The Paul Wells Show - Paul Gross on a King Lear for our times

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

The part of King Lear has a storied history, with classic performances by actors like William Hutt, Brian Cox and James Earl Jones. At 64, Paul Gross has taken on the role at Stratford, and he thinks the whole mythology around it is “just bullshit.” He reflects on the weight of the role, making Lear his own, and why Shakespeare still feels relevant.  In the episode, we mention Paul Gross's age as 62, but he is 64. We regret the error. You can get a premium version of this show with extra content by subscribing to Paul's newsletter: paulwells.substack.com

How do you play King Lear at Stratford? Paul Gross decided not to worry too much about it. It's like a PR campaign of very puffy actors to make it appear that the part is impossible to do. It is a mountain that can never be scaled. And I think it's just bullshit. Today, Paul Gross on Scaling the Mountain. I'm Paul Wells, the journalist fellow in residence at the University of Toronto's Monk School. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. I think my first reaction when I heard that Paul Gross would be playing King Lear at Stratford was, my God, I'm getting old.

King Lear is Shakespeare's greatest old man role, after all. It's about a king who divides up his kingdom among his daughters so he can ride off into the sunset and die in peace. He screws it up, of course. Everything falls apart. People start dying in waves. It felt strange to see an actor from my generation, more or less, in that role. I remember Paul Gross from Due South, the American TV show from the 90s, where he played a Mountie solving crime in Chicago, often in full dress, red uniform. Isn't he a little young to be playing King Lear? Turns out he isn't. Turns out the 90s were a long time ago. He's 62 now, older than lots of actors were when they played King Lear.

Call him Fjord, William Hutt, James Earl Jones. They were all younger then than he is now. But being old is hardly the only challenge. It's a big role. And being Shakespeare, it's about big things. Political power, judgment, loyalty, and knowing who you can trust. These are also things we think about all the time in politics too. That's what got me thinking. I didn't just want to ask this great actor about what he was getting himself into. I wanted you to hear his answers. Shakespeare puts a lot of stuff on your plate, whether you're on stage or in the audience.

And because his plays are about what it means to be alive, they're always contemporary. I went to Stratford to see Paul Gross play King Lear, and then I spoke with him a few days later. Hi. How are you? Good. I've always wondered when someone's doing a play, what effect that has on the rest of their day. We're talking on a Friday where you're doing Lear tomorrow. Is your Saturday shot if you're going to be going on at two or do you get to go to Costco or whatever it is that you need to do with the rest of your day? at two or do you get to go to Costco or whatever it is that you need to do with the rest of your day? No, it, it pretty much starts when I get up and with this, because we do have some long breaks. Sometimes it's as many as four days. So I try to run the play every day out loud. I have two little dogs that I've press ganged into helping me. They're very good at it. The,

they, they know when they're goner and when they're regan they know how to play the part properly and we we go on a long walk and i just do the play out loud and then i usually get to the theater about three hours before the curtain there's never a point when you've nailed it and you don't have to worry about it leaking out your ears it's not so much forgetting it it's just keeping it forward i don't think I would forget the lines. So just keep the whole, the totality of the play in the front burner and not let it fall too far in the back. It's the first thing you ever saw at Stratford when you were 11 or 12 years old. And it's only the second role that you've taken on at Stratford. You did Hamlet about 20 years ago. Tell me a little bit about the story of Paul Gross and King Lear at Stratford.

