Called to the Bard
Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, Stratford’s Graham Abbey is bringing new audiences to the plays that helped him weather the slings and arrows of his own life. Paul Hunter,
STRATFORD, ONT.— Seeing as Graham Abbey is one of Canada’s most accomplished Shakespearean actors, the moment should be more dramatic.
But as he undoes the top buttons of his plaid shirt to reveal a toonie-sized scar over his heart, his story of how a cancer scare ultimately pushed him into acting is remarkably matter-of-fact.
Abbey would come to understand he got off easy with that surgical souvenir on his chest. No need to overplay it 20 years later.
Still, if he’d followed the original script, Abbey would likely be a lawyer or a politician today.
It wasn’t in his plans to become one of the Stratford Festival’s leading men — or someone who, on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, is passionately keeping the Bard relevant through his own writing and directing. A child of this small picturesque city, Abbey was lured back to its stages by centuries-old poetry he now feels compelled, and humbled, to keep vital.
“I want to do something that fills my soul,” says the 45-year-old. “For me, that is Shakespeare.”
The young Graham Abbey had mapped out an entirely different career path, one by way of Osgoode Hall Law School. But circumstances — fate, to frame it in Shakespearean terms — interceded in a perfect tempest to push him to the theatre.
The death of a close family friend, an athletic injury and growing cynicism about the political process all forced him to reconsider what he really wanted in life.
But, mostly, there was that mole on his chest that didn’t look right. Turned out it wasn’t. “It was life-changing,” he says of the melanoma diagnosis. “I think it shifted my focus because I knew I loved and enjoyed the acting, but my cerebral side said, ‘No, no, you have to do something serious like law.’ When that happened, I thought maybe I should just do something I love and see what happens.”
The surgery was a success — “It was a quick, abrupt thing; it was there and they cut it out,” says Abbey — and the brief fright is now just an intriguing plot twist in the tale of how a local lad came to be a champion for some of the world’s greatest literature.
It is a passion Abbey is now exporting to Toronto. In 2011, he founded the Groundling Theatre Company, which is dedicated to producing Shakespeare’s plays in an imaginative and accessible way. As its artistic director, Abbey enticed Stratford royalty — Tony Award-winner Brent Carver, Tom McCamus and Lucy Peacock, to name a few — to appear in a 102-seat pop-up theatre on the Danforth earlier this year, in a production of The Winter’s Tale.
It was a coup Abbey compares to the “Rolling Stones playing the El Mocambo.”
While the experience was akin to performing Shakespeare in someone’s living room, McCamus says he “didn’t even hesitate” when approached about doing a difficult play in such an intimate space with a neophyte director calling the shots.
“(Abbey) has such a passion and a love for Shakespeare, it has always been clear that (directing) would be the next step for him,” McCamus says. “I came away saying I’d love to work with him again.”
The show was critically lauded during its 31⁄ 2- week run, with people lined up in the cold for almost four hours before curtain in the hopes of scoring rush seats — literally cushions on the floor beside the small stage — or tickets from no-shows.
“To me, that’s a testimonial in and of itself of people’s hunger for Shakespeare in the city,” says Abbey.
With tickets priced at $25 to $35, he believes he reached a new audience in a part of the city that wouldn’t typically be exposed to this type of theatre.
“It’s going to excite, possibly, a younger generation to be regular attendees of Stratford. To me, that’s a noble goal,” he says. Abbey also conducted Shakespeare workshops for young actors during the run.
The play, he figures, lost something like $30,000 to $40,000 — “It’s not a formula for any of my backers that I can continue with,” he says — but the director is already looking for a larger space with the same intimate feel for his next Toronto production.
Longtime Canadian director John Wood, instrumental in giving Abbey his first break at Stratford, came away from The Winter’s
Tale impressed with how the production was filled with “imagination and ideas.” He believes Groundling, with its fresh approach, could be “huge” for classical theatre in Toronto if it establishes permanence as a Shakespeare company.
“It is something that Toronto needs. It is something that, obviously, Toronto wants. And it is of a quality that Toronto deserves,” he says.
Abbey has also stretched beyond acting for the upcoming Stratford season. He has adapted four of Shakespeare’s history plays into two nights of theatre called Breath of
Kings, which opens June 22. “I think Graham is becoming very important in the world of Shakespeare, and not just in Canada. He’s forging new paths,” says Wood. “I think word is going to get around that there is something new happening with Shakespeare in Canada.”
