Interview Eric Peterson

The term “master” really shouldn’t be tossed around willy-nilly. But talking about Eric Peterson, it seems applicable. Even if his name doesn’t immediately register—a problem for many of Canada’s most established actors, who tend to fall into the “Hey, it’s that guy!” category—his face (as well as his clipped hoser-ish lilt) are immediately recognizable to even casual observers of the Canadian stage and screen.

On TV, Peterson’s played rascally retiree Oscar Leroy on Corner Gas and lawyer Leon Robinovitch on Street Legal. In theatre, he’s considered a pioneer in the collective style movement in the 1970s, with landmark shows like The Farm Show and 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt. He’s also one half of the creative team behind Billy Bishop Goes To War, the two-man theatrical darling he co-wrote with collaborator John Gray about the Great War fighter pilot hero and namesake of Toronto’s own Billy Bishop Airport. Since 1978, Billy Bishop has toured Canada, Europe, and the U.S., ran on Broadway, had an applauded remount at Soulpepper Theatre in 2009 and again this year, and was adapted into two filmed versions. This Friday, the most recent film adaptation will begin a week-long run at The Royal Cinema. As a kicker, Soulpepper Theatre recently announced he’ll be appearing in two of its shows in the 2012 season. With about 30 years behind him as a performer and theatre-maker, plus a few Geminis and Doras in the mix, yeah, you could call him a “master.”

But that doesn’t mean he feels like he knows what he’s doing.

His most recent project, The Test, the first show of a three-year partnership between Canadian Stage and The Company Theatre, is like nothing he’s approached before, he says. The Company is still relatively new to the Toronto scene, with Co-Artistic directors Philip Riccio and Allan Hawco (of the CBC’s Republic of Doyle) committing to only one or two productions every year since 2004. But they’ve made quite an impact. Running through Nov. 26 at the Berkeley Theatre, The Test is the English première of the script by up-and-coming Swiss playwright Lukas Bärfuss, about a man who doubts the paternity of his infant son. The unorthodox style of Irish director Jason Byrne is keeping the entire cast (including Gord Rand, Liisa Repo-Martell, Philip Riccio, and Peterson’s Street Legal costar Sonja Smits) literally on their toes. But it’s a style that Peterson says is essential in challenging the audience, the actors themselves, and our sense of imagination in the theatre.

The A.V. Club: Tell us about your role in The Test.

Eric Peterson: Well I’m playing a guy named Simon Korach; he’s a politician in the middle of the campaign. There are five characters in the play, and one of them is my son, he has a wife, another character is my wife, and the fifth is my assistant, a man that from questionable social and mental background, and I brought him to come work for me.

AVC: And what is Simon like?

EP: I would be the last person to ask about that. That’s a very hard thing to say, it’s a very dense play, and maybe dense isn’t the right word—it’s a very strange piece. So I can’t actually say what he’s like, I’m still trying to find out. And Jason’s way of working has very little verbal discussion in terms of sitting down and working it out. One way to approach a play is when either the director or producer has already decided what the play is about and how it should be done before we even begin. [With Jason] That is not discussed in verbal terms; it’s discussed physically in being almost always on your feet.

So this is my reason for being so inarticulate about it, is by learning about the play in a different manner that is really trying to keep the intellectual aspect of it at bay in the hope that there’s more freedom of scope and a bigger-ness to it. Once you say this is what it is and what it isn’t, well, that’s all it’s going to be.

AVC: Byrne’s style involves very little direction in terms of movement and blocking. What does that do for a play?

EP: You usually come at the blocking with some sort of meaning. When a character moves over here or you create a picture here, it’s supposed to mean something. When you don’t do that, you have continual relationships set up and it’s the audience that is making these relationships from these ostensibly random movements. And in that case, there is less of a Fascist approach, and that is, “I want to dictate how you see the play, where you see the play, what the play means, and you have to see it that way.” As opposed to the more democratic way that is, “We’re doing something up here and you’re watching it with total freedom. You can look where you want to look, you can see things you want to see.”

One of the magic things about live theatre, or any kind of live performance, is that though the audience forms a homogenous group, they’re a homogenous group of complete individuals. The people on stage and the people in the audience know that 20 years from now you go, “Yeah I was in the same room as you that night and I thought this, and you thought that.” And that is kind of a remarkable thing. That’s why we have art, I think; it’s for that deep significant human need and pleasure that in exercising my imagination, I’m no longer a single unit alone, living alone, being born alone, and dying alone. Now, there’s an argument that’s all we really are, but when one imagines another person, or takes something and imagines it back into their own life, suddenly we’re all joined, we’re all connected. And that’s the pleasure—that’s the need, I would almost say.

AVC: You mentioned live theatre there specifically. Does film and TV acting operate in the same way?