I think I was 12. I might've been 13, one of the two. And my mother took me here. The two of us came up here to see Kingar. And it was William Hutt playing it for, I think, maybe the second time. He did four of them, which is kind of unimaginable to me. Anyhow, I saw that. I remember very little about the production other than I thought, I'd like to be part of that world. It looked like it was just a fantastic place to be. And then years and years went by and I didn't really, I never worked with Bill. My wife did. Martha Burns worked with him until we were doing slings and arrows which was this television series loosely based on kind of based on stratford but more to do with theater company

and in the third year bill came in to play lear and i was in the show i was the director and that was how it kind of all started to come full circle. On top of which, in the show he was playing, his character was dying of cancer. And he asked my character to not stop the show and not tell the producers. And at the same time, Bill did tell me that he, apart from the character he was playing, was also dying and to not tell the producers. So everything was really... It was kind of resonant. Yeah, it felt just supremely meta. And then he had actually started sort of saying,

you know, you're going to have to do this part at some point. It didn't seem likely that I would ever play Lear. I think a lot of actors would like to, and I certainly was one of them. But to be doing it now is really one of the great privileges I could ever ask for. When I saw that you were playing King Lear, I thought, well, this makes no sense at all. He's much too young. Yes, so did I. It was a shock to realize that wasn't true how did you talk yourself into it

and first of all who asked who asked you to play lear this time well annie cimolino and i have been talking for off and on for years about possibly coming back and about whether martha and i would come back and do something together and for tons tons of different reasons, it just never seemed to work out. And then we were talking again, and the question of Lear came up. And at first, honestly, I did think, I wonder if I'm actually old enough. And he said, oh, I think you are. And then I thought about it. Well, yeah, actually, I am that old.

Not as old as he says he is in the script. Although it's interesting, the different ages of people who played it at. Colm was quite a bit younger than I am now. I think when he played it here, the last time it was done here. I know that Brian Cox did a production in England with Adrian Noble. I think he was 40. So it's, again, it is acting. But there is a certain degree of gravitas or something

that you have to, or just weight, really, of your own life, I think, that you pull on to inform this part. And even then, of course, you're going to be short. But that's where Shakespeare takes over. We were going back and forth about this conversation by email and you said you were looking forward to talking about this ridiculously cosmological play. I wasn't that familiar with Lear until I started studying up for this. That was not the way I conceived it in my head. I thought of it as essentially a family drama.

In what way is it cosmological? First of all, it is a family drama, but it's a family drama, the outcome of which the scales of justice in an entire kingdom and all of the people that are inside that kingdom, their lives depend on the outcome of this. I think there's also something quite mysterious at the actual heart of the play. First of all, just structurally, it shouldn't work. It just shouldn't work that you have your main character depart from the main storyline,

have nothing else to do with the plot, wander around alone and die, and have the play still hold together. And yet it does. And I'm sure, you know, we're all used to it now. It's this magisterial play, and we know it's a masterpiece, and we call it King Lear and Roe Lear, and everyone kind of accepts that.

But if it were brought in to HBO tomorrow, they'd say, you know, we don't think it's going to work. It needs more Lear. We need more Lear. And he's got to have more to do with the plot. Yeah. And I,

maybe by the end of October, I'll figure out how that actually works. Cause really it kind of ought not to, but I think also there's, there was something massive about the human condition that's rolling around underneath and blowing around on top of it that is not on the shoulders of actors, but it's what, however, Shakespeare is marshalling all of this, that we feel this increasing storm or the weight of this storm gathering behind us, that's going to lead us into this tragedy. It is just, it's,

it's such a massive piece. And and i for a long time was trying to figure out why because when i would go to see versions of it i'd start i would start to cry kind 15 minutes 20 minutes before the show's over i'm just feeling the weight of this perplexing play about humanity and the more I think about it is that he's, well, like all of Shakespeare's characters, he's extremely ambiguous and very flawed. Well, not all of them are quite as flawed as Lear, but they're not one thing or another.

I think Shakespeare was always incapable of writing simplistic characters, so they have lots of different angles. And certainly he's kind of writing simplistic characters, so they have lots of different angles. And certainly, he's kind of a terrible father, definitely by contemporary terms he is. He says some of the most horrifying things ever. He's vain. He's prone to irrational rage. He's capricious.

