An Interview with Richard Rose

Conducted by CASP Research Associate Mat Buntin in Toronto, February 26, 2004.

Richard Rose

Link to Online Anthology: Romeo and Juliet: Music, Opera, Dance and Drama (2002)
Link to Database
Link to Online Anthology: Hysterica (2000)
Link to Database

You've been involved in two collective creations that “adapt” Shakespeare, Hysterica and Mein. Is there something about the collective creation process that you find particularly suitable to working in this genre?

I think part of it, was in both cases, my familiarity with both Lear and the Scottish play and, particularly with Hysterica, I had worked on many variations and wanted to take my own variation and expand that story and find a contemporary context for it.

I'm not sure why I necessarily chose a collective creation path, at least for Hysterica. In the end, I think that was a bit evolutionary. Things started out to be a little bit more me creating it and then it fell into a different pattern as people started to come up with improvisations and doors started to open and other ideas started to come in. I guess it always was going to be a collective creation but it became more so I think than I originally thought when I started. And actually that particular project went on to evolve into the less eclectic vision of ourselves as more of a writing collaboration among the five or six of us, whereas Mein was always in the rehearsal hall and I sort of ended up writing it based on the improvisations and then people did internal drafts but the basic form and shape was there. For Mein we took just a section of the Scottish play and improvised from all of his soliloquies and took it in a cool direction. But that was much more a physical movement piece, much more the synthesis of movement and text and image. Language wasn't that important in a sense in terms of communicating. Mein was more of an imagistic piece, for lack of a better term. Whereas for Hysterica, and I think its how I evolved as an artist, I very concerned with language. I wanted to have a focus on a play where I worked with language and got actors who didn't write to write and it really became more writing on the table for the longest period of time.

How was the collaborative process of the Music, Opera, Drama, and Dance Romeo and Juliet similar to or different from the Hysterica and Mein projects?

Well that was really more of a project that is created by me and my limitations were some of the things that they could do in the ballet and some cast size limitations. Some of the things the opera singers could only sing. There were only two opera singers, I think, and they had to play Romeo and Juliet.   What I tried to do in the course of the piece was synthesize all those art forms, so that opera singers acted and they were in the ballet's chorus, as were actors, and that it was really a hand-off form as one form bled into another. I think in the end, how I sort of got it, was I began thinking about it really as an old time musical––with dance, then you break into speech, then there's a scene where you break into song––and keep passing the baton that way so that it tells a continuous story. But that was really an assembly, versus a collective creation, of material from various different sources. Good in many senses, and not so good in other senses. It's sort of funny. But I had to synthesize it all and I had just certain limitations about what was affordable given the high cost of those mediums and also what they could do. There were certain things they couldn't do.  

What was your experience of how each of the Music, Opera, Drama, and Dance components related to Shakespeare's text?

Well, again, in relating to Shakespeare, I tried to say okay, if I thought of Romeo and Juliet as a musical and we want it to go on this point and have this big group scene, this big dance number. So I find in Prokofiev, in the ballet, the dance number, a really kind of big group number. So even though I only had maybe 4 or 5 dancers I turned that into a big chorus scene. I'd try and find points where one could do nothing but finish speaking or one could do nothing else but break into song or one could do nothing else but break into something that was much more danced––that was very lyrical––ballet. So I was looking for qualities in the ballet and looking for qualities in the opera, and in West Side Story, and in the play where talking part, the Shakespeare part, carried the story to take us to the point of aria and/or duet. When love or hate or whatever became so impossible or the fight scene turned into a dance number.  And that was a bit of a steal from West Side Story, the Jets and the fighting was a choreographed piece but in this instance it was Prokofiev's ballet. So we really at that point melded the battle scene, and there were dancers, and opera singers, and actors all fighting with swords. Yeah, it was kind of neat. But they were all doing the ballet version of it to the music, so it wasn't like a stage fight, you're following the choreography. So actors are doing choreography and so are opera people. Quite a neat project.

Could you talk a little about the dramaturgy involved in these works, especially in relation to adapting to a Canadian theatrical context?