EP: No, not at all. Acting for the stage and acting for the screen are two completely separate activities, the same way as tap dancing is from playing the drums. They both entail trying to bring humanity to a character, to make this description on a page called a character actually be a person. In film, though, you have very little control. Nor do you have any of this joining with an audience, because there is no audience when you’re shooting. All you have is a camera and a crew who is busy doing their job while you’re busy doing yours. It’s a different experience from live theatre or any kind of live performance. It’s people watching a machine, and I can’t stress that enough; there’s a huge difference. And in some cases, film does allow my imagination to be engaged, but in most cases, it’s their imagination that’s been engaged and I have paid to watch that. I don’t want to go badmouthing film, because it’s an overgeneralization. But we do live in a culture where there is a lot of formulaic crap made simply to rip people out of their money.

AVC: And you think theatre is more participatory?

EP: I often wonder, does the acting take place on stage, or does it take place halfway between the stage and the audience, or does the acting take place entirely in the audience’s mind? Because as humans, we have a tremendous capacity for narrative and the need to actually put narrative to things. So when I watch a live band play, I listen to the music, but I’m also heavily now involved in the narrative. The bass player, the drum player, what their story is, what kind of life they lead. And that instinct in humans to need to explain things, to have narratives, that’s exploited in a live situation. And it’s that kind of theatre that I like. It’s more closely related to radio drama in a sense. The live experience should have a healthy element to it that has the audience making up the story, seeing the characters, and I’m up there going, “I’m just pretending up here.”

And in this case, I can say, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a play quite like this one, in the sense of how to get into it. There’s a lot of mystery involved in it, and the mystery will only to continue to increase when we come up against an audience and we see how much I’ve just been talking about is actually happening out there.

AVC: You’ve used the word “scary” when describing the process, about trying something new. Are you scared?

EP: Oh, yeah. I mean, I don’t think I’m ever exactly sure. When working with Jason, it’s like working in a fog. It’s like the fog of war. And you don’t really want the fog to disappear, either, you’re trying to get good at working in the fog. But working in the fog also means that you have to get good at tolerating feeling not quite comfortable. There—yeah, there is anxiety to it. But for me, anyway, I go, “God, I hate this feeling,” but on the other hand I go, “It’s important to feel this way.” You can only manage your own panic and fear and your sense of your own mega “Eric Peterson” career and all that, and to keep all that baggage someplace else. There’s a deep satisfaction and fun, and fun in a very broad sense of the word, in working on things in such unusualness with people in such an unusual way. It’s a great honour and privilege. Rather than going, “Eric, I want you to play the jackass fellow, you know, the Oscar Leroy from Corner Gas.” You know, that’s a character I can play and have a hell of a time doing it, but it’s not pushing me.

But as Jason was saying in notes, well, we don’t really get notes, but he was saying he likes to see thoroughbred horses—he refers to us as thoroughbred horses—he likes to see them on ice. And I have a certain understanding of what he’s talking about, because you take a cast of experienced actors, and watching them cope becomes interesting, at least to him. I can’t say if it’s the same for an audience. Marketing’s a tough thing, we’re supposed to say, “Come see this show and you’ll laugh your guts out,” but I can’t do that.

AVC: “Laugh your guts out”? Is that what the show is meant to do?

EP: I guess that’s why it’s a provocative piece of work—it refuses to be pigeonholed. It can be very funny, but it’s a very black, bleak humour if it is. And it’s also not very funny. Now is that a tragicomedy, or whatever? And again, I hesitate in describing, because I don’t want to fuck up an audience’s view by putting an idea into their head, by already limiting their curiosities by telling them what it is. That’s why I like talk-backs so much, because I want to know what they thought it was. I don’t want to make up anybody’s mind… I can say that it’s a première, it’s a wonderful playwright from Switzerland, and it’s certainly a provocative piece. There are all kinds of themes in it, absolutely. But I don’t think that’s the point; I’m not sure we’re supposed to see art to be instructed. It’s not a lecture or a scientific theory, again, it’s about just having an imagination moment.

AVC: This is an interesting show, with iconic Canadian actors, a Swiss playwright, and an Irish director. Looking at the larger picture, you have over 30 years in the business—how have you seen Canadian theatre change since the time you began?

EP: I feel that when I started out in theatre, the cultural model was important. I didn’t want to go to America or go to Britain, I wanted to be a part of an artistic endeavor in this country that had to do with Canadians being Canadian with fellow Canadians. It would help us not to be parasitical as a culture and live off other cultures. We’d also be able to contribute culturally to the world, because of what is true specifically to universality. So, we could talk about a specific place in northern Manitoba for example, and you would have people around the world, if you had it right, that would be able to totally understand from their own Northern Manitoba in Norway, or whatever you want. And also, there has been an ongoing political culture, especially in English Canada—we have all these creative people and we just expect them to go to America? And even more, we say, “That’s great!”

I’m 65, so I’m an old fart, I’m now facing a younger generation of actors, and they don’t identify the problem in the same way, and that’s because it is a global world now. But let’s take the music industry: They have a very nationalistic policy in which radio stations have to play Canadian music. And we have reached a point where in Canada, we have fine musicians, but nobody finds them in Canada anymore, they find them on the World Wide Web. So when they go looking for music, they can find American bands, British bands, and Canadian bands, they don’t like that Canadian band simply because they’re Canadian, they like their music. These people don’t feel isolated, or colonized, by still living in Canada. They feel they have a connection to a whole world. Nor do they feel they need to go to America to do this.