He's a whole bunch of different things. But we start to pull for him as he starts to get disassembled. And I think we're pulling for him to get through all of this to some state of self-awareness or understanding or what we might call a state of grace. And the tragedy is he doesn't make it there. And it's not, I mean, it's sad that he dies it's sad that cordelia dies it's you know it's awful that everybody else dies but i think what kills us is that if we're hoping if he can get there to this state of grace then so can we and he doesn't make it and that is what i think breaks our hearts and the courage to write that and to make it. And that is what I think breaks our hearts. And the courage to write that and to

make it work is yet another one of these extraordinary things about this writer who remains as mysterious now as he ever did to me throughout my career. It's also a play that seems to me operates on, on many levels simultaneously. So it is cosmological. I think it's Gloucester who talks about these late eclipses of the sun and moon, which portend no good to us, which I found chilling because he's basically essentially saying we're

living in a bad time. Whatever we do, it doesn't matter that much because it's just shitty times. And for anyone listening after the three years we've all been through it, that strikes me as a kind of a really contemporary vibe, you know? Yeah. And then it's international intrigue. There's a invasion by a foreign power.

There's, you know, high matters of court. And then there's the family drama. And then it's a play that's kind of disturbingly obsessed with the human body. He calls on the gods to make his daughter infertile. And then a bunch of people gouge out a character's eyes. It's a bit of a snuff film in some ways. Yeah, it's really, it's like Tarantino.

Tarantino in the 1600s. It must be a bit of a challenge, a bit of an opportunity to figure out which of those registries you're going to be playing on, both overall, who's your lear, and then secondly, almost minute to minute, which phrases in the counterpoint are you going to draw out or play down?

I don't really think of it that way i think now i feel i can kind of talk about it a little bit because i just really don't have much of a method or any sort of system what i realized i was doing with this one is just repeating it out loud just keep saying it over and over again wander around in a field and start yelling this stuff and see what emerges like see what it is pulling out of you and then start to see if there's any pattern to that and then start to go okay well that's yeah that'll hook to that that makes sense and then go back and look at the at the text what does he mean what did he mean by that why did he write that and not something else? I mean, the simplest example would be to talk about the ending, which is a very hard ending. It's not sentimental particularly. And he could write anything, so he chose to write this. Why? Why didn't he write a very lovely speech like The Seven Ages of Man about how death approaches us all and we just have to accept it he doesn't write that and i think it's because he does not want us to take our eyes off

it this is hard this is a hard life now of course a lot of shakespeare's stuff was mixed up in kind of cautionary tales to his own comrades to his society and often to the monarchy. He'd had to be careful if he got too far off the accepted line, he could end up imprisoned. James was on the throne when this play was first produced and I think had been on for like three years. But certainly it was a hot topic in very recent public conversation because Elizabeth, the previous monarch, had no children. There was no issues. So there was a big question about succession and a terror that everything would fall apart. They'd end up with claimants to the throne at war with each other. And luckily, they avoided it. And so I think he intended also to capitalize on that general angst about the succession

and make sure that it was alive in everybody. They would all have been, oh my God, yeah, look, we just dodged having people's eyes put up. And I think there's also the thing about a king. Well, there's two things. The first about a king is that's maybe the hardest thing was to try to imagine that you have complete power. And we don't really have contemporary analogies to that. I mean, Kim Jong-un, but those people feel more like they came from outer space. I mean, even Putin has constraints on his power.

But Lear, it's in such a stripped-down period of history. We were using as our reference kind of post-Rome in the warlord period before we arrive at Alfred and when things get a little more settled down. And one assumes that he did okay, then there's no mention that the kingdom was a horror story. It must have been relatively stable. But Lear's great flaw is assuming that his power stems out of his own personality and out of his rage and not recognize your power is the position and you've forfeited it he doesn't think politics affects him he he uh he's the king damn it and uh whatever i say look if i'm telling you we're all speaking swedish by noon we are all

speaking swedish by noon that kind of power and that he also believes that he's got a direct channel of communication to the gods that he stands as an intermediary between his subjects and the gods and discovers slowly over the play the gods aren't either listening to him or they're just not there yeah they're not picking up no so many of shakespeare's plays of course are tremendously political. I got to say, as an emissary from Ottawa, I was kind of shocked and fascinated by that opening scene.