I think that one of the things that went into Mein was that I experienced this tremendous success with a play called Tamara, and I was interested in a very personal sense in examining my own sense of ambition.   I went from a big popular hit in Toronto to a big commercial production in Los Angeles.   Suddenly at the age of 29 I was doing a million dollar production, and playing in that world, and in Los Angeles where it's not just the art but it's also the business. That's why I moved back planning to do Mein, so in a sort of personal dramaturgy, I was trying to examine my own ambition and relationships and my own conduct, and other people's conduct about what one does to get that far ahead or what one will do, and I suppose the struggle and neurosis when you answer what qualms you have about what you're doing and why you're doing it and who you're doing it to. I wanted to examine that and I wanted to examine that pristine form in the Scottish play.  

And again, that's why I went to the soliloquies. I didn't get to the events of the play, that happened offstage, but with the soliloquies I wanted to talk about the moral quest. And I wanted to find that in a physical way at well. At the time, coming on to the scene was rock videos and so I was looking for a theatrical equivalent to rock videos, in a way. I know it's hard to imagine a time when that didn't exist, but it was suddenly this new form, and I loved the idea of the way it just leapt about and worked in juxtaposition and told a narrative without necessarily telling it directly. I wanted to find a parallel to that theatrically that one could do without speaking, so in a sense we weren't worrying about language, or worrying about story, in a sense. We still wanted to tell a story, but … So when we went into the improvisations and I just came in and asked them to explore this theme and that theme and this theme, and then we started to pull the stuff together and work in an abstract way, as though one was struggling with, in the moment––as though you're inside somebody's head––all the thoughts you have, if you're making killer decision, you're making decisions that will destroy people's careers, or you're making decisions that are so cruel, and so vicious and how do you argue yourself up to that point.  

I was trying to tell the story of Mein without telling the story, in a sense, the story that was an aside to the story.  The story you never hear, the subtextual story. A story that's more stream of consciousness and more about what happened in your dream life as well, and your own personal image system and your own brain. It's a double reality, being in a reality and at the same time, there's this other image system going on in your subconscious. And to look at all the fears and anxieties that are attached to that, behind the mask of the face.

How would you see these plays fitting into a so-called Canadian theatrical context?

Well Mein was really my first collective creation, and I don't do them a lot. I've done a couple of them, maybe three or four, and I don't think they're a great place to write, to do good writing, but they're great places to do very interesting theatre. You can do a piece and it allows you the freedom of not worrying about language, but you have to be very clear in the image system. In terms of Canadian theatre at that time, we were the generation after Passe Muraille and Toronto Free Theatre, and I wanted to maybe take the idea of collective creation and advance it down the line to another level of sophistication, at least theatrically. I think a lot of my outside influences, as much as they were from in Canada, was the work that was being done in New York. Rock videos, Talking Heads videos. It was that kind of aesthetic at the time that was prominent, very slick, very urban, not collective creations also about prairie life or farm show life and all that kind of stuff, but about life in the city or urban experiences, but also not issue oriented.  

There are a lot issue-oriented plays and people beating the political / social issue with their plays and I did not want to get into that, issue-oriented theatre. I actually wanted to find something that was more focused on theme and idea.   And so when we did Mein we broke form. We broke a lot of forms, and opened up doors from people who had ways of seeing plays that we hadn't seen in Toronto, so we are both part of that heritage and going against that heritage, in terms of style. It's very interesting, not many years later there was a play by Tremblay, Albertine in Five Times, and of course here was Mein, with five people playing one person, but for me also that play had a very distinct similarity to Tamara where you had plays from multiple different points of view and people could follow anybody and it was from multiple perspectives.  

Whose story was it, was a question. If it's everybody's story, then how can you know the truth, because when you change perspectives, truth changes. In a sense, I applied that same ethic and aesthetic about perception (to Mein) so that when you were in the ambitious person's mind there was all these conflicting points of view contradicting each other, should or shouldn't they do it, and the debate that goes on in the mind, five different characters in your mind arguing, within one body . It was kind of a progression of these multiple viewpoints, to look at an idea and put these ideas in struggle from multiple perspectives.   

Hysterica for me was a long journey through Lear story. I had done King Lear twice, one a female to male version, a complete switch, and one a version where I didn't care about casting issues – I mixed men and women, so that one sister was a man and one sister was a woman. I did that in Lear because I wanted to explore issues of gender in Lear. One well of inspiration for me was a quote about the Japanese theatre where the man plays the woman because only a man can perceive the essence of a woman, so I was trying to reverse that so that only woman can see the essence of man and vice versa.

