Hard Truths + Fake News

Today I attended a “Boot Camp on Fake News and Democracy” at Carleton University presented by the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom and the Carleton School of Journalism in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election.

At the end of the day, Sean McCarthy of the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom said: “You are all influencers. Take what you have learned and share it with your network. You are citizen journalists. Have some humility. Journalism has been called the first draft of history. We should be honest about our shortcomings.”

And so I’m sharing:

First speaker on the world of fake news and online misinformation was BuzzFeed Editor Craig Silverman BuzzFeed.News who has been concerned about the topic for several years. 

He described a recent case study on what to expect by describing the activities of yellowvestgroup.com. It caught his attention because he saw a new article on their Facebook with bad grammar, and a false headline associating the building of an Islamic Centre with the ending of work camps, when they had nothing to do with each other.

 He was suspicious of a new page getting a lot of shares quickly, with private registration and a concerted effort to send people to the website. It was selling yellow vest decals, stickers, mugs and t-shirts. On the page was a photo of a woman in a yellow vest. He did a reverse image search and found she was a Scottish woman working in construction there. He tracked down craigio2778 in Alberta who worked in the oil sands. “He was really surprised when I found him and reached out to him,” said Silverman. “His view was he could do this stuff and he’d paid for privacy. We ended up publishing the story with the Toronto Star.”

Silverman said “we should be paying a lot of attention to what’s going on internally. There’s a lot of money to be made and hearts and minds to capture.”

His list on misinformation:

1. Misinformation comes in many forms, with many motivations, he said. He quoted a list of seven types of mis and dis information from FirstDraft: Satire or parody, misleading content, imposter content, fabricated content, false connection, false context and manipulated content.

2. It’s global. He gave the example of Macedonian teens being paid to spread Trump information on Facebook.

The platform WhatsApp has played a major role in inciting mob violence and vigilante justice. 

3. It feeds off polarization and human bias; filter bubbles. Belonging is stronger than facts. You don’t realize you aren’t acting rationally.

4. Creation of state sponsored trolling operations. Private planning and public execution. Using social media privately to plan the creation and purchase of fake accounts to seed content targeting Facebook groups. The aim of creating distraction/white noise e.g. the Chinese government flooding material for strategic distraction. Gaming algorithms and signals with bots tweeting the same thing to make it trend on twitter.

5. Targeting and exploiting journalists is a “double victory.” It gets the information out and discredits the journalist when it’s uncovered. “Any oxygen is a win” for white nationalists. “Getting them to ‘buy the meme’.”

The weaponization of leaks.

So what do we do about it? These are the principles:

1. Question everything in the digital environment. 
2. 2. Engage in content monitoring and network tracking.
3. 3. Apply traditional reporting techniques to developing sources and check facts.
4. 4. Recognize that actors with different motivations can produce the same signals. Don’t assume intent, prove it.
5. Understand you are a target. Guard your attention and be strategic with exposure.

Tactics:

• Identify places where misinformation campaigns are hatched
• Constantly monitor key participants
• Collaborate wherever possible to spot trends

Further info on the link bit.ly/verificationtoolsandtips

In reply to a question, about if you’re a journalist “taken in”

“Own the error. Take a screen shot of your tweet before deleting it. Delete, acknowledge and apologize.” 

Another question on how to avoid our own biases:

“Cultivate self-recognition if something makes you angry. Go and read content in reliable sources from a different point of view, and pay attention to your reaction.”

CTV Ottawa Bureau Chief Joyce Napier lead a panel of academics and pollsters to discuss what is to come in 2019.

 Ed Greenspan of the Public Policy Forum noted that the New York Times has more subscribers in Canada than the Globe and Mail. He said focus groups have taught him that people want “ a fire department of news.” They want it when it’s important, not every day. They say they get news from Facebook “unless it’s important. Then they go to news brands, anchors, columnists.” He said “we’re not out to protect newspapers. We’re out to protect journalism.”

David Coletto of Abacus Data said there is a big divide with under 45s getting news from Facebook and Twitter, and over 45s say TV is dominant. “People increasingly rely on their networks for their information. Emotion drives us to extremes and we believe more people have extreme views than do.” “This will be our first ‘digital first’ election. We need to hold our leaders accountable.” He said “the trust gap is really large. Every group believes their group is telling the truth and others aren’t.”