Because he not only makes a succession of terrible, terrible mistakes, he makes mistakes I've seen a hundred times before. So he disowns his daughter and marries her off to the king of the. Arch rival. Major neighboring military power. Yeah.

Right. So that's just a, that's a terrible policy must be. Not a good move. And then he kicks out Kent, the only guy in his court who's got the guts to tell the truth to him. And his right arm. Yeah.

I think Kent's the guy who's his fixer, who did everything. Or not everything, but he said, Kent, you know, there's a problem with this village or this town. We'll go settle it. And Kent would go do that. So this is a very bad staffing decision. Yeah, terrible. And then he leaves the stage. decision.

Yeah, terrible. And then he leaves the stage. And his older daughters, the ones he's just given his kingdom to, start bad-mouthing him behind his back. So it speaks poorly of them, but it also suggests he's a pretty lousy judge of character. And the thing is, lousy policy decision, lousy staffing decision, lousy judge of

character. My God, this is my last 30 years in Ottawa like this is why Shakespeare is still done today Paul well that's that whole opening scene is so fascinating because it's obviously, you know, his two main kind of consiglieres, Kent and Gloucester, both sort of know that this is coming, the division of the kingdom. And they don't seem to be upset by whatever it is he had planned. Like they think it probably would work. And so when he walks on the stage, Lear has an okay plan, not a brilliant plan, but not bad. Instead of dividing it in two, which is very unstable, it will be between three. And, you know, that will hold

everything at bay. Two of the daughters have dukes who have some military attached with them. And his favorite daughter will then be married to either to the king of france or to the duke of burgundy and now she will have some military meaning it's all triangulated and it should be a stable passing on what makes it go haywire is his anger and then he's improvising i mean if he just had walked off the stage said whoa this is a mess got to go and think about this for 10 minutes. We wouldn't have a play. Instead, he just goes berserk. And everything he does from then on is awful.

I think it's interesting with the daughters. Yeah, they're not great and immediately start to plot. But it also makes you wonder what kind of father was he to them? Like, did he have his foot on their neck their entire lives? And then when he lifts it off, all of their worst instincts come to the fore. And we're kind of left to, you as the players and us as the audience, we're left to speculate about that.

We get nothing about their backstory. No. About anyone's backstory. No, no. And the mother is mentioned only once and not by name. Well, that's also interesting. I mean, there are these odd little clues he leaves. Lear obviously did not remarry after the death of his wife,

which he most normally would have done to try to seek a male heir, but he doesn't. So either he had great respect for her, which is what I kind of think, that they will not talk about her, and that he would make do with his daughters, which would have in those days been rather an extraordinary thing to have done, at least in the historical time frame. In a minute, I'll talk to Paul Gross about his decision to play King Lear

as a bit of a goof. If you like discussions about big ideas like the ones on this show, I have a recommendation for another podcast. This Being Human is a show that features deep conversations about life, art, and the soul, informed by a Muslim worldview. It's hosted by Abdul Rahman Malik, an award-winning journalist and educator. He talks to artists, musicians, writers, and other intellectuals about the work they do and the things that move them. This Being Human is a podcast from the Aga Khan Museum,

produced by Antica Productions in partnership with TVO. Check it out. You can get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Now, you make a kind of a big decision about the character, about your relationship to the character, which I had a bit of a hard time dealing with until what the hell. He's on the stage, I'm not.

Which is that you're quite lighthearted. You are, for the first third of the play, quite jokey about everything. When you talk about crawling towards death, your Lear is making a big joke about the very idea that he could die. Do you agree with that, Reid, on your performance? And what made you make that call? I don't know.