So I did this first switch, and then I found that nobody cared after five minutes that Pat Hamilton was playing King Lear . At first it was like, “how do I adjust to this”, and then the actual performance itself took over, and I went, “oh that's interesting, maybe I should not care at all about gender and see what happens there, if anybody really cares that Goneril is played by a man or woman, and Regan is played by a woman and Cordelia is played by a man.” The first version I think I was trying to illuminate the play and in the second version I think I was trying to illuminate the issues more. Parallel to that, I began to work on the notion of Hysterica, of madness in the family and how it affects madness in the family. If you look at the Gloucester story and the King Lear story there are two separate plots and two separate genres, Lear being the tragedy and Gloucester being the melodrama, I tried to take those two different plots and blend them together into kind of a modern day story, so that both melodrama and tragedy could exist within one story.  

So part of it came from that. But for me, that was a very personal project, progressing through the King Lear story.   First we did Seven Lears, after that a couple of years later we did Hysterica, and that was actually a bit of the same process. Whereas also at the same time I wanted to address the nature of the immigrant's experience and the tension between someone who comes from away and people who are planted here, from generations that are planted here, and the kind of madness that split identities and schizophrenia can bring on.  

I also wanted to explore notions of schizophrenia, and this seems almost anti-theatrical, actually, which is interesting. This was the struggle in trying to make that play––it may be part of its flaw. In schizophrenia, the definition is the separation of action, mind, and body, and emotion. The body actually separates itself out like this and so part of the pursuit was to try get to a point where people were absolutely separated and isolated.   In the second act, they go into very distinct places and in those scenes together it's impossible to have a scene together when their behaviour is actually separated out and there's no way to have any more relationships, in a way. We did exercises in separating action and body, action and mind, action and voice or emotion, which led to certain discoveries, but it was kind of anti-dramatic because usually all those things are unified when trying to tell a story, but we were trying to tackle it in a different way.

Our project is necessarily concerned with what is “Canadian.” Is there something in these plays that marks what it means to be “Canadian” in specific ways?

Well, there's the immigrant theme, and I think that one of big keys for me was that my mother's an immigrant. I think that part of it is the notion of separation from your homeland in a sense starts to begin a separation of identity that brings on a kind of schizophrenia, and how people live in various degrees of madness and mental fragility. It doesn't take much to push us over. The world that that's set in is very much a Rosedale world but at the same time this woman's who's the powerhouse is a Greek immigrant and brought into Canada.  

So I wanted to look at that kind of fractured personality which started from the day she was married to this Canadian guy and how that kind of rupture happens, that disconnect happens as your first experience of separation. In a way, only by going mad does she feel at home in Canada. So that was interesting, and one of the things that I wanted to bring to it. And the other thing I think with Hysterica, and I don't know if it it's necessarily Canadian, but it's certainly in a way North American, I think, is the idea that the artist and the business world are separate.

Artists are certainly businessmen, they're survivalists actually, and the businessmen are certainly artists in many ways, but we live in a culture where the two seem to have an animosity to each other, or an aggression, or reject each other and keep distinct. Maybe that's a good thing, but again it's just another form of separation between two worlds. You don't see a lot of us going down to Bay Street. And it's interesting, both those plays are set in business worlds. I guess in both plays I'm interested in the dynamic of business. I don't know if it's Canadian business, but business. And in that play in particular, it's inherited money.

How much attention was paid in the rehearsal process to Shakespearean source texts?

Well, in Mein we followed the soliloquies and we used soliloquies to improvise out of. And certainly when I was assembling the project again after I had all these improvisations in Mein and I was trying to pull them all together, whenever I would get lost I would go back to the Shakespeare and ask, “okay, what happens here.” I would look at that as a kind of guide or if I felt we were missing something and I couldn't really identify what it was or as a principal of review to just counterpoint . Now it's not that we did a parallel version, but I would find equivalents, I would find different takes, I would reject this, it wasn't necessarily one for one.  

With Hysterica it was a bigger project. We took on all of Lear and we improvised from the Lear story and from the Gloucester story. In trying to follow that through we used the Shakespeare to (determine) that he did that, or this is the line in the play that should be the kernel in Lear for the thing that we improvise upon to expand upon these ideas. Certainly, when we were doing the improvisations and when assembling the piece, because we had all been involved in Lear we all had common reference. It created a common language about the story because everyone had been in various versions of Lear so we were able to get quick references dramaturgically. It was a bit of a handrail, something to buck against.

