>>PREVIEW
2005 BETTY MITCHELL AWARDS
Monday, August 29
Stage West
For an actor, transforming your physical appearance to suit a role just comes with the territory. Still, when you’re a woman, it must take more than the usual amount of thespian dedication to agree to shave your head to the bone.
Well, Valerie Planche has that dedication in spades. When she landed the coveted title role in Timothy Findley’s Elizabeth Rex – a part that requires the formidable Tudor queen to reveal a bald pate under her curly wig at the play’s poignant climax – she didn’t hesitate, she reached for the clippers. And money and glory had nothing to do with it – this wasn’t for a major theatre and a healthy paycheque, but for a little, upstart company and a pittance.
Thanks to that kind of actorly fidelity, she and the company both came away winners. Mob Hit Productions ended up with a hit show that helped expand its audience, while Planche has copped a Betty Mitchell nomination for best female performance in a leading role. Whether or not she takes home the trophy at this month’s Bettys ceremony, there’s no question she gave one of the most memorable performances of the past season.
"I was adamant" about the head shaving, says Planche, who is spending the summer performing Shakespeare in southern Ontario. "It was the only way I could experience even half the vulnerability that (Elizabeth) experiences at that moment in the play."
She says it was the men in her life who were initially hesitant about seeing her do a Sinéad O’Connor.
"Before I said ‘yes’ to Mob Hit, I asked my husband what he thought. I said, ‘You’re going to have to see me bald for two months — how do you feel about that?’ He wasn’t thrilled. He said, ‘Val, you’re shaving your head for 500 bucks?’ But finally I brought him around to my way of thinking," she says with a chuckle. "In the end, he shaved my head for me."
The other man who was initially alarmed at her tonsorial adventure was Alberta Theatre Projects artistic director Bob White. Planche had been hired to play Agnes, one of the three sisters in Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge, at the close of ATP’s season, and White was concerned she wouldn’t have a full head of hair in time for the production.
"After I’d shaved my head, Bob came to me and said, ‘Oh my God, that’s very short! You’ve got to grow back your hair! C’mon!’"
As it turned out, her shorter locks suited her role as the urbanite sister from Toronto who’d turned her back on her conventional Nova Scotia roots.
Agnes was typical of the parts Planche has become known for in recent years. The long-time Calgary actor has lately specialized in contemporary roles, whether it be the bitter half of an unhappily married couple in Daniel Brooks’s The Good Life at Theatre Junction, which won her a previous Betty Mitchell Award, or the epileptic farm wife in Judith Thompson’s Perfect Pie at ATP, for which she received a Betty nomination. Elizabeth Rex, on the other hand, gave her a chance to prove that she could portray a historical figure – and an iconic one, at that.
"People have seen me handle emotion, but they haven’t seen me handle classics," says the 40-something Planche. "And I’m coming of an age where I want to play Gertrude (in Hamlet), where I want to play A Winter’s Tale. So I wanted to put that out there — that I could handle intellectual roles."
She had also been dying to star in Findley’s costume drama, originally commissioned and produced by the Stratford Festival – a meditation on power and gender roles in which Queen Elizabeth I spends an intense and illuminating evening with the members of Shakespeare’s acting troupe.
"I’m a big Elizabeth freak," says Planche. "After I read the play, I tried for two years to find a place to do it." By happy coincidence, Lawrence Leong, artistic producer of Mob Hit and the play’s director, was also a fan of the work and his dream choice for Elizabeth was Planche. When Planche heard that through the grapevine, she knew it was destiny. "Lawrence and I said to each other, ‘Either we go big, or we fall on our asses, but either way we have to do this show.’"
To prepare for the part, Planche spent last summer reading biographies of Elizabeth and watching the numerous screen portrayals of the Virgin Queen, particularly Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love and Glenda Jackson in the 1970s television miniseries Elizabeth R. As well, she says, "I found as many pictures of her as I could and hung them up in my office at home and in my bedroom, and contemplated each of them."
Planche clearly has a passion for acting, which has survived some lean years as well as a move to Calgary 15 years ago that she initially thought might finish her career. Originally from Montreal, she attended the National Theatre School there, then moved to Toronto, where she got a promising start working with such notable directors as Robin Phillips and Guy Sprung. In T.O. she also met her husband, a telecommunications expert and former Newfoundlander named Joe Brazil. When he was transferred to Calgary in 1990, Planche says she was mortified. "I thought, ‘Oh my God, where am I going?’"
But as it turned out, living in a smaller theatre centre has paid off. "I’ve done work in Calgary that I don’t think I would have done if I had stayed in Toronto," she says. And the rapid growth of the city’s professional theatre scene has allowed her to work with young groups like Mob Hit between her gigs with the big companies. Typically, next season she’ll perform in ATP’s holiday production of Treasure Island as well as in Necessary Targets, a play about female Bosnian refugees by Eve Ensler of Vagina Monologues fame, to be staged by a new little company called Urban Curves. She’ll also direct the comedy The Duplex at Lunchbox Theatre.
Currently, she’s playing in Richard Rose’s production of The Comedy of Errors at Theatre By the Bay in Barrie, Ontario. She thinks Calgary is ready for a professional Shakespeare company, too, and, judging from her performance in Elizabeth Rex, she’s more than ready to act the Bard’s major female roles. Clearly, Planche is in her prime, and now it’s up to directors to take advantage of that. "The last couple of roles have been a real joy," she says, adding with a laugh: "Just keep ’em coming!"
Tickets to the Betty Mitchell Awards are available from the Stage West box office, 243-6642. For more info, go to www.bettymitchellawards.com. |
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