Press Coverage

The Toronto Star
Feb. 11, 2006

RICHARD OUZOUNIAN
Shakespeare, Colm on down

Acclaimed thespian Colm Feore delivers Bard lessons to 50 students at Riverdale Collegiate

Invigorating session breaks down historic works of tragedy and touches students on very personal level

If you want to see Colm Feore act at Stratford this summer, it could cost you up to $102 a ticket.

But if you were in Austra Gulens’ Grade 12 English class at Riverdale Collegiate on Thursday morning, you could have enjoyed the privilege for free.

The award-winning thespian taught 50 students in 75 minutes how to understand, appreciate and even deliver the words of William Shakespeare.

It sounds pretty exciting (and it was!), but it’s all in a day’s work for Shakespearience.

This program was founded in 1998 by actor/educator Marvin Karon and well-known performer R.H. Thomson, primarily as a response to the ever-decreasing amount of Shakespeare being taught in Ontario schools.

With the help of Peter Polley at York Mills Collegiate, they started working with the concept that Shakespeare was first and foremost a dramatic artist and no one could bring his work to life as well as a professional actor.

Originally called “On Board with the Bard,” the program visited more than 100 schools last year in nine boards of education across the GTA.

Paul Gross, Fiona Reid, Martha Henry, Sonja Smits and Graham Abbey have all willingly lent their help as guest performers and on Thursday, it was Feore’s turn. When asked why he spent one of the few free days on his crowded schedule driving through the snow from his Stratford home to teach some kids he’d never met about Shakespeare, Feore didn’t hesitate.

“This is one of the most important things we could be doing. If you understand Shakespeare, you understand language, you understand philosophy, you understand life.”

Without condescension, Karon puts the students in a receptive frame of mind and gets them working eagerly along with him and Feore.

“Comprehension is the major stumbling block,” Karon admits. “A lot of people don’t understand Shakespeare’s language, and so they tune the plays right out.”

Karon and Feore address the issue directly, by spouting a passage of Hamlet filled with obscure topical allusions and then putting everyone’s mind at ease by segueing into a sketch made up of nothing but street-talk, vintage 2006.

By the time the duo have spouted their jive about “cheddar” and “bling”, the kids are not only laughing, but ready for the serious point: every era has its own linguistic code and you just have to figure out how to decipher it.

Feore then picks up the ball and reminds them it’s all about storytelling. Without missing a beat, he swings into one of the speeches of Cassius from Julius Caesar, acting it full out, with total clarity and command.

In fact, he’s delivering the lines to this Grade 12 class exactly as he did to Denzel Washington on Broadway last summer, in a performance the N.Y. critics hailed as brilliant.

Realizing that doing is better than watching, Karon and Feore pluck volunteers from the crowd and within minutes have them acting Shakespeare with clarity and comprehension. They have seven not-so-secret tricks to accomplish this that all make perfect sense. (See sidebar.)

After leading the class through scenes from Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, Feore moves in for the kill. He charms the class with anecdotes about playing opposite Vin Diesel in The Chronicles of Riddick before arriving at his central thesis: Shakespeare is about telling stories, communicating thoughts and feelings in a way we should all be able to understand.

It’s been 17 years since he’s last played Hamlet, but he whips through one of the famous soliloquies without a single hesitation. The lunch bell rings and the kids don’t move; they sit enraptured by this actor and what he can do with the words of Shakespeare.

Something as ambitious and out of the box as Shakespearience is just what our schools need. This isn’t elitist, this isn’t a luxury. This is education in its purest form: exposing young minds to concepts that will excite them and opening doors to a world they may never have thought of entering.

Feore tells them, “If you feel something and don’t know how to say it, Shakespeare will say it for you.”

He speaks those great lines of Hamlet:

“To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep …” Behind the eyes of these students from Riverdale Collegiate, you could see emotions stirring that they felt, but never knew how to put in words. No one mentions her name, but the memory of their fellow student Jane Creba and her tragic death on Boxing Day are still never far from everyone’s mind here. Feore finishes and the words of Shakespeare linger in the air. The rest is silence.