It just kind of started to happen, I suppose, that it sort of surfaced. And I thought, well, that makes sense. I mean, I think he is a character that has to be full. I don't think there is a way to do it for a start. I don't think there's any template to it. And I think that what the play does ask of an actor is everything that actor has to throw in. And so that's going to include everything I have.

And even that won't be enough, but that's what everyone does. If you see Plummer, that's Chris Plummer. does. If you see Plummer, that's Chris Plummer. That's Chris Plummer doing Lear, but it's not a character because it asks you for everything. The thing about Lear is he is actually really funny. There are lots and lots of points in this play where he's hilarious, and that's Shakespeare. I don't think there's a whole lot of fun in the first half of our production, because he is so hurt and so furious, enraged and kind of blind. But I think he arrives at the beginning, and he's in, you know, it's a big day, and he wants to make sure it goes well. It's the biggest thing he's done since he ascended to

the throne, which is to hand the throne off. I think you should have a sense that he was kind of mischievous, that he was maybe actually kind of fun to be around, that he wasn't a big old bore. And it does sort of touch on something what your question does, which is this preconception we have about a part like lear one of these kind of iconic parts that we're sort of moving out of but it took a long time to start to move away from the great the sort of titanic lear the monumental lear the lear that is that was good for its time but was a fashion and then it became just kind of accepted wisdom that this is you know he's not very funny and he's a great big guy very serious and i don't really see that in the writing when he needs to be he is when he needs to be he can be titanic but i've never known a single person who is titanic all the time not one i'm struck by the

moment when he leaves the stage and he's left with the daughters and gonoril the eldest daughter says my god this is a silly thing he's done giving us the kingdom and reagan the middle daughter goes well yes but he hath ever but slenderly known himself. In other words, she's suggesting that he's really never been that on the ball. His judgment isn't deteriorating. It was just never great. Is that something that you factored into your performance at all? I think so. I mean, what that means to me is not that he's not so much not on the ball.

He was on the ball, obviously, for what was required of him to be on the ball for. Yeah. That is to hold the kingdom together for, one assumes, quite a long period of time. I think it's more that he was never self-analytical. That he didn't sit there and kind of examine his motivations for things. Unlike Hamlet, which is really hard going. Hamlet is quite depressing to play because Hamlet is constantly grinding around on the boulders inside himself. And so you are too.

And it's exhausting. Is there a better way to do this? Should I do it that way? Lear has none of those qualms. And in most of the initial indignities that he feels he's suffering he knows exactly it isn't him it's these horrible daughters a plague on you you know you unnatural hags he doesn't he's not thinking that he's got any culpability in his treatment hey we've been talking about all these decisions as though they're yours alone to make,

but obviously you're a member of a company, you're stuck with the script, and you have a director, Kimberly Rampersad. What has it been like working with her? She's a major figure at Shaw Festival. She came down the road to Stratford for the season to do this. What was the preliminary talks the

rehearsals the run-up to the performance oh it was just absolutely wonderful I just love her and we're a really great balance she's kind of jazz and I'm a little bit more ploddy but we didn't disagree about the general approach to how we'd go at the play didn't disagree about what it was i thought i would do i mean really in a sense the director has to do whatever the leer is going to do because that's all that leer can do like you could say well let's make it like some different character like i was saying before if it's scoffield it's paul scoffield it's not like I was saying before if it's Schofield it's Paul Schofield it's not Schofield

pretending to be somebody but we really did agree on everything talked about everything most importantly we were very good together on doing cuts they're essential actually because you have to bring the play down to a manageable size

I don't think we disagreed about anything really we talked a lot about casting together. So it was a wonderful partnership. Does it ever come out differently? Are there ever really significant clashes in the conception of a play or in the ideas about performance? I think there have been,

but I'm kind of careful of that and just make sure I'm not going to do something with somebody that I don't think we'll work together well because it's too awful to go and do a piece of theater and not agree about it and then get on stage and have to repeat something you don't agree with over and over and over and over again and it's much easier to not agree with a film director and you just do it and get off and it's over because you're not having to do it every night but i was very lucky with Kimberly. She's just magnificent.