Kendall Anderson of The Samara Centre for Democracy said we have to expand civic literacy. “In all areas over the past 20 years, it’s decreasing.” “People in Canada are interested in politics. It’s up to the media to make sure they get good information.”  On election day, the front page of “a newspaper I won’t mention” was totally opinion, she said. “That’s why people think they have to follow opinions they agree with.”

 There was a Skype interview by Rosemary Barton with Fergus Bell of Pop Up News which promotes a collaborative newsroom. Bell said 90 organizations collaborated on the Mexican election, with the shared goal to fight misinformation. They ran the WhatsApp Channel Verificado 2018 and got 60,000 messages they responded to with a fact check. “We saw people share widely…We were a really strong resource in the election.”

How to do it? Ask ‘what slice of the pie can we one on together?’ Have an end date.

Last activity was a panel led by CBC’s Rosemary Barton on preparing for the upcoming campaign, with panelists Susan Delacourt from the Toronto Star, Mike De Souza of National Observer, Murad Hemmadi from The Logic, Michelle Richardson of the Ottawa Citizen and Lindsay Sample from The Discourse.

Said Michelle Richardson: “My role is closing the trust gap…Transparency so that when we make mistakes we own up to it. The second thing is bringing our audience into the work that we do…so they understand the critical process we go through. Lastly, to have a meaningful dialogue with our stakeholders so they look at our news with a more critical eye.”

As well, “we will be looking at the neighbourhood level.”

And “we have an obligation to push back and challenge when a politician says something that’s not true. We’re not a stenographer.”

Susan Delacourt worried about two tugs of war - the old way of covering the election on buses and planes, and now we cover platforms and not the advertising.  We will have a focus on finding the fake news, the bots. “We are working with BuzzFeed to do this too.” She mentioned that Facebook will have an ad library where you can go and track the election ads.”

Their pre-election sum up:

Michelle: “Engaging in more of a dialogue, listening to what people are saying.”

Susan: “Resist inertia. What worked before, won’t work again.”

Murad: “Policy is what happens after the election. It has to be covered.”

Rosemary: “Determining how I can make sure I’m serving you well, and to listen to you.”

Stratford 2017: Find 'what you will' in the 'food of love' season

By Louise Rachlis

Themes of identity and madness coloured summer 2017 for the Stratford Seminar Society, a longtime group that meets annually at Stratford for theatre, lectures, and discussions.

It was also hopefully the season of farewell to “the Patterson,” the popular building that began as a badminton court and has been a makeshift theatre for 40 years.

Seana McKenna and many of her fellow actors are sentimental about the Patterson, as are many theatre-goers. “It feels like summer theatre,” she said, speaking to Stratford Seminar Society participants. “The actors are away from the administration and all together in the Green Room together. But the air conditioning never works. It’s time for a new theatre. I’m ready to let go and welcome change, and if I am, everyone should be…I have a soft spot for the space. I will be a nostalgic historian but I will welcome the change.”

If plans go ahead, the beautiful large new theatre would begin construction in October. Provincial funding has been announced, and federal support is pending. Meanwhile, according to an article in the Stratford Gazette, there has been local opposition from members of the SLAAA, the Stratford Lakeside Active Adults Association including the Stratford Lawn Bowling Club. Sound like a good plot for a theatre production!

Between July 31 and August 5, our more than 80 Society members saw Tartuffe, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night or What you Will at the Festival Theatre; School for Scandal at the Avon Theatre, and Bakkhai, Timon of Athens, Madwoman of Chaillot and the Changeling at the Patterson Theatre. Many added in the musicals HMS Pinafore at the Avon and Guys and Dolls at the Festival, for a bit of levity among the tragedies.

Meeting since the 1980s, the Seminar Society arrangements are made by Kate Stiffler of New York and Susan Hobbs of Toronto. Members come from both the U.S. and Canada.

Professors Peter Parolin of the University of Wyoming and Liz Pentland of York University taught us about each play and its time period. It was helpful for instance to learn from Peter that Bakkhai was about “the god, the king and the women” and that the director had engaged an “intimacy coach” to help the actors deal with scenes of intimacy and eroticism.

 Similarly, Liz’s explanation of the turbulent times of The Changeling in the 1600s and the plot lines of “madness and confusion of sexual obsession” enhanced our appreciation of the performance.

There was a lot of blood and violence in both Bakkhai and The Changeling. Stratford has bloody heads and bloody clothing down to a science, but as one Society member said, sometimes imagining it is better than seeing it in front of our eyes.

