Robin and Mark and Richard III...

Today I witnessed magic. A DVD came in the mail, and I stopped everything to put it in and watch it. It was Robin and Mark and Richard III, and if you’ve not heard of it that’s not so surprising. It’s a Canadian documentary in which the late theatre director Robin Phillips works with Canadian comic actor Mark McKinney on playing William Shakespeare’s Richard III, the title character of the play. It's only sold in Canada as far as I can tell, and it's wonderful.

Robin Phillips, photo by V Tony Hauser

The first time I saw Robin’s work was in the summer of 1978 at the Stratford Festival of Canada. That was the summer he directed Maggie Smith and Brian Bedford in As You Like It and Noël Coward’s Private Lives, among other things. Those were the two shows that made me determined to go, and the entire week was immersion in some of the greatest theatre I’d ever seen.

Maggie Smith and Brian Bedford in As You Like It, Stratford, 1978

At the time I had no idea what made Robin’s work unlike anyone else’s – all I knew was that during the intermission of As You Like It I had to get out of the theatre and away from people. I felt raw and fragile and had never experienced Shakespeare quite like that before.

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Martha Henry and Alan Scarfe in Love's Labour's Lost, Stratford 1979

The next year Maggie Smith and Brian Bedford weren’t there, but Robin’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost made an impression that is still as fresh in me as the first time I saw it (I went back and saw it another three or four times that season). Before the play even began, you walked into the theatre and there were actors on the stage, and from their actions, their energy, you knew it was a hot, languorous afternoon and no one wanted to do anything.

When I met Robin a few years later, I told him how powerfully I’d been affected by Love’s Labour’s Lost. It wasn’t the stars, wonderful as they had been, it was how he wove together the individual notes of each actor into a symphony of performance.

The DVD I watched today shows how that magic occurs, or at least, it gives glimpses. The truth is, the magic isn’t just Robin, it’s Robin and Mark and what they each bring to the character of Richard III. And partway through, Christine joins them and brings her own magic to the mix. Martha Burns and Susan Coyne, both of them acted at Stratford when I went there, came up with the idea and completed the film shortly before Robin died.

In both films Robin quotes Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale – his favorite line of Shakespeare he says: It is required you do awake your faith. That was and is the magic. Robin had a gift for awakening faith – in actors, in an audience, in the world.

If you want to see for yourself, there is a trailer for the film on the Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/robinandmarkandrichardthethird/) and there’s another 5-minute film with Robin done by Hubert Davis on the National Film Board website (https://www.nfb.ca/film/move_your_mind/).

Take care,
Doc