What is your role in/on this production? I play Dr. Henry Maudsley, an eminent British psychiatrist in Victorian England. He’s a real historical character who gave his name to a psychiatric hospital in London. He genuinely believes that academic study may be harmful for women’s health and may even prevent them from bearing children. What is your background in theatre? At Walterdale? I can’t remember all of the shows I was in with Beaumont Drama Society, although the highlight was performing in The Mikado at the Winspear Centre in 2007. The first show I saw at Walterdale was A Streetcar Named Desire in 1995. The first show I appeared in at Walterdale was The Country Wife in 2001. This will be my sixth show at Walterdale as actor or director.
What brought you out for this show? Why did you want to be a part of it? I always relish an opportunity to play the villain, especially when he is a rational villain who believes that he is actually doing the right thing from the best motives. And I always have fun dressing up in period costume. But most of all, I’m loving the irony of having to tell an audience why women are unfit to receive degrees in the very same month as my own daughter sits her finals at the UofA.
What has been the most fun thing about working on the show? The biggest challenge? It’s a lot of fun to play an antagonistic character on stage, especially one who holds views diametrically opposed to my own. It’s also interesting to put myself into the mindset of someone who sees only the evidence that supports his own prejudice: what we now call confirmation bias. The biggest challenge was shouting at, and being quite so mean to, Lucy/Tess: I feel I need to apologize to her after every rehearsal!
What do you think audiences will take away from the show? Why should they come and see it? This show asks us to put ourselves back to a time when women were not allowed to vote, or graduate university, or to compete in any way with the men. Ostensibly, this was because they were considered too weak or incompetent to do these things and so needed to be protected. I think the show invites us to consider what the real reasons might have been, and so to examine our own prejudices about the relative status of men and women. But the script does this with an engaging story and even a laugh or two on the way.
This show is about the advancement of women in history… who is a woman from the past (or present) that has inspired you? Why? In 1947 Margaret Thatcher graduated from Somerville College, Oxford with a BSc in Chemistry. She was reportedly more proud of being the first science graduate to be prime minister, than the first woman. To quote Vanity Fair: “she is a symbol of what women can do, what the British character can be, what the English-speaking peoples stand for, and what conservatism is”.