The Toronto Sun, May 27, 2007
About Time
By: John Coulbourn
It's hard to believe that there is still a bit of history to be made at the Stratford Festival.
In its storied history, the Festival launched by Tom Patterson and Tyrone Guthrie has put the Bard's entire canon on the stage, and in almost 200 productions of his work, no doubt repeated it several times over. It's broadened the range and reach of the Festival's mandate so that, today it is as well known for its musical productions as its classical fare and it's welcomed a range of talent to its stages -- everyone from movie stars to graduates of its own academy, in the process, casting men as women, women as men and embracing all the permutations in between.
And now, finally, when the curtain goes up on their latest production of Othello Saturday, the Festival will -- for the first time -- feature a Canadian-born black man in the title role.
It will be, one suspects, a touching moment, rendered all the sweeter for the fact that we've waited so long for it to happen.
Mind you, as he prepares for opening week, Philip Akin, the man at the heart of this story, isn't finding much time to savour the sweetness, immersed as he is in rehearsals both for Othello and Of Mice And Men, and juggling them with his duties as Artistic Director of Obsidian Theatre Company.
A lot of actors in Akin's position, of course, would have taken a leave of absence from any administrative post -- but for Akin, that simply wasn't an option.
"I'm the only full-time person there," he says of the Toronto-based company he helped to found, along with 12 other like-minded theatre professionals from the black community, back in the last century. "You don't have a whole staff of people who carry the whole history in their heads.
"So my first obligation is to Obsidian," he continues. "I've got a lot more years to be an actor than I do an artistic director. I'm doing things with Obsidian that have the potential for long-range benefits, so if it was going to impact on what I was going to do next year ..."
So, even while Akin was aware of the historic significance of playing Othello in this production, he didn't immediately leap at the chance.
"I talked it over with Janine (the lady who shares his life), my agent, the board chair, the people at Obsidian," he recalls. "And everybody was very supportive."
Then, he had to audition, a task for which he prepared for a week, enlisting the support of director/actor Joe Ziegler -- and then he went for it.
"It was the first time in my career, I didn't feel like a supplicant," the 57-year-old Akin says. "I came out here with no pressure and, if it worked, I was really going to go for it."
For Akin, whose Canadian father and grandfather meant he was Canadian from the moment of his Jamaican birth, it's been a long road from his Oshawa childhood to the Stratford stage. Having been drawn to the stage as a youth -- "I won't say that (colour) didn't matter, but merit mattered more," he recalls -- Akin enrolled in Ryerson Theatre School and, after a short stint at the Shaw Festival, moved into film and television, watching from a distance as the Festival cast first, white actors in black face, then American-born blacks in the Shakespearean classics. He particularly remembers 1973, when the Festival imported Israeli actor Nachum Buchman to play the role, despite his lack of fluency in English.
"I remember doing a rant about that at a break at a CBC filming and Alan Scarfe (who would play the role in the Festival's 1979 production) was at the table," Akin recalls.
Still, it seems Akin had few dreams of playing the character himself, although he does admit to speculating as a theatre student that he'd be ready to play the role when he was 35, which he then considered old.
He would, in fact, first play the Moor of Venice at age 53 in Vancouver -- "God heard me and just got the numbers reversed," he quips -- but as far as he's concerned, he's about the perfect age right now, at least to play Othello to Claire Jullien's Desdamona.
"It's about the age spread," he says simply. "She's a young woman of a very sheltered society. To me, the poignancy of it is that older guy being head over heels in love with her. At 57, (you think) the chances of that sort of a relationship are gone -- and if that's where he's at, to have this woman come into his life increases the rush."
The other key player in any production of Othello, of course, is the villainous Iago, and Akin knows it.
"I think the play should have been called Iago half the time," he says, not a little ruefully. But while he's clearly aware that a good Iago can completely overshadow a lacklustre Othello, he welcomes the opportunity to play opposite Jonathan Goad in that role, even in the wake of Goad's brilliantly villainous turn as the bastard Edmund in Soulpepper's King Lear.
"He's a kick-ass actor and he makes me up my game," Akin insists, adding that he's equally impressed with the skills of director David Latham and the rest of the cast. "There's a lot of pressure, but there's a lot of talent right there. In a sense, that pressure is mitigated by the fact we're so tight working together."
Akin insists that, beyond Othello, he's never aspired to play Shakespeare and further, that he bears no malice that it has taken this long for Stratford to fully embrace homegrown actors from minority communities.
"I think Stratford is making a push to change things. It's taken a lot of years to get here," he says simply, adding that he hopes the days when a young actor of colour could only dream of playing Othello are gone forever at a Festival that has finally embraced colour-blind casting.
"It's a deep hurt,' he says. "You asked about (other) roles in Shakespeare (he'd like to play) -- Well. 20 years ago, maybe Hamlet, but that time's gone and I'm not ready to do Lear.
"I want to do this part to the best of my ability. I may fail. I may not -- but it will be the best and I can do."
And it will make history.