Can you reflect on the extent to which Shakespearean influences figure in your work as a playwright and director generally?

Whenever I have problems, I look to Shakespeare. I use it as a dramaturgical tool as a playwright.   I reference it. I speak about his dramaturgy. For example, where do you find all the exposition in King Lear? You never know what a scene is about when the play starts. Where is the exposition in this scene?   We start in the middle of the scene, in the middle of the action. We find out two or three scenes later that oh, that scene was informed by this event that's someone's talking about.   It's a remarkable piece of writing, in way.  So, I use it with new plays as a dramaturgical tool. I look for material that addresses that kind of complexity in the human experience, and I look to his innovation.  

It's interesting how in Taming of the Shrew, act five, scene one or two, Petruchio and Kate return back upon going into Padua and there's this big scene going on there and the playwright takes his two lead characters and Petruchio says to Kate, “Let's stop and watch this for awhile,” and he pulls them off to the side.   It's the weirdest line in the world. Now all logical dramaturgy would say that your lead characters are there, get them on to the stage, get them into the centre, they should be in centre of the action. But there he does something quite radical, he pulls them right away from the action.   In an odd kind of way, it's still radical dramaturgy.   If you actually look line by line, which I do as a director, and I'm speaking as someone very familiar, having directed this, those are the surprising things. Those are the things that disarm you. So, it's a source, a good well to draw from.

Is adaptation a way of overwriting Shakespearean source texts? How do your ideological goals interact with Shakespeare's?

I don't do that in relation to my own work. I think I am using Shakespeare and then I look at it, and there is resonance in those stories and I look at it and try to re-apply to find another resonance. Now, I have heard people rewrite Taming of the Shrew to make a feminist take on it and provide that kind of overwriting. I'm not that familiar with those kinds of takes but I am distrustful of anything that has an ideology or agenda attached to it as you write.   As a playwright, be careful of the ideologies. I think that's why I'm attracted to Shakespeare because the ideologies get thrown on their head. His plays see all the contradictions of human experience, and for me ideology will always be a contradiction.

Do you see any problems facing playwrights who undertake a Shakespearean adaptation?

Well, he's a tremendous model and he will beat you, because he's better. So, is there any reason to do the rewrite? You have to be very conscious of the reason why you might be adapting and very clear on the plays that you're doing. Why not just do him? You know, I did Two Gentlemen of Verona and I went to talk to a pre-eminent teenage psychologists at York University. I had a very difficult time understanding the play––it's a hard tough play––and I started to describe these scenarios, and I knew they were about teenagers and I knew they were going stages of teenage development – that had been part of a session where I was doing Spring Awakening that taught me about teenage development, and a psychologist came in and talked about it – and I went and talked to this psychologist and I said, just review with me these stages of teenage development and we were talking and I said, “so is that like what happens in Two Gentlemen when this character does this …” (And he said) “Oh yes that's in stage two, that's in stage three, this is often what happens among teenagers, they do this …” So what is brilliant about the guy, like it or not, is that this contemporary thinking about teenage behavior is right there in the play and he wrote about it first. This guy's invented a system to make it intelligible, and Shakespeare, because of the language and the complexity of his scenarios, it helped me understand what was going when we started to talk that he was actually writing about teenage and coming up with a theory before anyone else did. He's hard to best.

Adaptation of Shakespeare in Canada is a flourishing genre. The CASP research team has found close to 500 plays that date back to pre-Confederation.

Really, you're kidding, five hundred? Wow!

Yes. To what extent does this tradition of adapting define specifically Canadian theatrical practices (if one can even speak of such practices with any validity)?

You could say that Shakespeare adapted other people's plays too, which if you look at his source material, he's ripping off this person and that person––Plautus, the original King Lear story. That is actually not new. In fact I think the act of rewriting is in just about everybody's experience as a writer whether from original source stories, and you're writing in response to the knowledge acquired when you read Shakespeare or the Greeks and you're writing to try and tell your story. That might be a variation, or a different take on it. It's old school, rewriting. Everybody rewrites. Everybody takes on somebody else's story.

Is it different if they are rewriting Shakespeare, as such a giant?

