‘Grace will take over’
Versatile and acclaimed B.C. actor Carver took any challenge, Jamie Portman writes.
“What I do is perform,” Brent Carver said in 2014 when he was honoured with a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award. He would have been content to leave it at that. Carver was shy and reticent about his art, but trouper that he was, he would try to rise to the occasion.
“In many ways it’s the sensation of coming home,” the internationally acclaimed actor said in discussing the mystery of what he did. “It’s the sensation of moving through all kinds of thresholds to find the heartbeat of what’s going on.”
Carver’s death, announced Thursday in Cranbrook, the B.C. town where his life began 68 years ago, marked the end of a remarkable acting career that had seen him triumph not just in Canada but on the stages of Broadway and London’s West End. It is also safe to say that it has caused an inconsolable sense of loss among those who knew him, worked with him and loved him. (Indeed, in keeping with a long tradition, Mirvish Productions dimmed its marquee lights in tribute.)
Those with long memories will remember his early impact in Vancouver theatre — as a mopheaded youngster in a controversial production of David Freeman’s You’re Gonna Be Alright, Jamie Boy at the Arts Club and also displaying a sizzling musical talent in Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.
When he returned to Jacques Brel a few years ago in a Stratford Festival revival, we were seeing a mature but still incandescent performer with a staggering list of triumphs to his credit.
Carver’s story touches on seminal moments in Canada’s performing arts history. Those early years in Vancouver reflect the vibrancy and vitality of a regional theatre movement that flourished in the face of Central Canada’s chauvinistic assumption that it was the anointed guardian of the nation’s cultural life. Carver would prove gifted enough to perform anywhere
— at the Stratford Festival, which was to become a spiritual home, but also triumphantly in London and New York with his award-winning work as a frightened homosexual window dresser in the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman (for which he won a Tony Award).
He could claim a dizzying succession of musical theatre credits — the sleazy master of ceremonies in Cabaret, Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. But he also excelled in the non-musical arena — his versatility allowing him to give us both an ardent Romeo and the sexually conflicted David in Brad Fraser’s breakout play, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. He was always prepared to push the envelope, playing the troubled hero in director Robin Phillips’s film version of Timothy Findley’s The Wars, and a flamboyant drag artist in the acclaimed low-budget movie Lilies.
Carver told Postmedia several years ago that in his working universe there were no “big” or “small” projects — there were only those that promised to be rewarding. Hence his involvement in Lilies.
Indeed, he had a simple but firm philosophy. “
Desire not to flinch from the person you’re playing,” he said in 2014. “Grace will take over.”
He sought to make “courage, confidence and compassion” essential to his credo. He owed that much to the people he cared about — “the people I’m allowed to know, the people I’m allowed to share with, the people I’m allowed to share this country with.”
There were hints of frailty in his last years. He turned down an important role in The Tempest at Stratford because he didn’t know whether he could meet its physical demands. But there was a final memorable appearance in 2017 as Feste in Twelfth Night. When he quietly sang of the wind and the rain at the end, you could hear the rustle of autumn leaves.