Globe Review
THE GLOBE AND MAIL CANADA’S NATIONAL NEWSPAPER
THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 2002

In studying the Bard, the play’s the thing

KATE TAYLOR
ARTISTIC LICENCE

When TV actor and supply teacher Marvin Karon asks a class of Toronto high school students whether they hate Shakespeare, three-quarters of them usually raise their hands. A new poll commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and released last week showed British young people are a bit more enthusiastic: A third of those under 35 agreed that Shakespeare’s plays are relevant today. The RSC trumpeted this as wonderful news - a third of the population under 35 is a whole lot of potential theatre-goers - but it does leave you wondering what the other two-thirds think. Maybe, like Karon’s students, they think Shakespeare’s language is in-comprehensible and his plays are boring.

Or at least, that’s what they think before Karon and his friends have got to work on them. He is director of Shakespearience, a program that brings professional actors into the classroom to do scene work with students. The professional takes a lead role - and the students play the other parts and direct. Suddenly, both the universal and the archaic become clear, as the students agree they all know a braggart like Falstaff or realize that when a servant cries “Anon!” in Romeo and Juliet he must be lagging behind his mistress to comic effect.

The program, originally called On Board with the Bard, began in 1998 with a conversation between Karon, who was then teaching at York Mills Collegiate, and actor R.H. Thomson.

Depressed by a colleague who said she dreaded teaching Shakespeare, or another who suggested a drama class could busy itself doing improvisations based on The Jerry Springer Show, Karon told the veteran stage actor that he better look to his future audiences. Thomson took up the challenge and came to the school to workshop scenes from MacBeth.

Today, a list of actors that includes founding members Peter James Howarth, Rosemary Dunsmore and Yanna McIntosh along with the likes of Martha Henry, Gordon Pinsent, Fiona Reid, John Neville and Colm Feore have now visited 150 schools in the Toronto area, while Karon has also taken the program to Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School in Halifax, and to several schools in England. Meanwhile, Haworth is expanding the program this summer, setting up a day camp offering children from ages 8 and up the opportunity to spend two weeks performing Shakespeare. At the core of the Shakespearience program is the notion that these weighty texts of the Western canon have to be taught as theatre rather than as literature. When students have handed in essays that begin “In Hamlet, the book makes the point…,” Karon the teacher angrily scribbles in the margin, “It’s not a book!”

That’s also the philosophy at the Stratford Festival, where education manager Pat Quigley runs training programs for both teachers and students to supplement the matinees attended by an average of 70,000 young people from Canada and the United States every season. “If you approach it as literature; you destroy the intent of the playwright,” she said. Indeed, when asked why students should study Shakespeare, she replied, “I wouldn’t dwell on the universal [themes] that everybody talks about…They are marvelous examples of how to write good plays, with interesting characters and plots packed with action.”

To encourage teachers to move beyond line-by-line reading of the text and its analysis, she pairs them with actors who are trained to take a more physical approach to the script. Then the actor returns with the teacher for a classroom visit: Last Year, Graham Abbey who was playing the title character in Henry V, reported inspirational experiences working with the students at Toronto’s Central Technical School.

The actors show how Shakespeare is fun and physical, but that doesn’t mean they skim over the text. At York Mills Collegiate, English department head Peter Polley says what impresses him the most about the Shakespearience sessions is how the actors never let a line slip by unexamined but insist that every reference be explained and every word understood.

When I originally phoned Karon, Quigley and Polley, I thought to ask whether they believed Shakespeare should be compulsory in the schools. The curriculum varies from province to province, but most Canadian teenagers can easily avoid the Bard. In Alberta, for example, a Shakespearean play is required reading in the advanced English classes for students headed to university, but in the basic classes, the teacher can substitute a modern drama. In both Ontario and Nova Scotia, Shakespeare is simply one of a list of possible writers to be studied. Quigley doesn’t see any trend toward ditching Shakespeare, but Karon is worried that intimidated teachers won’t teach demanding plays that they themselves may find difficult to under-stand. Similarly, Polley is concerned that the stress on measurable standards in the new provincial curriculum will mean teachers use easier texts to ensure their students pass.

