Appreciations: Christopher Plummer, Prince of Players

“No matter what I do between, the stage always beckons and gets me every time. I suppose it's because there are no tedious retakes, no endless waiting, no cutting-room floor upon which I can end up. Once on the stage, we are thrown to the lions, no barrier comes down between us and the mob; everything is exposed, dangerous and now."—Canadian Tony- and Oscar-winning actor Christopher Plummer (1929-2021), In Spite of Myself: A Memoir (2008)

The death this past weekend of Christopher Plummer at age 91 concluded a career lengthy and storied enough to land his passing on the front page of The New York Times.

Like Falstaff (the one role he scoffed at playing in his last years because it required a fat suit), Plummer had many a time “heard the chimes at midnight.” Indeed, it was nothing short of miraculous that he survived into his nineties.

Reading In Spite of Myself is likely to induce in a reader the worst case of drunkenness by osmosis since Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Plummer was such a champion hell-raiser that around 20 years ago, when I visited the place that thrust him into the spotlight in the 1950s, the Stratford Festival, one aficionado of the longtime Canadian theater institution was still shaking his head over a drinking binge by the actor from years before.

With his keen intelligence, matinee-idol looks, vigorous libido, and epic thirst, Plummer could have easily sunk into sodden self-parody as John Barrymore had. But he credited his third and last wife, Elaine, with curbing his wild ways, and he proceeded to do much of his best work well into old age.

Unlike, say, Nathan Lane, whom I blogged about last week, Plummer had a significant film career. Early on, he appeared in the most high-profile vehicle imaginable, the blockbuster musical The Sound of Music (which he insisted afterward on terming The Sound of Mucus).

Although he felt his role as Captain Von Trapp to be woefully wooden and thin, he found later parts far more suited to his talents, including in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King; a personal favorite of mine, the Sherlock Holmes thriller Murder by Decree; and three films that netted Oscar nominations, The Last Station, All the Money in the World, and Beginners (the last of which earned him the coveted trophy, at age 82, making him the oldest actor ever to win the Academy Award for supporting actor).

But it was the stage, with its audiences reacting, its rich classic texts by Shakespeare, Sophocles, Rostand and Shaw, and its never-to-be repeated moments, that clearly catalyzed Plummer. His transatlantic theater appearances were sensations.

Much to my regret, I missed Plummer on the three different times I visited Stratford in the 1990s and 2000s. But I caught him on Broadway in the winter of 1982, and it wasn’t just any play. It was Othello, a production of fire (James Earl Jones, as the Moor of Venice) and ice (Plummer, in perhaps the greatest of all villain roles, Iago).

New York Times critic Walter Kerr called Plummer’s Iago “quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time.” I was hardly prepared to argue that point. I barely noticed then an up-and-coming young actor named Kelsey Grammar as the easily gulled Cassio, and, despite the admiration of Jones and Plummer, had little use for Diane Wiest as Desdemona. Instead, I was intent on how Plummer’s Iago devised his intricate spider’s web to ensnare Jones’ Othello.

That February night, as Plummer let his resonant voice drop as Iago vowed to turn Desdemona’s “virtue into pitch,” the atmosphere in the Winter Garden Theatre turned darker and chillier than what awaited us on the street.

That production, which began at Connecticut’s American Shakespeare Theatre, was booked for a limited Broadway run but was so popular had to be extended twice. Nevertheless, all was not well backstage.

The problems began in initial rehearsals, according to Michael Riedel’s Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway, when the original director, Peter Coe, was sacked, after his impolite suggestion to Jones that “Mr. Plummer is mopping the floor with you.” A new director, Zoe Caldwell, on good terms with both leads, dissipated much of the animosity, but the issue Coe identified remained: Plummer was, astonishingly enough, “mopping the floor” with Jones.

During the play's run, I heard scuttlebutt that Jones was annoyed by Plummer. In his memoir, Plummer, while praising his co-star’s “great authority” in the role, thought he had decided to “restrain and underplay the great moments of surging poetry.” Nor did it help that Jones objected to the unexpected laughs that Plummer elicited.