When is the performance locked in? Like when is a play done? Is it done opening night? Is it done six months after? Is it done when you like draw your last breath and you realize you should have done it in French? Or I mean. Swedish.

No, I don't think they're ever done. These big plays, they're're never you're never finished uh you just stop you just put your pen down but it's kind of a part like leo you can't really do it in any conventional sense you do a version of it and every time i'm on stage something completely different happens not all through the entire performance but there are things that will crop up or some line comes out differently or i realize something oh that's what that means and that goes on every single time so it is very live and then you know the last performance we did there was a completely different feeling to the whole the last big fight with the two daughters than we'd ever done before and this is not

exactly intentional i don't well not at all i mean i don't sit backstage saying well i gotta do something different i gotta shake it up or something it's just whatever is taking you over it comes out quite differently and all of them are valid so So in that regard, it's never locked. And also a part likelier is so broad. It's very similar to Hamlet. They're not really doable in the way that one might think that word implies. You do a version of it. And all of the performances you do of that part become that version. And if you see three King Lear's in your lifetime, it's the amalgam

of those versions that becomes King Lear. That character has starts to, with all of that will start to fill up and feel like a full character. And I used to be quite snobby about this until I did Hamlet. But I remember when Keanu Reeves went out to do Hamlet in Winnipeg and the theater community, and I was one of these cretins who was saying, oh, he's not really an actor. He's just, you know, he's a mudhead. And I just wish I hadn't been such a dick. I should have gone and seen it. I think it would have been really fascinating. And I would add it to all of the other Hamlets I've seen. And then by the time I'm ready to die, that'll be Hamlet. This is why I didn't pepper you with questions about William Hutt. Even though you saw him in

1972, even though you were there shortly before he died 24 years later, in the meantime, you lived a hell of a lot of your own life. And then after it was over, you sat down with the text yourself. And I suspect that in the end, this is no kind of tribute to william hutt particularly it's just it's everything you've got poured into the vessel of that text yeah and and it's it is the amazing thing about that stage it's got nicks and cuts and grooves in it from everybody who's been on there all the sword fights it's the same wood as when it first went down in 57 and he's on there and that's the same stage i saw when i was a kid i mean he he basically made me want to be part of this and so it's such a

lucky feeling that i this is happening that i get to do this but you know going back to the part for a second i just this is something you said earlier about making him kind of jokey or something and i don't think that's certainly not making him it's me uh i think though that we're coming out of the monumental period of the leers and a lot of that period was put up by this sort of, it's like a PR campaign of very puffy actors to make it appear that the part is impossible to do. It is a mountain that can never be scaled. And I think it's just bullshit. It's a part. But it was a smart campaign because if you went to see somebody who said it was impossible and

they got through it you'd think well that guy has to be a genius he at least got through it but it was written by the the one playwright perhaps more than any other who knew how to write for actors who knew what actors needed who knew how much of a break they might need between scenes to pull themselves get themselves organized to go back out again. All the clues that you might need to put together a character, Shakespeare gives them all to you. And it's of course doable. If it weren't doable, you wouldn't be doing it.

Wouldn't be there. And I think that for me meant you need to get rid of that notion of the grandiosity of the part. That's Shakespeare. Shakespeare does the big stuff. You're doing a man, a man who slowly discovers that's what he is. And that man can be complicated. And that man has blind spots. And that man has also just exactly like you do.

Of course, you've done an awful lot of TV. You've done movies. You've been the driving force behind getting movies made. What chops does theater call on that don't get as much of a workout in the other parts of your career? I mean, they're a technical thing. Obviously, the vocal demands of a play like this are quite substantial. And it's a muscle. You really just have to work your voice up.