No one would have guessed that based on how Abbey started out.
Acting bug bit early, and left its sting
Abbey’s acting career appeared to be over before he even hit his teens.
The son of Robert, a lawyer turned judge, and Sharon, a lifelong educator who became a professor at Brock University, he was born in St. Catharines. His parents divorced when he was just 4. He moved to Stratford with his mother and sister at the end of Grade 3 and soon was onstage when the festival went looking for youngsters who could sing.
Abbey had been in choirs and he loved performing for reasons a kid would: it was a chance to skip school, and backstage there were doughnuts.
While acting got into Abbey’s blood at a young age, two years of small parts on the Stratford stage served as an effective exsanguination.
Watching the backstage squabbling and actors having meltdowns, he says, “knocked the theatre out of me.”
Literally, in one instance. In his second summer, he worked under fiery artistic director John Hirsch — a Hungarian-born Jew who lost his parents and brother in a German concentration camp — on what Abbey remembers as duction of As You Like Hirsch created a des on his experience w Within that opening beggar boy was to walk chase a potato from a
He did this at rehearsal, but, Abbey recounts, Hirsch screamed "Stop!" Hirsch approached Abbey, perplexed about what the young actor was doing. The boyexplained he was buying a potato.
“But you look happy about this," Abbey recalls Hirsch telling him. "You're suffering. You must . . . I want you to go to the centre pillar of the stage and I want you to bang your head against it 50 times and say ‘s--t’ every time.”
“I thought he was joking," Abbey continues. “I started to do it and I did a couple. I looked up and he said, 'No, no, c'mon, we're still counting.’ And he counted to 50. By the end of it, I was fairly distraught because I was embarrassed emotionally. He looked at me and said, ‘You see that, that's what we want. Now we go on.’ It was an early experience for me, I guess, of the cost of acting."
In high school, Abbey did no acting.Instead, he was a full-fledged jock, a feared spiker on a legendary Stratford Central Rams volleyball team that won two provincial titles.
The plan was then to go to Queen's University, study political science, play volleyball and move on to law school, just like his dad. But all that jumping took its toll. Bad knees prevented him from making the Queen’s team in his third year. As a diversion from his studies, he joined the Queen’s Players, a troupe that did musical sketches and improv at the pubs. Abbey was energized to be on the stage again.
But he was also conflicted. He felt he should pursue “real” work and suppres the acting urge. He was accepted to Osgoode but deferred when offered a highly
“I think word is going to get around that there is something new happening with Shakespeare in Canada.” JOHN WOOD LONGTIME DIRECTOR, ON THE WORK BEING DONE BY ABBEY’S THEATRE COMPANY
coveted internship program at the Ontario legislature. The experience soured Abbey on politics when he encountered hostility on the doorsteps during the 1995 election campaign.
At night he would hustle up to North York to rehearse and then perform in community musical theatre, doing Hello, Dolly! with the Yorkminstrels.
“Even back then, his performance was so endearing and charming,” recalls Mike Nadajewski, part of that Yorkminstrels cast and an actor who also made his way to Stratford. “I remember he had an insatiable appetite to kind of crack the scene. You could tell this was what he wanted to do.”
While Abbey felt the pull of the theatre, outside forces also started to push him in that direction. A family friend, whom the kids affectionately called Uncle Mike, died from cancer. It hit home that life “is a short ride,” Abbey says. “That was the first moment when I had a sense of mortality.”
As he weighed his future, his father offered the advice that “there are just as many starving lawyers as there are starving actors. Do what you want to do. If something inspires you to get out of bed and spend your day doing that, then do it.”
Abbey, also dealing with the cancer scare, put off law school again. He would try acting for a year, he promised himself.
The path he followed was so well worn it seems clichéd. He took a job as a waiter at the now defunct Tony Calzone’s Wine Cellar in midtown Toronto and moved into a “cockroach-infested” apartment in Little Portugal. He got a huge break when John Wood, directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Oakville’s Coronation Park, cast him as Demetrius.