For Twelfth Night, Liz provided slides that showed maps of the ancient world that showed that Shakespeare’s Illyria, the ancient Greek name, stands between Italy and the Ottoman Empire.

Liz and Peter also led the post-play discussions, which always elicited both appreciation and disapproval of the same plays. Some hate what others love, particularly evident in our responses to Romeo and Juliet and the Madwoman of Chaillot.

Many loved Tartuffe, with its modern dress and translation, and referencing of current U.S. politics elicited strong reaction. One Society member said it was “the most emotional experience I’ve ever had in the theatre” because of the Trump references. Another remarked that “French humour is usually subtle, but this is not.” He said that coming to Canada he and his partner had wanted a week of “he whose name will not be mentioned.” Another thought it was brilliant to make this audience feel the way that original audiences felt - “we laugh when we’re uncomfortable.” 

Everyone loved the performance of Twelfth Night, particularly the music played by Brent Carver on crystal bowls with different pitches, his singing and the set. 

Our talented theatre guests were dramaturge Bob White, and actors Rosemary Dunsmore, Joseph Ziegler, Seana McKenna and Brent Carver. 

Bob White, the director of new plays and drama at Stratford, said that when the theatre was founded 65 years ago, it was done as an economic solution for the city when the railway yards were closed. It conformed to Stratford’s English namesake, and developing new plays wasn’t a priority at that time. 

Ten years ago, former artistic director Des McAnuff gave him the mandate to source new work. He develops relationships with new writers, and tries to increase roles for women and how women look at the world. He also works on translations and adaptations done by Canadians.

He works on the text even during the play previews. “We are lucky to have seven previews before the official opening.” He quoted an old adage, “Plays are never finished, they just open.”

Two of the plays we saw were in their first preview, Tartuffe and Madwoman. Seana McKenna said the audience at a preview was “important and informative.”  One factor is that “when we don’t have an audience, the sound quality is very different. The audience soaks up some of the sound.”

While White doesn’t look at unsolicited manuscripts, he asks writers for “one-page pitches” and decides from that what plays to evaluate. 

Some other thoughts from our guests:

Rosemary Dunsmore on Bakkhai by Euripedes: “The Bakkhai is not tidy. It’s a play about addiction…It’s much more than a ‘feminist’ play. Greek plays are a public forum to discuss ideas, and not designed to be emotional.”

Joseph Ziegler who played Timon in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens: Timon is “a problem play” because it isn’t really a comedy or tragedy. “It’s not really about a man who becomes a freak…We are supposed to think ‘why isn’t the world helping him?’ He is completely unprepared for the loss of friendship and all he can do is withdraw. He cannot bear to be with those people any more.” As Peter Parolin said in his pre-Timon presentation, Timon is about misanthropy. “Is man so hateful to thee?…It’s Shakespeare’s anti-social play. The character turns his back on social relationships altogether.”

Ziegler said that for every play he’s in, his own life is “the fuel.” “That moment is the same moment as you felt” in a similar situation.

Now in her 26th season at Stratford, Seana McKenna first did Madwoman as a teenager. “This is a new translation and there are still times the long term memory want to kick in the old line.” She said The Madwoman of Chaillot is “a play about resistance, very topical now…Is it progress to tear down the old and keep building, building, building? There’s a line in this play, ‘the world is in trouble.’ It’s an allegory, it’s a fable, but it’s about what the playwright saw happening in 1940.”

Brent Carver, who played Feste in Twelfth Night and Rowley in the School for Scandal, on his previous role as Tevye the dairyman in Fiddler on the Roof at Stratford: He said he had doubts about playing Tevye and was sitting on a bench outside the rehearsal hall, and asking, “Why me? I don’t know.” And then he realized he was talking to God, and understood the role better and that he could do it. “The part of Tevye reminded me of my father who had eight kids.”

Next year’s Stratford Seminar Society session will take place July 30 to August 4, 2018. The play lineup will be announced in the fall.

Stratford 2016: When plays are master class perfect, there is little to say

“The plays are not museum pieces,” said Stratford artistic director Antony Cimolino. “They are sources of light on the world we have today.”

I’m always surprised by which plays have an impact on me. Before this season, I thought that scenes of war, taverns, sword fights, weren’t my thing. But Macbeth and the Henry history plays made a big impression. I had thought that A Little Night Music was up my alley of romance, and yet it left me cold. Macbeth, All my Sons, The Hypochondriac, particularly lingered.