I hadn't used it that much in any kind of significant way for a while. So there are brilliant coaching staff at Stratford. And they beat me until my voice started to work again. And then it would last long enough. You know, it's got to go through a lot of in the course of three hours and i can use it absolutely flat out and it's fine it feels sort of indestructible now so that's a big piece also just physically you have to be in really good shape to get through parts like these because it is three hours of full tilt and the emotional toll is fairly large

it's in a good way but it's exhausting to do which is funny i don't feel it at the end of a show i sort of feel it in the morning the next day i feel kind of sluggy but the thing that i the most wonderful thing is to be with an audience and in that theater that theater is a magical space and the relationship between the audience and stages like no other it's very intimate on the stage yet it has a kind of epic feeling it's sort of got an inverse feeling if you're sitting in the house but when you're on the deck it feels like you're all in my living room and that whatever happens to the performance in any given day or night is something that happens between us and the audience. So that you have a lot to do with determining what we do.

Because each audience has a collective character. And I miss that. The absolute aliveness of it. When you're around film, it's a long way away from anybody seeing it. And you're not around when they're watching it. long way away from anybody seeing it and you're not around when they're watching it is stratford as a community and as a a center for theater uh the same as it was when you were a kid the same as it was when you played hamlet has it been changing oh yeah yeah it's changed a lot i i would say that the company right now pound foround for Pound, compared to when I was here 23 years ago, is just so sharp.

They're so focused. They're just fantastic. The quality of the actors is so good. Not that they were terrible before, but there was a kind of – it was a sort of slightly soft, slightly unfocused feeling. This is really different. I think there's also a seriousness about the purpose right now as the theater rolls out from under the pandemic.

There's also real challenges as all theaters across North America are facing post-pandemic. The audiences are down. It's harder, it seems to get people to come. And everybody's in lockstep and trying to do what we can to reverse that. I think the company is just vastly more diverse. And that is, I think it just is. And that has immeasurably enhanced, I think what goes on on the stage. Because one hears people who are awfully grumpy about that, right?

This is just not the Shakespeare that I grew up with. But it sounds like you're arguing that the Shakespeare they grew up with was a bit of a guild. It was a bit of a closed shop. It was. Yeah, it definitely was. There's no question about that. And not even sort of mindfully so. It just kind of was. It's like nobody really questioned what we were doing. And I think those questions were great. And I think that the results of trying to answer those questions has been to the benefit of the company.

struggles that aren't necessarily related to that exactly. They're really to do with, are you relevant to your community? Are you interesting enough for people to come? It's also here in a place like this, that's a huge theater. It's almost 2000 seats. That's a lot of tickets. It was a very different time 23 years ago where there wasn't as much competition, where the 401 wasn't quite such the horror story that it is now, where the train was a bit more dependable. All of those kinds of factors play in very heavily. And also things that, you know, theaters like Stratford-A-Shaw aren't really in control of, like the price of gas. So, you know, there are always struggles, but I think the theater is in good shape artistically,

and I think it's in good shape psychically or psychologically or whatever it's there's a good frame of mind about what the challenges are what we need to do to overcome them so it's been great to work here i feel very i mean i love it it's a very positive place to come to work in a question you've been dealing with as an, as an actor does throughout your career, what do you do for an encore? I don't know. You don't have anything lined up. No,

I really haven't been thinking about that because I thought I just don't want to get involved in anything else. I want to do this for this year till the end of October. And then I'll think about something. I feel like I'm on a mission and I can't let anything else get in the way of it. And I feel every time that we do a curtain call and I walk off the stage, there's a little tiny cut. That's one less.

That's one less show I get to do. Not one less show you have to do, but you're approaching an end that you're not looking forward to. Yeah. I don't want it to come. I mean, I might be tired by then, but right now it's sort of, uh, I'll keep doing this.

That sounds like a pretty good place to end it. So, uh, thanks very much for taking the time. Well, thanks for talking to me. It's great. Thanks for listening to the Paul Wells show. The Paul Wells show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's

Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday.