Hello, dear lonely reader.
I hope you’re well, in these weird, weird times of isolation.
I wrote this piece below as a Facebook post last night, on April 23rd, Shakespeare’s birthday. And I thought I should post it here as a blog piece; a little update on my current whereabouts.
My theatre company, Shakespeare in the Ruins, has recently had to cancel our production of The Winter’s Tale, and my staff and I have been working remotely from home as we weather this storm of uncertainty; valiantly trying to keep our company open as theatres around the globe go dark due to COVID-19. It’s been a trying time…
So, for a change, here’s a story of hope…I hope you enjoy it. Stay safe. We will meet again, soon:
***
Something truly special happened to me tonight, on Shakespeare’s birthday of all days, and I decided to write about it here. If you have the patience to read it, I hope it will make you feel less lonely and maybe even inspired to “keep at it”; to keep doing the thing that tickles your heart.
“On Hope & Blind Faith – or how I learned to never let go of the thing that first made my soul sing, and was rewarded for it”
When I first fell in love with Shakespeare, I was, frankly, a bit of an anomaly – I felt like an anomaly. I was 18 and I could barely speak English, fresh off the boat from Brazil. But there was something about the way my high school English teacher, Mr Gordon McLeod, allowed me to enter the world of Hamlet that was completely liberating – something cracked inside of me, and I will never forget that feeling; how lucky I am to be able to remember the feeling when my soul first opened.
Mr McLeod was brilliant enough to see in me the love I had for the material; to nurture it; to notice how elemental it was. And so, at the end of our first semester, he gifted me a special, Cambridge University Press edition of Hamlet – as a token of appreciation and extra encouragement perhaps. “Keep at it, kid”.
The book is filled with wonderful pictures from famous past productions. One of the pictures is of Mark Rylance, in a 1989 RSC production of Hamlet, wearing pajamas onstage. It’s an extraordinary photo. Prince Hamlet. In pajamas. Scandalous really, especially in the context of the traditional tastes from that stiff 1980s RSC audience.
That production was directed by a fella named Ron Daniels. In the book, there was a bit about why Rylance was wearing PJs during the “antic disposition” scenes: Daniels, the director, thought it would be a fun nod to an eccentric uncle from his childhood, whom he remembers as a very relaxed guy who used to walk to the bakery down his street in RIO DE JANEIRO…wearing nothing but his pajama bottoms.
“Rio de Janeiro”? I repeated to myself as I read that bit again. What the what?!
So, apparently, this Ron Daniels was, in fact, BRAZILIAN. And his name was, actually, Ronaldo Daniel – I had just become “Rod” myself.
I proceeded to look for more info on the man. This was when Google was still in its infancy, so what I did a lot of was searching on freakin’ ALTA VISTA instead…
And yep, sure enough, Ron Daniels was a Brazilian who, aged 18, went to study in England and fell in love with Shakespeare; ended up staying in the country; joined the RSC as an actor; and then became a director and went on to helm iconic productions with Kenneth Branagh, Brian Blessed, Roger Rees, Mark Rylance, Derek Jakobi, etc etc etc…
Suddenly, I no longer felt like an anomaly. This guy had already trodden the path I was about to walk on – hell, he created the path - and now I just needed to follow in his footsteps and pay attention to the signs.
I was 18 and that journey was already clear in my head. I just needed to keep at it.
Now, if you don’t know who Ron Daniels is, please do Google him. Now you can, as Alta Vista is, like, so 2001.
Ron continues to be a massive theatrical force, working mostly in opera and the classics, all over the US, Europe and Brazil. He moved to the UK in 1964, and stayed there after the military coup in Brazil, never to return permanently again. Among his many historic achievements is the fact that he and Christopher Bond were the artists who first adapted SWEENY TODD to the stage; and it was their play that inspired Sondheim to write the incredible musical. Ron was the first human to direct that bloody play. As he said in an interview: “Chris took credit for writing it, and I for directing the first production”.
Fast-forward a few years in my life. I continued to do my thing, and on/off I’d see news online about what Ron was up to. It always made me smile. “He’s still at it, my Brazilian brother, still pursuing Shakespeare and still discovering, still digging…I guess I’ll continue too”.
In 2016, while visiting me in Stratford, my Dad told me that one of his college friends had a son who was also an actor: Andre Hendges. And so, dad put me in touch with him.
Andre turned out to be a total delight; we are from the same State in Brazil, and we started to message and to exchange ideas and theatrical tales.
At one point, Andre told me he had recently played Ross in Macbeth, in a production in Sao Paulo, in a new translation, adapted and directed by…Ron Daniels.
And I went “what the what…”
Apparently, Ron is a total delight too. Andre told me the experience was brilliant, and working alongside Thiago Lacerda, one of Brazil’s ‘superest’ superstars as Macbeth, was a gift.
And thus, I stayed on course; ever inspired. Ron was, after all, still at it.
And then...I received a message from Andre last week.
“Ron has been organizing Zoom meetings and Shakespeare readings, I sent him your email address, hope you don’t mind”
And I was like “what the what”.