I can’t tell you what to see, because it’s so personal. For instance, in contrast to my opinion, Bill, a voice expert, in our Seminar Society, thought the singing in A Little Night Music, was technically fantastic and he loved the play.

All the plays were different, all so professionally amazing; acting, sets, costumes.

Cimolino was the first of our five fabulous Stratford Seminar Society guests, along with Martha Henry, Graham Abbey, Ian Lake and Stephen Ouimette.

The 2016 Stratford Seminar Society schedule for the 74 of us began Monday August 1, with an introduction to the week and dinner at the Marquee in the Festival Theatre.

Lorne and I were attending the seminars for the fifth year, with Claes Winqvist from Rochester and my brother David from Toronto. Attendees come from all over, at least half from the U.S.

Every day consisted of a morning discussion of the previous day's plays, followed by a theatre guest and a talk on the day’s plays by professors Peter Parolin of the University of Wyoming or Liz Pentland of York University.

We had a matinee and an evening play every day, because we added the musicals to the eight Seminar Society plays.

Both Tuesday’s plays were in the Tom Patterson Theatre, Breath of Kings Rebellion (combining Richard II and Henry IV), and John Gabriel Borkman, the second-to-last play of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, written in 1896.

The plot (by Wikipedia) is that the Borkman family fortunes have been brought low by the imprisonment of John Gabriel who used his position as a bank manager to speculate with his investors’ money. The action of the play takes place eight years after Borkman’s release when John Gabriel Borkman, Mrs. Borkman, and her twin sister Ella Rentheim fight over young Erhart Borkman’s future.

Wednesday afternoon was Breath of Kings Redemption (Henry V) and All My Sons by Arthur Miller in the evening, both in the Tom Patterson as well. Thursday was Macbeth (taut Scottish thriller of guilt and violence) in the Festival Theatre and The Hypochondriac by Moliere in the Festival Theatre.

Friday, both plays, Shakespeare in Love and A Little Night Music, were at the Avon.

Saturday was A Chorus Line and As you Like it in the Festival Theatre (a Newfoundland-themed romantic pastoral comedy in which a cross-dressed heroine escapes court life to live and woo in the forest.) My bracket summaries are mainly from The Cambridge Shakespeare Guide by Emma Smith. I couldn’t sum them up in a sentence myself.

In this quick blog, I won’t give the play discussions, just a few highlights from the comments of our theatre guests. Guests traditionally receive flowers and a smoked salmon for doing the “salmonar.”

Day 1 The first half of the week was very gloomy, with the more cheerful plays the second half. Someone in the group remarked that “we’ll all feel like Scandinavians (gloomy like Ibsen) by tomorrow.” Next to Shakespeare, Ibsen is one of the most performed playwrights, said Scandinavian Claes.

Antony Cimolino, speaking on the theme of this season, said that all the post 911 victories “weren’t as clean as we thought...We’ve sowed our seeds for future defeats. It’s about the ambiguity between victory and defeat.”

-- He said that Ibsen is more modern and still speaks to us today, because except for the Norwegians, there’s a freedom to translate the text as you want. There are many ways to interpret each word. Re Borkman, “there are charismatic characters that think they can ‘make America great again’,” he said wryly.

In Macbeth, “it’s a big canvas.” “We undervalue it because it has witches in it.” The word “fear” comes into Macbeth three times more often than in other Shakespeare plays, and “corruption” is at the centre of the text.”

He deliberately cast younger actors in Macbeth because “there is speed to their actions. They don't have time to think.” Also, “because the play is about the future, I thought a young couple would be best. In casting, you can’t undo personality and you can’t undo age.”

The rhythm of night and day is very important, and it gets destroyed as the play goes on and the greyness takes over.

-- Cimolino on Moliere:

Louise IV loved the arts and was a patron of Moliere. He loved his satires of nobility, doctors, lawyers and priests. Moliere was constantly sick but when he took ill in 1673, the doctors wouldn’t come and the priest wouldn’t give last rites because of Moliere’s writing. Because of that, he couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. The King asked “how deep is consecrated ground?” The priest replied, four feet. The King said, “Would you mind burying him at five feet?”