How much did this barely suppressed bristling reflect honest differences in interpreting the play? How much derived from the leads’ egos? In the end, it didn’t matter. Those like myself fortunate enough to witness one of those shows will remember how an old play took on new life amid this clash of theatrical titans.

Jones shouldn’t have felt badly about coming off second best to Plummer. Over 60 years in the theater, the Canadian channeled his flamboyance and astuteness into a well-earned reputation as an international prince of players. He brought to his craft an abiding love, realizing that acting had:

“…taught me music, poetry, painting and dance; it has introduced me to the big bad world outside; it has made me face rejection; it has taught me humour in its blackest and gentlest forms; it has made me think; it has even taught me about love. It has shown me the majesty of language, the written word in all its glory, and it has taught me above all that there is no such thing as perfection -- that in the arts, there are no rules, no restrictions, no limits -- only infinity."

(The photo accompanying this post shows Christopher Plummer at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, September 2007. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/1752518829/in/set-72157602744288487/ ; author: gdcgraphics at https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/ )

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Re-Reading Great Literature at Different Ages)

"Nobody ever reads the same book twice. People are expected to read [Vanity Fair] during their university years. But you are mistaken if you think you read [William Makepeace] Thackeray's book then; you read a lesser book of your own. It should be read again when you are thirty-six, which is the age of Thackeray when he wrote it. It should be read for the third time when you are fifty-six, sixty-six, seventy-six, in order to see how Thackeray’s irony stands up to your own experience of life. Perhaps you will not read every page in these later years, but you really should take another look at a great book, in order to find out how great it is, or how great it has remained, to you.” —Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books (1995)

Robertson Davies died 25 years ago yesterday in Orangeville, in the Canadian province of Ontario. I have identified him as a “man of letters” because, during his prolific career, there were few forms of writing in which he did not succeed—journalism, essays, poems, plays, ghost stories, and novels.

Davies’ considerable success in Canada has not extended south of the border, a popularity deficit that might have been overcome had he received the Nobel Prize in Literature he was widely rumored to be in the running for late in life. The Nobel committee could have done worse (and often has) in extending this honor to him.

I first became exposed to him the old-fashioned way: through a former co-worker and fellow book-lover who pressed on me her copy of Fifth Business, part of Davies’ “Deptford Trilogy” revolving around his fascination with magic. 

I became further interested in him when I was lucky enough to hear him speak at Fairleigh Dickinson University (near where I live in Bergen County, NJ), on his promotional tour for The Cunning Man, his last novel. 

His white beard may have predisposed the unknowing to expect a jovial Santa Claus until his still-resonant deep voice and wry wit testified to his early training as an actor. Within a year of his deathat that point, he was surely far more frail than in his prime, but he still knew how to command an audience’s attention.

But my fascination solidified when I saw a 2001 adaptation of Davies’ Tempest-Tost, at Canada’s famous Stratford Festival (an institution he had played a major role in establishing 50 years before, and in which he retained a lively interest until his death). I went on to read the novel itself, as well as its follow-up volumes in his “Salterton Trilogy,” which has, with a great deal of truth, been regarded as a Canadian answer to Anthony Trollope’s “Barchester Chronicles.”

There is much more that can be written about Davies and his career, and in the next year I hope to pursue at least some of those aspects. But today’s quote reminds me of maybe the best way to get an idea of his gifts: through his essays.

When he wasn’t writing, Davies served as professor of English at Massey College and a master of the college until his retirement in 1981. 

But I suspect that he was an old-fashioned professor—scornful of academic jargon and fads, intent on communicating basic truths to listeners—because his essays on literature and the stage convey a vast amount of his erudition without deadening readers’ thrill in discovering and working out the meanings of great books for themselves.

(For a solid, no-nonsense summary of Davies’ career—the kind that he himself might have appreciated—I suggest you read this post by Andrea Koczela on the blog “Books Tell You Why.”)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Money and Happiness)

“Money, it is often said, does not bring happiness; it must be added, however, that it makes it possible to support unhappiness with exemplary fortitude.” ― Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost (1951)

This past week marked the centennial of the birth of Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies. The drollery in the above quote was a characteristic trait of his more than 30 books, including numerous novels, plays, newspaper columns, longer essays, ghost stories, diaries and letters written before his death in 1995. 