Two days later, an email drops in my inbox.
“Hi Rodrigo, Andre sent me your email. I’d love to hear more about your journey and theatre work, in Canada and Brazil…Ron”
Listen, you gotta understand this: I have had “get in touch with Ron Daniels” on my “forever To Do” list for, like, forever. And it is insane that HE is the one that ends up emailing me first.
I reply that night. I tell him everything; how much his work means to me, all of it – but I make sure I sound real cool too, ya know. I resist the temptation to fanboy. Although inside I am all butterflies.
He replies, and he invites me to his Zoom project, which he has been doing every Thursday evenings. He calls it “The Shakespeare Salon”, and he says this:
“The Shakespeare Salon is simply a group of actors who meet with me online on Thursdays to play with Shakespeare's language and verses. Most of them are well-known actors, who have worked with me, which means we know each other very well. In a way, the Salon exists in response to an email that a theatre actor sent me from the set of a television show where he had been recording for months: “Help! I feel brain dead!” Then I said as a joke, that the Salon is a kind of retreat, or even a "rehab" clinic, which allows actors to go back to their roots and do "restorative" work, as Gower says in the Pericles prologue! The important thing is that everything is very informal, without any preciousness, but that aims to give freedom back to the actor, and to offer him an alternative to what I call Fatal Fluency! Well that's it, for now.... If you want to stop by the Salon next Thursday, you are welcome. Just click the link below.”
“What the what”.
Nevermind the astonishing invitation from this man who has been my touchstone for nearly 20 years, but the way he phrases things…the incredible articulation of the thought behind the eternal quest to “do Shakespeare better"...it’s amazing. Simply beautiful.
6pm arrived today, on Shakespeare’s Birthday, and I logged on to the Zoom call. I made sure to down a glass of Campari first. I was incredibly nervous.
Ron was, indeed, a total delight. We spoke Portuguese to each other for a bit, before the rest of the group joined. I had to explain to him where Winnipeg was.
Then the other 9 artists arrived. Some top actors. I kept Googling their resumes (yay Google) as they entered Zoom. “What the what” over, and over again.
Ron introduced me to the group, in his perfect British-posh accent: “I’d like to introduce you to this astonishing creature, Rodrigo, this anomaly who happens to be Brazilian! And who has done quite a bit of work at Stratford Ontario!” – which generated a lot of “ooooo, wow, nice” from the Americans, most of them based in NYC. Apparently, indeed, “Stratford Ontario”, as the Stratford Festival is known in the States, is quite popular among geeky American stage actors.
And then we jumped right into it. For the next two hours, no breaks, Ron and the actors worked on Titania’s “These are the Forgeries” speech. No breaks. Just that speech.
Actors would read different sections and then talk about it, and then Ron would offer some astonishing insights, and then they’d go back and read again, and again, and again. His turns of phrases and vocabulary were a revelation. He spent most of the two hours analysing “caesuras” as a device in Shakespeare’s language; the several possible functions of caesuras as a tool.
I particularly loved this thing he said, so I wrote it down:
“Caesuras are not pauses. They are not a stop. A caesura is a weapon of new, clear thoughts”.
Another brilliant nugget:
“When a character is engaged in a caesura, he or she is obsessing whether the image about to come out is the right one or not”. To which an actor then added: “I’d say it’s not just the discovery of the ‘right’ word the character wants to say next, but also the discovery of the very meaning of those words, as they come out in the moment.”
To which Ron then said: “yes, caesuras are a search”.
I’ve always used the word “reach” when directing Shakespeare. But I think “search” is much better. ‘Reaching’ implies that you know where the thing you’re going for is; whereas with “search”, the mystery remains alive and electric – and that’s really the sort of thing we want to see bubbling in the actor/character.
I’m sitting here typing and reliving all that and I don’t really know what else to say. As Hermia says in Midsummer, “I am amazed and know not what to say”…
After we said our goodbyes, I went back downstairs to put Zeke to bed with the biggest smile on my face. I felt re-charged after Ron’s Zoom excavation – and what a brilliant use of Zoom: a private little clinic, not a performance, but a rehearsal; a safe, quiet space. Indeed, it was a “rehab” for my soul – particularly at this moment, in this lonely Spring we find ourselves in; together in bitter, alienating isolation.
I love Shakespeare.
He is my church, my sanctuary and my bottomless well of inspiration. I cannot live without the sounds and the mysteries of his words. I continue to smile as I type this; smiling at the improbability, the impossibility of it all.
An 18-year-old Brazilian immigrant carving out a whole life from a long dead Englishman – and apparently, not alone in this pursuit.
How magical it was to finally cross paths with Ron, and to spend this sunny, spectacularly balmy Winnipeg night with him on my computer screen, celebrating the Bard’s birthday while obsessively trying to crack the code, the poetry and the meaning of it all.
All of that, from a picture in a book, given to me by an inspirational teacher. A picture of a man in pajamas, pretending to be a mad prince.
Thank you, Mr McLeod. Thank you, Andre. Thank you, Ron. Thank you, Will.
“This, above all: to thine own self be true…”
RB.