--

Professor Peter Parolin gave us insight into the two views of history in the Henry plays - the providential view that history is dominated by God, and the Machiavellian view that power is all and the end justifies the means.

Day 2

We discussed the previous day’s plays in the re-designed Patterson theatre, and the difficulty of hearing lines when characters’ backs are turned. Later in the week we learned that the Patterson will be torn down in a couple of years and a new theatre built.

Our guest was director and actor Martha Henry, 78, and in her 42nd season at Stratford. She has worked many other places as well, and this year went back and forth to Niagara on the Lake where she directed Dance of Death, as well as All My Sons at Stratford.

She said All My Sons by Arthur Miller is the first play written in her lifetime that she has directed at Stratford. Because of its colour-blind casting, she had asked Miller’s estate for permission to add a line such as “You know Chris, she’s a coloured girl” or something like that, but they turned her down. She said we should pretend the line is there because it would have been mentioned and noticed in 1946.

All My Sons was the first play in the reconfigured Patterson, and the action takes place on the porch as characters go in and out of the house.

Martha Henry has also been in charge of the Conservatory program for seven years. It was started because the young actors auditioning “couldn’t speak,” she said. “I basically tried to teach them speech and context.” There are thousands of applications which are narrowed down to 10 in the Conservatory each year. They also learn from all theatre fields from stage managers to dressers “so they can act in any theatre in the world. I tell them ‘you’re not the centre of the universe. No actor of mine will ever throw a costume on the floor.”

Even with more new and Canadian plays being offered, she believes in the classics as a learning experience. “Shakespeare educated me. You don’t get that anywhere else.”

Actor Stephen Ouimette will be taking over the Conservatory from her next year, with his own ideas to add to the program.

--

In our afternoon Henry V play, Peter told us to watch for the examples of the English being better than the French in every way, so the country will support the war against them.

-- Day 3

Earlier in the week we learned about 90-no, which means a 90-minute play with no intermission. The history plays were twice that, three hours long each. We thought the young actor playing Henry V needed more nurturing to be stronger. Chuck in our group said he didn’t think the play is “done” yet. “The director has to watch it and go back and see what’s working and what isn’t.”

Bill suggested one of the problems with the voices was because of “hearing inversion.” “We don’t hear ourselves the way others hear us; that’s why we don’t recognize our voices on the answering machine. A good actor has to be aware of that.”

-- We all agreed that All My Sons was a master class in acting. When a play is good, there isn’t much to say. When it’s bad, there’s a lot to say. We sat for awhile in silence. -- Our guest was Graham Abbey, adapter, associate director and actor in the Breath of Kings plays. He is also the founder of Groundling Theatre in Toronto, which won the Dora Award for independent theatre last year for. A Winter’s Tale.

He said he’s “interested in human beings and what Shakespeare brings to them.” “Macbeth was written for James I who believed witches had caused the storm when his wife was travelling. It was a real world, not Halloween. Macbeth is about a union of two people that disintegrates. It’s about that couple.”

-- Day 4

It was wonderful to have Macbeth actor Ian Lake talk to our group, relaxed in shorts and a t-shirt. He said he was “wiped” from the previous day, when he played Macbeth, followed by his very funny part in The Hypochondriac as Dr. Diafoirerhoea. He said it would be easier when the order of the plays is reversed. “Macbeth was the most physically, emotionally and psychologically taxing experience of my life...I’ve learned the most about myself than in any job I’ve ever done.”

Growing up in B.C., he said he was “destined to be a rugby player”. He attended University of Victoria because they had the best rugby program but studied theatre “where I was rugby boy” and played rugby “where I was theatre boy”. He then he attended the National Theatre School and the Birmingham Conservatory in Stratford.

Last year he acted, sang and played the guitar in the musical “Once”. I realized you can you can succeed at things you don't know you're good at yet...Readiness is nonsense. If you’re ready, you should have done it already.”

With the fight scenes, he said the focus is on “storytelling, not just cool looking fights. The fight director liked having a young Macbeth, not an older one who says ‘I have this thing about my knee.’”

He said he and “Lady Macbeth” are a week apart in age and have known each other for 10 years in real life. “People realize they could be this amazing couple. When the relationship actually starts to deteriorate, and the chasm starts to grow, their ambition is for the other person.”

Auditions were in pairs. “It was like a chemistry test,” he said. “Relationships are the core. That's what audiences connect to... To me, my goal every night is to fill the Festival stage without sounding as if I’m yelling.”

