All the world's a stage

Not everyone knows that one of my life’s regrets is that I’ve never had a career in the theatre.

In the Fall of 1967, I was living in Montreal and I applied to the National Theatre School. Everything about the process of application was outside my experience but I bravely followed through.

To my great surprise, the school phoned me. During the course of a nice conversation, the woman who phoned told me kindly that she liked my letter but that I was considered too old for the acting program. I was 24. She told me it was rare for someone of my age to be admitted but if I truly thought I was exceptionally talented, she would try to get me in for an audition.

Well. . . my mother had told me I could do anything – of course, as most of our mothers told us – and I had won two awards for acting in high school. (One was for Rise and Shine, the other for Still Stands the House.) I clearly didn’t have the confidence though because I thanked her and moved on.

Years later, I was out of work and living in Fredericton. A position as assistant to the Communications Director at Theatre New Brunswick came up and I was interviewed by Walter Learning, then TNB’s artistic director. We knew each other as we were both close friends with the poet/playwright Alden Nowlan. Walter told me I would hate the job. It was a junior position, I would have to answer to a director who had much less experience than I and, in his opinion, I was over-qualified. He was right and I knew it even then.

I still love the theatre though and I’m happy whenever I’m a member of the audience. I enjoy it at all levels, from a high school play to the professional leagues but occasionally, there’s something that makes it memorable.

In New York a few years ago, we saw Angela Lansbury in her final Broadway performance in Blithe Spirit. It was such a thrill – I felt star-struck but she was so good at what she was doing, I had to keep reminding myself, “That’s Angela Lansbury!”

We waited at the stage door with a few hundred other people for her to appear after the show and eventually, there she was. She was so gracious and friendly – she signed everything and chatted and laughed and when it was time for her to go, miraculously, there was a car that had silently appeared out of nowhere and she was gone. No muss, no fuss.

It was, altogether, a lovely experience.

Last week, we were in the West End in London. We went to the Gielgud Theatre (even the name is thrilling) to see a current hit play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It was fun just to look around and see the differences from our theatre experiences at home.

The cheerful man sitting next to us, for example, read his book – a good-sized hard-covered book – before the play started and throughout the intermission. The family in the row in front of us – a couple with their three children – got settled in and then the husband went out and returned with glasses of wine for the two adults. Most people sitting around us had brought in drinks from the bar.

The play is hard to describe. First of all, it is excellent – winner of Olivier and Tony Awards and generally acclaimed by the critics. It’s multi-media and fast-paced with much going on and yet it’s focused and tells a moving story.

It’s the story of a 15-year-old boy who has autism or Asperger’s and who needs to find out who murdered his neighbour’s dog.

We all really enjoyed the play and, as always, the theatre experience itself added a lot to our enjoyment.

Two footnotes: For anyone who follows theatrical news of the West End, we did look into the ticket situation for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet which opened while we were in London. Not surprisingly, we found that tickets had sold out in minutes when they went on sale a year ago. There are 30 tickets available each day for that day’s performance and people sleep on the sidewalk to get in line to try and get one. We passed on that.

But speaking of Shakespeare: a few days before our West End experience, we had walked exactly where William Shakespeare himself walked, on the 400-year-old floors of his childhood home. Why should that seem so memorable and significant? That's a story for another day.