City native helps bring Shakespeare to big screen
Stratford actor Tom Rooney, a Saskatoon native, appears on the big screen in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
The play, part of Stratford Festival HD, screens across Canada on Saturday, including the Scotiabank Theatre Saskatoon. It’s part of an ambitious plan by the festival to film all of Shakespeare’s plays over 10 years.
“I think it’s an amazing way for people to see the shows,” Rooney said recently. “It’s so great that they’ve put the resources behind it and found the money to produce these things."
Rooney played the pedant Holofernes in the play which also featured Ruby Joy, Mike Shara, Sarah Afful, Juan Chioran, Josue Laboucane and Sanjay Talwar. The Torontoist said “it’s impossible to say who gives the most delicious performance in this comic feast.”
Rooney described his character as a “pompous ass, basically. He knows everything and enjoys speaking in manners that no one truly understands, including the actor playing it, I have to say.” He called Love’s Labour’s Lost one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays.
“The verse is incredibly dense and most of it rhymes so that can be very challenging. But it’s a beautiful story."
Rooney is heading into his 10th consecutive season with Stratford. He has huge roles this season, playing the title character in Moliere’s Tartuffe in addition to Rowley in Richard Sheridan’s The School for Scandal and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night.
“Shakespeare is constantly a challenge,” Rooney says. “I find the more I do it the more difficult it becomes, in some ways. It is bottomless. There’s a constant riddle in every one of his shows and you’re constantly searching for answers. The amazing thing about him is that he gives you just enough and then he allows you to bring yourself to it.”
Shooting for Love’s Labour’s Lost took place two seasons ago near the end of the run. It was filmed in front of a matinee audience. Additional shots and close-ups were gathered during an evening runthrough. There were 10 cameras and 128 channels of sound.
“They shoot it very much like a sporting event. The director is in a van outside with all the TV monitors and he’s literally calling the shots. It’s a fairly fast and furious experience,” said Rooney.
The presence of cameras did have the potential to change the dynamic, he added.
“Eventually, you put it out of your mind. But theatre is a very sensitive art form. Because you know the audience is feeling self-conscious, you start feeling self-conscious and there’s a real feedback loop going on. Which is kind of the great thing about theatre because that doesn’t happen anywhere else. We rely on the audience, the audience relies on us and everybody is in the same room experiencing the same thing.”
Another project close to Rooney ’s heart is the Gina Wilkinson Prize, named after his late wife, awarded annually to an emerging female director. Information on the award can be found on the Ontario Arts Foundation’s website.