Stephen Fry’s storytelling shines at Mythos
Mythos: Heroes By Stephen Fry, directed by Tim Carroll. Until July 15 at the Shaw Festival Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake. Shawfest.com and 1-800-511-7429
This is Part 2 of Karen Fricker’s three-night Mythos diary.
The second night of Stephen Fry’s Mythos trilogy begins, as did the previous evening, with a campy flourish — Fry rising from below the stage on a hydraulic platform to a bombastic soundtrack, in this instance the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
From there on out the presentation is disarmingly simple: Fry sits in an armchair and tells stories, this time about a period he calls “humanity’s teenage years.” Heroes focuses on the extended, intertwined tales of Heracles and Theseus, both of whom were a mixture of mortal and divine.
I brought along two friends for whom Fry is a personal hero. Bill Ralph is a mathematician and Bruce Thompson, his partner of more than 25 years, is an actor-turned-visual artist. Actively involved in Niagara’s arts scene, they have been attending performances at the Shaw Festival for many years. They admire Fry for his gay rights advocacy, as with the 2013 TV documentary Out There in which he leveraged his high public profile to confront politicians in countries where LGBTQ populations are oppressed.
This is Bill and Bruce’s first time seeing Fry perform live, and at the intermission they’re loving it. “I imagine that I am hearing these stories and feeling the things that people would have felt 2,500 years ago,” says Bill. “He has managed to translate them into the ver- nacular and translate the drama into something that I can understand in the 21st century.”
Bruce marvels at Fry’s technique. “It’s incredible. He’s showing off all the skills that you learn as a theatre actor, to the Nth degree. He’s giving us every accent I ever tried to do.”
Improbably and amusingly, some of Fry’s cast of mythic characters have distinct and perfectly executed Yorkshire, Northern Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Cockney accents, which likely helps him keep them distinct in his own mind.
“He’s taken his love of these myths and translated it and helped me understand why they’re amazing,” says Bill. “He’s also taken his love of theatre and storytelling and given it to us, and said ‘I can make all of this interesting,’ ” Bruce adds.
After the show, Bill is more measured. Overall, the show wasn’t what he expected. “Stephen is an advocate for gay rights, he’s an atheist activist, and a few minutes into it you’re wondering why is a person with that background telling me all these deeply heterosexual stories about gods? What would motivate him to do that? … He’s doing absolutely mainstream work, very far from his social causes.”
Bill also had expectations about the professional context. “With all the resources at Shaw, all the directors and musicians and incredible people that we have here, I watched a man sit in a chair and tell a story. There’s not really acting; he doesn’t really move … it was maybe a little bit initially disappointing that I wasn’t going to get my theatre hit.”
Despite these initial surprises, Bill says, “After 10 minutes I was seduced and awake … It was wrong to come with preconceptions. He’s not just an activist, he’s also an artist, and he wanted to bring one love from his life in front of an audience and share that with us.”
There wasn’t any point to look for a deeper motive or hidden subtext, he says. “It was just a great telling of these stories. I kind of have to give it to him for that. It’s a kind of purity of motive — you’re not trying to teach me anything, you’re just trying to tell a great story.”
Bruce agrees. “That’s what hit me completely — that pure storytelling when it’s done well and by a professional can be riveting. Especially the second act, which just flew by.”
When I ask them if they’d pay to see the other two shows in the series (for this evening they’d paid for one ticket and the other was half of my complimentary press pair), things get a bit more real. “I don’t think it was completely successful as entertainment. I think one was enough for me,” says Bill.
“It’s the opposite for me,” says Bruce. “I’d like to see them all. I want to see what he has to say; I want to complete it.”
And after all, was it meaningful to see Fry perform live?
“Absolutely,” says Bruce. “I felt like it was very personal, like we were having a personal relationship with him, and that is very difficult.… I respect him more after seeing this. Seeing what a mind this man has. You are getting a little glimpse of what fuels him.”