Sophocles was pretty much a giant too. Kind of shaped our thinking, didn't he? I think Shakespeare complicated it because I think it's what Harold Bloom says about the human being, that he sort of invented the human persona. I don't think he invented it, I think he was just perceptive enough to see what was going on and try to write about it, and he gave us definition. But up to that point, there was very little writing that was helping to define, at least in the English canon, human individuality.   You look at medieval drama … there's nothing after that, in English drama. There were the Greeks, there were the Romans.

That's a really huge starting point, in human consciousness, Shakespeare. It's a big turning point. It's also Elizabethan England, it's the Renaissance, it's the Enlightenment, it's the Italians and the French eventually, or Molière after that. Something's turning in the world. There's suddenly this increase in synaptical connection that's happening in the brain that's taking people to the new level.   It seemed to be around the Greeks and Romans, and then a big long gap. There was very few writers or the ability to write, or the social or political conditions to write. If you have to worry about eating all the time, there's not much time to sit down and think and write, if you're just trying to survive. There is a breakthrough in consciousness that's so significant. What was the question again?  

Adapting Shakespeare and why Canadians might choose that …

Well, everybody's taught it in high school. He's there in your core education. I read Macbeth and King Lear in high school, for sure. Those kinds of plays are there in the formative years. That's why he sells so well. He sells very well. The Shakespeare festivals in the park … When we did King Lear, it sold. Just packed houses. Couldn't get them to a Canadian play that way, but King Lear sold.

Are you talking about Hysterica?

No. King Lear sold like crazy. It's what we call the brand.  He's got great branding. He's taught to every high school student whether they like it or not. That's a great marketing tool.

Would you say that adaptation places the playwright in a compromised position at all in terms of reinforcing theatrical tradition or does it afford an opportunity to remake that tradition?

No, I think … everybody's rewriting. Most playwrights are rewriting inspired by seeing, inspired by what they read. One is always writing in context. Adaptations take you a little closer to that context, in terms of being inspired by that, but one's always reworking one's father, whether that's Shakespeare or Ibsen, or whatever. One's always re-examining that material. You might get very far away and no one sees the source material. Shakespeare did. Think of Plautus with Comedy of Errors. Plautus has two twins, so he [Shakespeare] adds two more twins. Complicate it more and up the ante.   For Titus Andronicus … Marlowe kills so many people in Massacre of Paris, alright, I'm going to kill that many more people. I think that the act of writing and creating is a dialogue, and you're having a dialogue with the world and you're having a dialogue with other people that are writing, or have written.  The most vibrant writing is a dialogue.

What theatrical techniques do you see as most useful in the adaptation of Shakespeare genre?

My theatrical techniques were based on improvisation because that's how I wanted to create. I can neither say whether they were useful or not. They were useful to my story, and to the final images I had, the final understanding of how I wanted my story … and if I wanted to take this path and do it in this manner. Useful? I don't know. I think you choose the way you do it to suit the goals you have.   So someone else might take a different take, and just sit down at a table and write.

Could you reflect on your own cultural background in relation to your writing and in relation to being “Canadian”?

I grew up in the north in Sudbury and Sudbury wasn't a very big place then, more a town than a city.   When I was a young man, I wanted to flee Sudbury as fast as I could, and I did. Theatre was one of the ways that I could flee Sudbury, but I really quite readily recognize actually that my imagination was born in Sudbury in a way because there was so little to do for I wanted, and because I was in those relatively isolated circumstances, I mean I had friends and stuff, but something about being alone like that led me, from a very young age, into the world of literature and reading. That's where I found my entertainment. The way my imagination and my creative life came to be was through the act of reading, and I read voraciously. I'm not sure if I had been in an urban environment with a lot of stimulus, would I have read as much. And now it's become a habit, but it was a habit that began at a very young age, eight or whatever. I read voraciously in search of stimulus that being in an isolated … though it wasn't that isolated, I must admit, but it certainly wasn't the city. I find it now great to go to Newfoundland or Northern Ontario and read. I can feel at home. I get a lot of reading done. So it was kind of a place where not much happened and was where I got the idea of reading to fill the time.

Link to Online Anthology: Romeo and Juliet: Music, Opera, Dance and Drama (2002)
Link to Database
Link to Online Anthology: Hysterica (2000)
Link to Database