAUL GROSS PLAYS LEAR AS A MAN TEETERING ON EDGE BEFORE THE FALL
For award-winning Canadian actor Paul Gross, a typical working day sees him setting out early for a walk with his dogs. It’s his way of getting into gear for another performance of King Lear at the Stratford Festival.
So the other morning, he was hitting the trail by 8.30 a.m. in the company of two canine pals — a lively pair of rescue animals of indeterminate origin — who would serve as his audience while he ran through his lines.
Gross is more than halfway through his critically acclaimed run as Shakespeare’s doomed monarch, but he can’t allow himself to become complacent.
“It can never become a matter of just doing it,” he says firmly. “On every show day, I do all of my lines out loud with Jerry and Banjo. It’s not that I worry about not remembering them — that’s not a problem. It’s just that I have to keep it all front-loaded in my mind.”
With his morning run-through completed to his satisfaction, the 64-year-old actor was in his dressing room at the Festival Theatre by noon, making final preparations for his matinee performance as the patriarchal ruler who creates chaos and bloodshed with his ill-considered decision to divide his realm among his three daughters.
Gross notes with some amusement that his younger self is currently visible on Netflix in the role of stalwart RCMP officer Benton Fraser in Due South, the hit television series that ran from 1994 to 1999.
“It’s an extraordinarily enduring show,” he says affectionately. It also brought him a stardom that extended beyond Canada’s borders — which is why, nearly three decades later, fervent Due South fans have been showing up to check out his current foray into Shakespeare.
“People have been coming here from far away, even from overseas. They loved Due South so much that they want to see Lear.”
This is a role long considered to be one of the most taxing in the Shakespearean canon — one that sees Lear stripped of his power and dignity and reduced to rage and madness. But Gross, a naturally gifted classical actor with an uncanny ability to bring clarity to even the most intimidating Shakespearean verse, finds that Lear does not exert the kind of emotional toll he suffered when he tackled Hamlet at Stratford 23 years ago.
Gross found Hamlet very disturbing to play because the character is so solitary.
“You’re really alone in that play. Even his friends can’t help him, so you kind of grind against the boulders in your own psyche and you know it’s not going to end well. Hamlet takes hold of you ... it is relentless. I was getting really paranoid and didn’t trust anybody around me.”
In contrast, for all its darkness and horror, the role of Lear does not trap the actor on the kind of psychological roller-coaster that Hamlet demands. Furthermore, Lear is not prey to the sort of painful self-reflection that afflicts Hamlet. “You have to let Lear inhabit you ... yet at the end you sort of feel burned clean.”
Five months into his Lear run with another two still to go, he’s still making discoveries about the character. “I love it when a play seems dense and bottomless. So right to the end of October, I’ll be learning new stuff.”
Many productions of Lear offer a monarch who is old, decrepit and often senile. But at the start of this current Stratford revival, Gross’s lean vigorous Lear is far removed from critic Charles Lamb’s notorious image of “an old man tottering about the stage with a walking stick.”
Gross follows a more intriguing route by first giving audiences a seemingly capable ruler who is fully confident about the decision he is now making to carve up his kingdom. So why does everything go so appallingly wrong?
“Senility or anything in that direction is not something that appeals to me because then he has no culpability for what happens,” Gross says. His Lear has kept a difficult kingdom relatively stable, but now he’s tired — tired enough to take a fatally wrong action. “Yet he also knows there’s something ‘wrong’ inside him.” Gross points out how a brief exchange with the Duke of Kent suddenly sends Lear berserk — signalling a king already teetering on the edge.
The example of the late William Hutt, a great Canadian actor who played Lear more than once, helps explain Gross’s presence in the role. On his first visit to Stratford as a young teenager, he saw Hutt play Lear. “I knew then that I wanted to be part of that world,” he says now. This legendary artist remained an inspiration. Gross first came to know him through his actress wife Martha Burns who had acted with Hutt, but Gross himself didn’t have the chance to work with him professionally until Hutt, now in his late 80s, took on the role of a dying actor playing Lear in Gross’s acclaimed TV series, Slings And Arrows.
“One day on the set I was asked to go to Bill’s trailer. I went in, sat down, and he said: ‘I am actually dying, but please don’t tell the producers.’ It was in that context that he would also ask me when I was going to do Lear.”
William Hutt died in 2007 at the age of 87. But Gross is always conscious of the fact that he’s walking on a stage that was Hutt’s domain for decades. That he feels is part of the festival’s uniqueness. “The continuity of tradition is always here.”