Six roles to remember: Graham Abbey reflects on his favourite Shakespearean turns
Florizel, The Winter’s Tale (Stratford, 1998) “In early rehearsals I decided I would really show off. I wanted to impress (director) Mr. (Brian) Bedford. I’d watched him since I was a kid, so I really came with all this emotion and energy. In one scene, I just laid it all out. I was on the floor in a sweaty mess of tears. I remember Brian leaned back in his chair and he said, ‘It’s all right but we simply can’t charge people money for this.’ I struck up a friendship with Brian after that. I would go to him with questions. He was a great mentor.”
Henry, Prince of Wales (Hal), Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2,
and Henry V (Stratford, 2001) “Playing that one character through and being able to go through the evolution of it was a fantastic opportunity and a rare one at this place. It was a gift of an opportunity from the late artistic director Richard Monette, who wanted me to have that experience. The sequence was called ‘The Making of a King,’ so it was at a time when I was starting to take on bigger roles. If you look at those three plays, it’s the biggest roles I’ll have taken on, really. So it was an extraordinary time.”
Romeo, Romeo and Juliet (Stratford, 2002) “I loved that play. Claire Jullien played Juliet. I think Romeo and
Juliet is a very tricky play . . . and Claire and I had the opportunity to do lots of roles opposite each other as a run-up to it, which is the great thing about being in a (repertory) company. We had forged an onstage relationship through various roles that then was able to come to fruition with that beautiful love story. So it was a special one. It just seemed to click. I think it’s the one and the only time I’ve worn tights at the Stratford Festival.”
Petruchio, The Taming of the Shrew ( Stratford, 2003) “It was a spaghetti western version . . . I played Petruchio and it was sort of modelled after Clint Eastwood — you know, all that cowboy stuff. It was fantastic. We had this beautiful music by Marc Desormeaux, who has since passed away at a fairly young age, but he sort of modelled (it) after Ennio Morricone’s stuff . . . I had this fabulous entrance with a saddle and came around the corner to the sound of music (like something from The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly) . . . That was a fun production.”
Title role, Hamlet (Fairy Lake Park, Newmarket, 2010) “I signed up to do it. Then my father passed away. I was to start rehearsals three or four weeks after that and I was all set to pull out. My wife said maybe it would be a good thing to be busy and go through it. I had such a remarkable journey with that play. It was very therapeutic for me and almost a meditation on (my) relationship to my father. The play for me became very much about a son and his father, which is certainly one way to look at Hamlet.”
Posthumus, Cymbeline (Stratford, 2012) “This one came shortly after I had lost my best friend, Bradley Garrick, at the age of 41, to cancer. We saw him through right till the end, then I returned to Stratford to do that play. I talk about the late romances, The Winter’s Tale being one and Cymbeline another, and I just find them such beautiful meditations on life and death, forgiveness and all of those things. That play became very special to me — Posthumus’s journey and his sense of redemption and the sense of reincarnation that is in those plays.”