“There’s a list of 72 [curriculum] expectations…You can accomplish them using John Grisham or you can accomplish them using Julius Caesar,” he said. But as all three talked with huge enthusiasm about getting Shakespeare up on his feet in the classroom, my question seemed increasingly irrelevant: There is little point for using students to study Shakespeare if they are only going to be left with the impression that the plays are irrelevant and boring. On the other hand, those lucky enough to have an R.H. Thomson or a Graham Abbey visit their class may be in for the educational experience of a lifetime.

Students get actors’ take on The Bard
R.H. Thomson, Barclay Hope and Paul Gross teaching? ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t’

Peggy Hill
National Post

Fifty Grade 12 students are enthusiastically obeying the urging of actor R.H. Thomson, Barclay Hope, star of Global’s Psi Factor, and Marvin Karon, a teacher, to loudly berate each other on stage. Using a handout of Shakespearean insults, the teenagers pair off and the insults erupt:

“You pribbling, sheep-biting maggot-pie!”

“You gorbellied, clapper-clawed canker-blossom!”

The exercise, held this day at North Toronto Collegiate Institute, is part of a program that brings professional actors into high schools to demonstrate a scene from a Shakespearean play to English and drama classes.

The idea for this merging of actors and students arose a couple of years ago when Mr. Karon, a supply teacher, was looking over a lesson plan for a high school drama he would be covering. The lesson plan called for improvs based on the hyper-tabloid Jerry Springer Show.

Appalled at what he considered a waste of the students’ time and talents, he sought a solution with Mr. Thomson, his friend of more than 20 years.

Together, they created On Board With The Bard.

They launched a 20-school pilot project in 1998 with funding of $5,000 from the Toronto school board. But despite the program’s success, funding was cut last year. Mr. Karon thought that would be the end, but Mr. Thomson’s determination and the willingness of actors such as Paul Gross, his wife, Martha Burns, and Sonja Smits to donate their time has kept it going, at least for now.

But the students at this session are oblivious to the program’s financial woes. They quickly become enthralled with the hands-on experience of staging a scene from Hamlet.

Mr. Hope plays the lead, delighting the audience by heaving a young man — playing the deceased Polonius — over his shoulder and getting their input on whether that is the best way to dispose of the body or whether dragging, which he also demonstrates, is better.

Mr. Hope said that hearing Mr. Karon’s Jerry Springer anecdote “made my knees wobble” and he was determined to find the time to help make Shakespeare accessible. Originally from Montreal, he has stage experience in Death of a Salesman and The Heidi Chronicles, but with his George Clooney looks, he is best known, as one fan put it, as the “dishy” Peter Axon on Dan Aykroyd’s Psi Factor television show.

Students take turns in the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and others enthusiastically offer directing advice with prompting from Mr. Thomson, who has done award-winning stage, screen and television acting and racked up several directorial credits.

Over and over, the group goes through Act IV, Scene iii, in which Hamlet humorously toys with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern through feigned madness, while they demand that he show them where Polonius’ body is.

Messrs. Thomson and Hope workshop the scene, showing the students what an actor must bring to his or her part in terms of motivation and reaction.

The two actors help the students understand the significance of Shakespeare’s language, and the emotion that it conveys. That is a crucial element that the actors argue cannot be adequately taught by simply reading the text in class.

(Messrs. Thomson and Karon said they want to go into teachers colleges and do the same presentation so that the young educators are exposed to dynamic ways of presenting the plays.)

Mr. Gross, who is currently rehearsing for the role of Hamlet (he’ll appear as the Dane at the Stratford Festival next month), says a lack of proper teaching stifles students’ enthusiasm for Shakespeare.

“One of the problems with Shakespeare generally is that it’s taught partly by people who aren’t that experienced with it and, secondly, it’s usually taught like a document …” he said. “Shakespeare makes some sense, but not real sense, until you get up and start to make it do what Shakespeare intended, which is to make it come alive by the cadence and the meter and the rhythm. It only really starts to click in when it’s acted.”

Mr. Gross went into a school last December with Mr. Karon to do a scene from Hamlet and said it was exciting.

“The kids start directing a scene and it really becomes spectacular. … You can actually watch their heads coming alive.”