In a way, Davies is responsible for the birth of this blog. As I mentioned six years ago in my inaugural post, I read about his theater diary and wondered if I could keep a similar record of the plays (not to mention films and books) that had gained my attention—except that this record would be shared with the blogosphere. 

Faithful Reader, you can readily see how this blog has evolved over time, in ways good and bad, from that original conception. But, from first to last, it has reflected what obsesses me, just as Davies’ work, no matter what the genre, did—in his case, magic and the occult, academe, journalism, gypsies, Indians, music (especially opera) and theater.

Theater: that was his first love, as well as, in both literal and metaphorical senses, how I first encountered him. A friend had given me Fifth Business, the first installment of his Deptford Trilogy, so I had a bit of an idea of his ironic narrative voice and phantasmagorical plots. But then I saw him at Fairleigh Dickinson University on a tour to promote what turned out to be his last novel, The Cunning Man.

Davies himself turned out to be a theatrical presence, with a stocky frame and a full white beard that recalled more than a little of Santa Claus, if Santa might be said to be less a jolly fellow than a mocking contrarian, well past the age when he needed to care what the young might think. Certainly appearing well along in years, he was also the type of person who could have looked that way for a long time and, given his mental vigor, might have gone on looking the same way for a fair number of years more. It was with some surprise, then, that I read of his death not long after. 

Davies left his imprint on the audience, as well as on my autographed copy of The Cunning Man. On the title page, he had drawn a single line through one of those pedestrian italic typefaces that make up in clarity what they lack in personality. His signature, in contrast, occupied virtually the same amount of space, but in a more fluid, albeit firmly controlled, calligraphic-like manner, with the initial “R” appearing more like a “17” and with first and last name intertwined. “No author had a more attractive signature,” noted a Michael Dirda essay on handwriting for The American Scholar.

Six years later, the Stratford Festival in Canada, a project that Davies was associated with in the early 1950s under Tyrone Guthrie, staged an adaptation of Tempest-Tost. The latter, which marked Davies’ transition from playwriting to fiction, took advantage of his recent involvement with a “Little Theater” group to send up these well-meaning amateur productions.  (Evidently, he figured that it was unlikely that any theater group would mount a play that satirized the acting profession. How wrong he was!)

Quote of the Day (Monette)

“You pig! We have spent our lives in this theater. We have given of our time taking care of our art. You talk to us about money all the time. ... You have no morals. I don’t know how you can sleep. I care deeply and passionately about this place, and you must address yourselves to your consciences.” Richard Monette, Canadian actor and director, at the December 1980 annual meeting of the foundation of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, shouting from the audience at the outgoing board president

(I pay tribute today to Monette, who, 12 years after this extremely dramatic outburst, went on to become artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Now it became his lot to deal with money issues. Amazingly enough, he succeeded. By the end of his first season, he had transformed a $1 million debt to an $800,000 surplus, and continued to do so throughout his 14-year run. More than any person associated with the festival since Tom Patterson provided the publicity and organizational spark and Tyrone Guthrie the directorial genius, Monette made his mark on this glittering jewel in Canada’s cultural crown.

But Monette not only enabled the festival to thrive: he brought it to artistic heights it had only reached intermittently before. Among the highlights of his tenure: renovating the Festival and Avon Theaters; establishing the Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre; creating a formal program of new play development; adding a fourth venue, the Studio Theatre; and creating a $50-million endowment.

I was lucky enough to see the festival in Monette’s first full season as artistic director. I missed the unexpected hit that became the centerpiece of that year, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (though I saw it on TV, in a production that forever altered how I viewed that play and Eugene O’Neill himself). I did, however, in a little less than a week, see Othello (which, in that post-OJ-in-the-Bronco summer, draw many parallels to contemporary events), Twelfth Night, Hamlet, The Comedy of Errors, and The Pirates of Penzance. I couldn’t get over seeing the same actor perform two different roles in the same week—and often, even in the same day.

