FFWD Weekly
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| Theatre by Lori Montgomery The Fox Playing a character who just returned from the First World War presents an obvious challenge for a young man whose most immediate experience of war of any kind comes from books and movies. But Gordon Rand is committed to making his performance in Theatre Calgary’s The Fox more than a caricature. "It’s been a real challenge in this play, to try to get into this guy’s head," says the actor, last seen in Calgary in TC’s Stephen and Mr. Wilde. "I mean, I know nothing about being in combat. I can only use my imagination – which is what actors are supposed to do – but at the same time, you have a certain responsibility to respect the people who actually went through it.... My greatest fear is to trivialize it in any way." That’s not likely to happen, given the amount of research that the youthful veteran of the Shaw Festival has put into his contribution to the stage adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novel. He plays Henry, a young man who returns to his childhood home after the war, only to find it occupied by two women, into whose lives Henry insinuates himself. Besides a lot of reading and watching films, Rand’s research included some digging into his own family history. He discovered that his great-grandfather and great-great-uncle fought overseas in World War I. "I think seeing a picture of my great-grandfather, taken behind the lines or when he was on leave in France – that sort of physical evidence of it makes me feel as if I have more of a connection to it than I did before," Rand says. "My ancestors were there. It sort of helped to bring a lot of things home." The play jumps ahead of its time, he says, to look at the difficulties that veterans face when returning home. "When D.H. Lawrence wrote this story, it was actually a year before the war ended," Rand says, "and I think he’s encapsulated a lot of what people have examined in the behavior of veterans coming back from the First World War, which is similar to veterans coming back from a lot of wars – the kind of misery that they had to go through, and the things that they thought that they were fighting for.... I’ve attempted to find that in my character." Again, he didn’t have to look any further than his own family tree to see the effects of combat trauma on survivors. "My great-great-uncle had shell-shock and was sort of ruined for the rest of his life," he explains. "My great-grandfather turned into a wild man. He left his wife and went through women... and that’s another reaction that people have. You can’t judge how people are going to react when they come out of a war." Rand’s discovery of his family tie to the war is a relatively recent one, but he says that his sense of connection to the period dates back considerably further. "I’ve always felt a strange fascination with the First World War," he admits. "I’m not sure why. I remember when I was a kid, I lived in England for a year, and I went to the National War Museum, where they had dioramas of what life in the trenches was like, and there was something about it.... I think for anybody, it’s striking, and I don’t know whether my reaction was greater or just the same as everybody else’s, but there was something about it that stuck with me." |
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