Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 51
5. Wig on, Stewart applies the “pathetic
little makeup that I use” to play Mark
Antony. He uses no base makeup, only
a few very simple lines accented with
an eyebrow pencil. Forty-five minutes
before curtain, Stewart makes his final
preparation, with light exercise and
meditation, all intended to lead him to
the ideal state of readiness for his first
entrance. © Robert Cohen
6. The two “Sirs”—Patrick Stewart
as Vladimir and Ian McKellen as
Estragon—study their last carrot in
Sean Mathias’ British production of
Waiting for Godot, brought to Broadway
in 2013–2014. © Geraint Lewis
7. The actor plays a playwright: Patrick
Stewart here performs the role of the
aging William Shakespeare contemplating
his future at a local pub after his
retirement to Stratford-upon-Avon,
in Edward Bond’s Bingo, directed by
Angus Jackson for London’s Old Vic
Theatre in 2012. © Geraint Lewis
American campuses, first through the
RSC’s “theatre-go-round,” which visited
the University of California at Irvine in
1968, and for a dozen years thereafter
as the cofounder of the ACTER group
of British performers (now called
Actors from the London Stage) which
has toured American colleges
annually since 1976.
One of the remarkable aspects of
Patrick Stewart’s career is his easy
crossover between English drama
(by Shakespeare, Harold Pinter, and
Tom Stoppard, among others) and
American drama (by Arthur Miller,
Edward Albee, and David Mamet).
Born in the north of England, he had to
lose his Yorkshire accent before acting
even in classic English plays, so finding
the proper dialect was always part of
his actor’s preparation. Even today,
forty-plus years into his professional
acting career, Stewart joins the cast
in preperformance warmups that tone
not only his voice but the particular
diction of the play he is in.
For his first American plays, Stewart
admits, “the biggest handicap was
the accent. I was very aware of this
in an early movie where I played an
American and they wrote in a line
about me saying, ‘Oh, he was born
in England.’ Whenever you hear a
line like that, you know it’s about
the accent!” Stewart attributes his
now-polished American accent to
vocal coach (and New York University
faculty member) Deborah Hecht, “who
completely transformed my experience
and confidence in speaking American.
That was for [Arthur Miller’s] Ride
Down Mount Morgan on Broadway.
We were aiming at sort of a cultivated,
cultured, New York Jewish accent, and
she brought me to a point where I felt
so good with it that I felt physically
like a different person. The accent
changed the way I moved, the way
I behaved; certainly the rhythms of
speech changed. And she was very,
very precise with me, very exact.
I worked with her again on [Edward
Albee’s] Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? and I went to her again for a
film role. Once I had ‘slipped sideways’
into feeling like an American,
everything became much easier.
Indeed, a year ago, when we started
to rehearse Antony and Cleopatra
(in England), I was perpetually
teased by stage management for my
American vowels!”
Stewart obviously loves acting. “It’s
the liberty of total freedom, where
I can be not myself—yet also purely
myself. It is a kind of possession,
where something takes over and
I become everything I would like to
be, and find a liberty to ‘play’ while
knowing at the same time that there
will be no consequences. Nobody’s
going to say, ‘Oh, stop being a
child! Stop being so selfish, so
self-obsessed! Pull yourself together!’”
“I thank God that I am an actor,”
Stewart concludes. “And that I spend
my days in the company of people
who behave with such dignity, honesty,
and openness. That’s what’s truly
meant by ‘theatrical’—not something
merely flashy, but doing what actors
must do to help people understand
what is really going on.”