It wasn’t until much later, talking to other theater aficionados—Canadian natives who knew all the backstage gossip—just how much it took for Monette to keep everything going—how to launch a pet artistic project without bankrupting the place again; how to keep, say, an actress who had long been estranged from the festival from departing in anger again; how to find one play that meshed with the talents of particular directors and actors; how to satisfy competing, clashing egos of all ages; how long to stretch the festival’s season with moneymaking musicals without infringing on how much its actors could make in other, more lucrative productions off-season. (Just as New York actors have an inordinate number of credits for one of the Love and Order series, Stratford actors, at least a decade ago, had an enormous number of credits for Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. They all need something to pay the bills!)

I returned to Stratford three more times over the years, savoring more and more. The last time, in 2001, I attended a theater-enrichment activity, a “Meet the Festival” spotlighting Monette himself. He held forth in droll, the-hell-with-it fashion on such subjects as the current penchant for staging Shakespeare in almost anything but Elizabethan dress (it’s a way of proving the plays are still relevant, he said); his refusal to apologize for musicals that put fannies in the theater (musicals required more diverse skills than nearly any other theatrical form, he said, and to his mind there were really only about a half-dozen truly great ones); and his disdain for the Globe and Mail’s theater critic at the time, Kate Taylor (he was aghast that when she took on her role, she had a background in journalism but not theater).

I have no idea what Monette was like as a person. It seems that he experienced the requisite miserable checkered childhood that so often sees acting as a glorious escape, as well as an Olivier-like bit of stage fright that drove him from an acclaimed acting career into his later, more celebrated career as festival saver. But I can’t imagine the Stratford Festival getting another artistic director so passionate about his work and so canny about getting it noticed.)

This Day in Theater History (Wilde Enjoys Last Triumph With 'Earnest')

February 14, 1895 – Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London at the St. James Theatre—appropriately enough, for this rather bent love story, on Valentine’s Day. The farce was reduced from four acts to three, at the insistence of the St. James’ producer-manager, George Alexander.

But, unlike the disastrous Henry James drama, Guy Domville, which Alexander had produced only the month before, Wilde’s comedy of manners was a roaring success, the moment when all his subversive wit and wordplay coalesced into the theatrical equivalent of a light but perfect soufflé. Like fellow Irish Protestant George Bernard Shaw, he tweaked British Victorian values from his standpoint as an outsider.

With An Ideal Husband still running at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket, the young writer who had told an American customs official, “I have nothing to declare but my genius,” had finally made good on his boast.

It was also, alas, to be Wilde’s last hour of triumph. The Marquess of Queensbury (yes, the same man who drew up those famous boxing rules), the father of Wilde’s feckless young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, was so enraged by his son’s relationship that he had planned to show up at the play’s opening and ruin the proceedings. 

Wilde got wind of the idea and had the irate parent banned from the theater. Instead, Queensbury left a calling card on the board at the gentleman’s club that Wilde frequented: “To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.”

Instead of laughing off the feeble spelling, Wilde took Douglas’ insane advice and swore out a warrant for Queensbury’s arrest on a charge of libel. 

In the ensuing sensational trial, Queensbury’s attorney, Sir Edward Carson (later, the intransigent opponent of the Irish Free State), demonstrated—through Wilde’s indiscreet correspondence with Douglas and a parade of witnesses that prominently featured young boys patronized by the playwright—that Queensbury’s charge was true.

Wilde lost his case and ended up in Reading Gaol, where his health was broken. He died five years after the premiere of his greatest play. 

Several variations have been given of his final words: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go" (my favorite), "I am dying beyond my means," and, "I can’t even afford to die."

Though I had read much of Wilde’s writings, I never knew about the missing act in The Importance of Being Earnest until, in the fall of 2000, I attended a rare performance with this section restored at the marvelous Stratford Festival in Canada. The repertory company mounted the play in the centennial year of Wilde’s death.