-- Day 5

Our last guest was Stephen Ouimette, in his 22nd season in Stratford, fresh from the opening of The Hypochondriac in previews. He said a late opening is a “tough sell”. “We couldn’t wait for an audience to see what was there. We’re now trying to refine and control, to navigate the boat. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a little laugh to get a big one.”

The audience was shocked by the ending of Moliere, sick and dying at the end of the play. “It brings a multilayered experience to this,” said Ouimette. “Moliere was sick and wrote this play to make money. The best play is when comedy is next to tragedy and has a root in reality.”

“I kind of feel about Moliere the way I feel about Shakespeare,” he said, “in that we put them in a different pile...I still think you have to see a living, breathing human being in a classical play. The audience wants believability and reality as in modern playwrights Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. If it’s done well, there’s something released in the air, and it’s intoxicating.”

This has been an intoxicating season at Stratford.

A sampling of Stratford summer 2015

By Louise Rachlis

The Alchemist was one of the 10 plays we saw the first week of August as members of the Stratford Seminar Society for the 5^th year, and we were captivated in all the plays by the theatrical alchemy – using human imagination to transform us for a brief time.

The theme this season is Eureka moments, after which the world is not the same.

The variety, depth and quality of all the plays made me feel that indeed I’d suspended disbelief and been temporarily transported to another world of illusion, and I’m now back.

There were 68 in the Seminar Society group this year, the majority from the United States. Good friends Claes and Puck Winqvist came from Rochester, N.Y., and my brother David joined us from Toronto for two days. The five of us stayed again at the Mercer Hall.

Every morning the Seminar Society discussed the plays of the previous day, had a session with a theatre guest (each of whom was presented with flowers and a smoked salmon (we are nicknamed the Salmonar Society), and we were briefed by one of our two lecturers about one of the plays we were going to see. We went to the theatre each afternoon and evening.

This was one of the best seasons ever. In the past it had been much easier for the four of us to informally rank the plays on our last day; this year it was impossible because each had different strengths. Even in the Seminar Society group as a whole, every day was a surprise in the post play discussions, as one person’s gem was another’s “this play should have stayed in the closet.” One member said “the play was too loud”, and another followed with “it was the first time in the Patterson Theatre I could make out every word.”

The plays we saw – and what was special - were Hamlet (wonderful clarity and emotion), Oedipus Rex (business suits, nude Oedipus, and hand sanitizer against the plague), The Taming of the Shrew (good acting), The Physicists (really surprising), Pericles (Deborah Hay in three roles), The Alchemist (good costumes, and funny Stephen Ouimette), Love’s Labour’s Lost (funny prologue, I won’t reveal), Possible Worlds (very strange, but grows on you), and She Stoops to Conquer  (Lucy Peacock) and Lorne and I also went to Carousel (powerful singing and dancing), and the Winqvists saw Diary of Anne Frank (great set). Each play was in its own way amazing, and we were particularly impressed with Hamlet and Oedipus Rex.

The first night group dinner was held for the first time at the Marquee restaurant in the Festival Theatre which is only for events. An excellent venue we will be repeating next year. Dessert was our traditional Pavlova, there, and at several other Stratford restaurants. We enjoyed Bijou, Revival House, Raja, Red Rabbit and Keystone Alley.

Our first Seminar Society guest was Geoff Scovell, associate fight director for Hamlet and other plays, and a stunt performer in many movies.

He said the title of fight director has only been around for 20 or 30 years. “In the past, they’d look at the cast and say ‘who has fighting ability?’ And there would be injuries.”

As fight director, he is responsible for the health and safety of the actors, and to provide consistency. “We create violence and action within the capabilities of the actors. There are two rules – Be safe, and look good.”

How do you maintain safety? “You break down everything. A sword fight is a technical exercise. The target never changes.”

They use swords that look good and sound great, aluminum rather than steel and historic reproductions.

He said that “every single fight is unique, to the play, to the actors, to the stage.” “Musical companies are our favorite to work with; they are so disciplined, so sharp.”

There is a fight captain in every cast who makes sure the work of the fight director has been carried through. “Stage is about being able to repeat the action, while film is faster, harder, quicker.”

“We want to create ‘snapshot’ images that will stay with the audience, like Hamlet dying. It’s moments that people remember, not the choreography.”

