Hutt back as Lear on Slings & Arrows
Six weeks ago William Hutt took his final bows at the Stratford Festival, appropriately playing Prospero in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s own farewell to the stage. But now in the manner of the ghost in Hamlet and the deceased artistic director played by Stephen Ouimette in Slings & Arrows, the 85- year- old dean of Canadian actors is poised for a spectacular comeback — on the small screen.
In a delicious casting coup, the producers of Slings & Arrows — the brilliantly witty and bitchy series about a Shakespeare festival in a town with certain similarities to Stratford — have landed Hutt to play a continuing role.
“ I tried to make it very clear before my final season at Stratford that I was retiring from the stage, but not from film and TV,” he explained yesterday in a phone interview during his lunch break. “ Now I am having fun and enjoying the company. It’s hard work, but I find the lines from Lear come back to me easily.” And if you saw the film version of Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Norman Jewison’s movie The Statement, then you know that William Hutt on screen is just as formidable as William Hutt on stage.
In all six episodes of Sling’s third and final season, Hutt plays a crusty old journeyman actor named Charles who has always dreamed of playing the title role in King Lear and finally gets a chance to do so at the New Burbage Shakespeare Festival.
That’s a bit of an inside joke, since Hutt has played this same role four times at Stratford, as well as once playing the Fool to Peter Ustinov’s Lear. “The actor I play has been dragged out of retirement,” Hutt says, “ and he’s a bit scrappy and intimidating with younger actors.”
It seems Charles has some dark secrets that threaten to bring down Geoffrey Tennant, the impulsive artistic director played by Paul Gross, and the festival itself, which was already teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe by the end of Sling’s second season.
“ Bill is the greatest actor on this continent,” says Susan Coyne, who has been involved in the series as co- writer, actor and
creative producer of the six episodes in the final season. “ But apart from that, the reason we wanted him was we needed someone with enough depth of experience to be credible as Lear. Bill has that stature.”
Producer Sari Friedland adds: “We had started talking with him a year earlier about being in season two, but the timing didn’t work out. We wanted to try again for season three, but of course we had to have a plan B ( involving another actor) in case he didn’t take the part.” The series is constructed as a trilogy, and each season revolves around the production of a major Shakespearean tragedy: Hamlet, Macbeth
and now Lear.
In the beginning, Stratford artistic director Richard Monette and executive producer Antoni Cimolino were definitely not amused about being sent up by their occasional producing partner, Rhombus Media, in a TV show about the hysterical goingson behind the scenes at a small-town Shakespeare festival.
For a while, Rhombus danced away from the Stratford association, claiming it was about any theatre festival. Meanwhile many of the people closely associated with the show — Gross, Coyne and Ouimette along with Martha Burns and Colm Feore — just happened to be associated in the public mind with Stratford. As soon as the first six episodes hit the air on The Movie Network two years ago, the word was out that this was classic showbiz satire in the tradition of Singin’ in the Rain and The Producers. As the show gained prestige, Stratford got over its hissy fit and belatedly realized it ought to be grateful for the attention. TMN subscribers switched on their VCRs so they could share their discovery with non- subscribers. Eventually, the show’s reputation spread with the help of repeat telecasts in Canada on Showcase and the show’s sensationally well- reviewed debut on the Sundance Channel in the U. S. Ahigh point of season two featured Feore as a demented swindler who had novel concepts for beefing up the festival’s revenue from corporate sponsors, which ended up with him in jail and the festival awash in red ink. Now that Slings & Arrows is finally getting the acclaim it deserves, it might be tempting to extend its life beyond three seasons and 18 episodes. But that would be difficult, because at the end of season three, something dramatic occurs that could be along the lines of Shakespeare’s great Globe itself vanishing into thin air.
Besides, according to Coyne, “ we always conceived of this as a trilogy.”
Hutt’s participation should provide the final seal of approval and the ultimate irony. There is no film record of his Stratford performances as Lear. And so, decades from now, scholars who want to know what Hutt’s Lear was like will have to turn, when writing their PhD theses, to Slings & Arrows. mknelman@thestar.ca