Superficially, Alexander’s instinct to cut the play was correct – the additional section, lodged between what became the second and third acts of the revision, did nothing to advance the plot. 

But plot is hardly the reason for being of a Wilde comedy—it’s the wonderful lines. And this had them in abundance.

Moreover, this act includes plot twists ironic in light of what was about to happen to Wilde. It features a bill coming due and an arrest, almost as if Wilde sensed that his increasingly open life of “feasting with panthers” would exact a price.

You may have noticed that I’ve referred to the play’s “missing act.” Don’t I mean “discarded”? Well, no—for years after Wilde’s death, the act was nowhere to be found. 

Then, in 1953, it was rediscovered in, of all places—drumroll, please—New Jersey. (Don’t ask me how it got there!) The 2002 film, starring Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon, Rupert Everett and Frances O’Connor, featured the restored act.

Appreciations: William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”

With this, the last night of the Christmas season, upon us, I thought it an appropriate occasion to comment on perhaps my favorite comedy by the Bard.

At my alma mater a quarter-century ago, the entire Shakespeare corpus was covered in two semesters. Though the course and its professor were legends on the campus, I was at least a mild dissenter from the prevailing opinion – "a boat against the current," if you will. I thought then – and feel even more strongly now – that it is insane to think that one can cover all the plays and all the poems and still do justice to any one of the works.

I only took one half of the full-year course, so I did not go the later plays (including this one). Much of my education on the playwright since then has come on my own, helter-scatter, aided largely by perhaps really best way to appreciate Shakespeare – in performance.

My good opinion of Twelfth Night was formed by two productions I saw: at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, in 1994, starring a rising star of that repertory company, Lucy Peacock, as Viola; and, four years later, at Lincoln Center, with more of a marquee cast, including Helen Hunt as a more cautious Viola, the marvelous character New York stage actor Brian Murray, and, in a performance that first made me aware of how marvelous an actress she could be, Kyra Sedgwick.

Last summer, in upstate New Year, I vacationed at the Chautauqua Institution, an eight-week program devoted to public affairs, recreation, and the arts. One of their Special Studies of continuing-education courses was “Illustrating Shakespeare via Twelfth Night.” With easily worn learning and vast reserves of humor, the instructor, Ruth Gerrard Cole, focused on the play's central play in the evolution of Shakespeare.

The play constantly underscores the theme of appearance vs. reality, like a comic Hamlet, as can be seen in the following lines:

Orsino: "So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical." – (I, i, 14-15)

Viola: I am not what I am.
Olivia: I would you were as I would have you be.

In another forerunner of Hamlet, fate figures prominently (Olivia: "Fate, show thy face, ourselves we not owe,/What is decreed must be, and be this so.")

Shakespeare also plays with dissolving the line between spectator and stage, giving the audience a poke in the ribs, like an Elizabethan Bob Hope: (Fabian: "If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.")

While never neglecting the raw material craved by Elizabethan (or, for that matter, modern) audiences, such as complications doubled and redoubled and one-liners sure to produce chuckles (“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage”), the playwright raised the play above the level of simple farce through his humanity, notably how he treats Malvolio, Olivia's censorious household steward.

To be sure, Shakespeare made sure his contemporary audiences knew that he shared their scorn for the Puritan (who, like many of his co-religionists, undoubtedly interfered with the theater and much-loved festivals such as – well, Twelfth Night). "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous that there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Malvolio is reproved by Olivia's uncle, Sir Toby Belch. (That final phrase gave an especially felicitous title to what might be Somerset Maugham's finest novel.)

But the trick played by Sir Toby, his boon companion Andrew Aguecheek, and Olivia's servant Maria is great comic fun. But the playwright shows that Malvolio's punishment – "imprisoned,/Kept in a dark house") is crueler than anything he ever perpetuated. Contrast this with the film M*A*S*H, in which Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan is humiliated in the shower while naked – a scene that should make anyone question the humanity of that much-loved (and at least somewhat overrated) auteur, Robert Altman. Malvolio's punishment as a madman makes us queasy, so his release comes almost as welcome as the laughs in this surprising, and surprisingly humane, comedy.