Born 1572, son of a bricklayer, Ben Jonson who wrote The Alchemist had a 40-year career in London theatre. He wrote over a dozen plays and was known for four. He thought teaching virtue is a central aspect of what a writer should be doing. He was made fun of because he took writing so seriously. Because Johnson published his plays, Shakespeare decided to do so later on. Johnson preferred a realistic portrayal of the contemporary world, rather than imaginative fairies and magic of Shakespeare. The Alchemist is set in London, fall 1610, the time and place it was written. The theatre had been closed for the plague. The language in the Alchemist is difficult because comedy speaks in various vernaculars, not the legal, more formal dialogue of tragedies.

Another guest was actor Graham Abbey, in his 16^th season at Stratford. We saw him as Sir Isaac Newton in The Physicists. He said that two shows earlier, a cell phone rang in the audience, and Abbey pulled out his gun (as part of his character in the play) and turned and pointed it at the audience member. “He caught it in one ring.”

When we saw The Alchemist it was still in previews, and director Antoni Cimolino was in the audience. Being a work in progress may have contributed to the fact that we had a bit of trouble with the dialogue. The group also had mixed feelings about the next play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, the length and the language. Similarly, our problems could have been because the play was still in previews.

Abbey is the founder of Groundling Theatre in Toronto, which will be doing Shakespeare this winter. “I’m obsessed with Shakespeare’s late plays…These plays have so much to say about our time, leadership and invasion…”

Abbey said that playing Ferdinand in The Tempest with William Hutt, he said to Hutt in the Green Room afterward, “I think people are thinking ‘bring back Bill Hutt’ when I go out on stage.” Hutt told him, ‘you must believe you are going to bring something to that stage.’ Ego is important. You have to have confidence and bravery on stage. Otherwise you’re dead in the water.”

“Shakespeare has been my therapy,” he said, “whether after 911 or the death of loved ones. You find meaning in words and passages.”

The next play was Hamlet, about what our lecturer called “interiority”, “the most talkative character in the Shakespeare world”; “a revenge play, a theme popular in the 1590s.”

In our group discussion, participants didn’t like the circa 1914 costumes and hairstyles for Hamlet but loved the basic presentation and the language and humour.

Jonathan Goad who played Hamlet was our guest the next day. He talked about the challenge of Hamlet; “it’s not about the 1500 lines, it’s the 1500 moments, the quality of the emotional journey.”  “You’re playing the same story every night, but not playing it in the same way.”

Also in the Alchemist, he said the Jonson play is more difficult because of the language. “It’s a domino effect if you stumble on a word, and everyone falls down.”

He loves the theatre because it’s a live experience “between actor and actor, and actor and audience”, even though there are coughers and other noisy audience members he has to work around.

“You must know the text so well you can forget it…You need to be in the underwear of your character.”

Our guests the next day were Ben Carlson and Deborah Hay, a married couple playing the leads in the Taming of the Shrew. They said the imagery in the play is that of falconry. “They are both outrageously tired and hungry together…The bird is still wild, but they have an alliance. In Shakespeare’s time that would have been common knowledge.”

Actor Mike Shara who we saw in three plays on the Festival stage was our guest for the first time.

He said that at the end of high school he was drafted to play baseball, and that’s what he wanted to do. He took one drama course in high school because he needed an arts course and couldn’t draw or play music.

He auditioned for a few acting schools, one accepted him and then kicked him out. “They were trying to teach discipline and I was there for a good time. It was a good eye opener.”

His first acting job with at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton with the late Robin Phillips. “He really turned me into an actor…To be with Robin in that room, I knew I was with somebody who knew how to do it. He put me on the right track.”

In Hamlet, he has a two-hour break within the play. “I spent that time learning my lines from Love’s Labour’s Lost,” he said. “Acting gets harder as you get older. You agonize more. You expect more, you want more. You realize how much harder it is to do these plays well. What I find challenging in Shakespeare is to speak these articulate lines and make it appear that you just thought of it. He’s an amazing playwright.”

 “It’s a singular experience to be on that stage when the theatre is full or almost full. To be in Hamlet in front of 2,000 people is very freeing. It’s three dimensional; it’s hard to disappear. I find it really liberating.”

He likes physical acting and movement, not “park and bark” Shakespeare, he said. I hadn’t heard that expression before but I love it because it’s what I dislike to watch myself – and fortunately ‘park and bark’ was nowhere to be found at Stratford this summer.