Wood recalls a man who was “a little bit apologetic for presenting himself as an actor.” However, the director was blown away. “I knew that Graham had it — there was no question,” Wood recalls. “When you’ve been auditioning for such a long time when somebody — and it’s rare — with real talent walks into the room, you just know it. He spoke Shakespeare beautifully, which is a real feat. I immediately wanted him in the production. It was hardly much of an audition. He was just that good.”
Wood tipped off Stratford artistic director Richard Monette about his discovery. One live viewing by Monette was enough. The next year, 1997, Abbey was back on the Stratford stage.
A prince of Stratford takes up the crown
Abbey has been in more than 30 Stratford productions, but one night is particularly etched in his memory, one that was the impetus for his most ambitious project at the festival.
The two-part Breath of Kings, which will be mounted this summer, is an adapting/ writing endeavour that has been 15 years in the making and has gone through some 30 drafts.
It traces the lives, the battles for power and the deaths of kings Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V. Abbey has condensed four histories, known as the Henriad, into two nights of theatre, sort of a Shakespearean Game of Thrones. The genesis of the project came after Abbey played Hal one night in a production of Henry V, a play filled with the horrors of war. It was Sept. 11, 2001. Abbey himself had been in upstate New York that morning on a golfing trip with several members of the cast. When the planes destroyed the World Trade Center, the actor and his pals hustled to the border before it closed. That evening, in Stratford, Abbey brought the entire Henry V crew onstage to address a full house.
“We all had a moment of silence with the audience and I asked them to take the hand of the person next to them. It was quite a profound moment I’ll always remember,” he recalls.
“After it, there was a knock on my dressing room door and there was a man standing there who I’d never seen in my life . . . and he was completely in tears. He gave me a hug, and when he sort of pulled himself together, he said he was from New York and he’d spent the day trying to get a hold of his family, which, at that point, I think he still hadn’t. He said, ‘The only thing I could think to do tonight was to turn off CNN and come and listen to Shakespeare.’ ”
Abbey says it was during that poignant exchange that he committed to creating
Breath of Kings, an idea that he had been mulling since the Gulf War.
He’d never understood the relevance of Shakespeare to a modern audience more than he did that evening. It struck him that Shakespeare wrote “about the same stuff we deal with today. The same cycle of violence.”
There is less than a kilometre between the Avon Theatre, where Abbey was inspired by that stranger, and the Tom Patterson Theatre, which has seen its stage ripped out and redesigned to accommodate his vision. But it’s been a long road to get there. Abbey left Stratford for a while, deciding that if he was ever going to do TV, he’d better do it while he was in his 30s. But he hadn’t counted on the bias against theatre actors trying to make it on the small screen.
“I had a very tough time,” he says. “I was tempted to take all the Shakespeare off my resumé. People see you as one thing or another. It’s hard to be both.”
What didn’t hurt Abbey were his matinee idol looks and the fact he’d maintained an athlete’s body. He was eventually cast as womanizing gambler Det. Sgt. Gray Jackson in CBC’s The Border. He did film work, too, appearing in Take This Waltz, Casino
Jack and Defendor. Abbey married fellow Stratford actor Michelle Giroux almost eight years ago and they are now raising a daughter, 16-monthold Vivienne. They live about a block from the Tom Patterson; the proximity, along with a dedicated babysitter, helps the couple balance the long hours of rehearsals with child-rearing.
These are busy days for Abbey. Not only does he spend evenings tinkering with the text of Breath of Kings — he’s had input from professors of literature, historians, directors and playwrights — but he is also rehearsing his acting role in the adaptation, as Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV.
It is obvious Abbey remains firmly and affectionately in the Bard’s grip.
“Why I love Shakespeare and why I presume others do, too, is because at its essence, (the plays) are not only domestic stories, but they’re universal and eternal because they’re about things like love, hate and jealousy. Those things never change,” Abbey says.
“That’s the joy of doing it. I just see them as beautiful poetry about those universal things. That’s why I think they’re still relevant today. The setting that they’re in doesn’t date them. The kernel at the heart of the play is eternal.”
He is reminded of how his good friend and Stratford stalwart Brian Bedford, who died in January, would turn to Shakespeare’s works the way some people rely on the Bible.
“(Brian) would go to it for moments in his life when he needed solace, understanding or to work through something . . . I find that Shakespeare does that for me — passages from it help me figure things out in life.”