Shakespeare at Notre Dame celebrates the impact of Sir Patrick Stewart, one of the founding members of Actors From The London Stage. Since 1975, AFTLS has traveled the country, bringing the words of Shakespeare to life, entertaining and educating hundreds of thousands of students. Reflecting on his legacy, Associate Director for AFTLS Bruce Alexander penned a tribute you can read below.
Sir Patrick and AFTLS
AFTLS has lost a founder and a champion. A man who made his name on the screen and stayed with the stage. Sir Patrick Stewart's involvement with Actors From The London Stage was no planned project. It grew pragmatically. More than we can know, was the chance knocking on his dressing-room door at the RSC over 50 years ago. That doubtless tentative "Come In" addressed by Patrick to Professor Homer Swander, English Professor at the University of Santa Barbara California, changed both of their lives. Actor met Academic; and AFTLS ACTER in its first manifestation was born.
Professor Swander ("Murph" to everyone) wanted Patrick to come and talk to his students who were visiting Stratford. They'd just seen Patrick's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice on the proscenium stage. "Talk? You want me to talk to students?" An excited uncertainty was, he tells us, alight in his eyes. "Why would you want me to talk to students?" Came the reply: "Because you ARE an actor and have brought Shakespeare to life. How, we want to know, is it done?"
Well don't we all want to know that? Still? Actors and Academics? In those days Patrick's natural outgoingness was still to bump up against a prejudice born in libraries that implied that Shakespeare shouldn't really be acted, but read. He and Murph both instinctively saw that as ridiculous heresy. And saw the possibility for wonderful debate far beyond that issue. Soon a group of five actors was flying to Los Angeles to talk to Shakespeare with young Americans. The unusualness of such a venture cannot be overestimated.
Five? That was the number Murph could pay for and host generously out of a university budget. Like so many aspects of AFTLS's work, the number turned out, fortuitously, to be magical. Soon the suggestion came from the actors, among whom was Patrick himself, that whole Shakespeare plays might be performed with the words as their Star. Soon AFTLS was traveling to campuses all over the States, performing and investigating with students.
It has to be said that Patrick's relationship with Shakespeare was born out of loneliness. A constant devil on his young back was his need to intervene to protect his mother at home. Shakespeare for him, as it is and has been for so many, was about trying to understand. Violence, aggression, and sex - all the sentiments that can drive us apart. And love, friendship, and benevolence - all the sentiments that bring us together. There are no generalized answers of course. Merely the way we treat each other. Our relationships. Shakespeare is big on relationships.
For AFTLS, the fact that this great writer was an actor who wrote, as well as a writer who acted, is alive in us all. Shakespeare clearly collaborated and cooperated. His was not the sort of genius that hands down from on high, but rather furthers and helps joint exploration. Patrick "got that". Of course Shakespeare "works" under electric suns with extravagant visual delights, but how if he comes to us out of a suitcase in the clothes we might stand up in ordinarily?
This, of course, is not a million miles from the way Shakespeare's plays were offered up in his day. The companies he was associated with did "boldly go" out onto all sorts of different stages - be they on tour in plague years or at their wooden "O" of a home. Suited only in the words provided by one of their number, his company told stories of lives lived.
Yes, theatre companies feel the urge to pay tribute to a Great Man by laying before him all the technical and visual riches they have access to, but AFTLS believes it is just as valid - and possibly truer to the plays themselves - to work the audience's "imaginary forces". To engage their audiences vitally in dreams they come to own as theirs.
Bottom has a dream. He wakes in amazement. "The eye of man has not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was..." he says. We encourage you to see with your ears.
AFTLS shares the discombobulation of creativity by being true to the assembled words of an actor/playwright who sought to understand what it is to be human and sought to share the inquiry with anyone.
Thank you, "Shakespeare" for opening up the theatre we all have in our heads. Thank you, Sir Patrick, for Acting For The Love of Shakespeare. You will be greatly missed, as we carry on.
-Bruce Alexander, AFTLS Associate Director