A Mother’s Intuition

Matron of the arts: Actress Martha Henry plays Volumnia in a new Stratford production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Photo David Hou. Courtesy Stratford Festival of Canada.

You could hardly imagine two more different mothers. One, proud and war-loving, sent her son into battle as soon as he was able to pick up a sword, and now exults in his bloody heroics, boasting of the number of wounds he’s sustained. The other, ashamed and protective, sent her son away from home to shield him from an alcoholic and adulterous father.

The first is Volumnia, mother of the eponymous hero in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus; the second is Mrs. Alving in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. Both are played by Martha Henry, one of Canada’s most celebrated actors, at this year’s Stratford Festival.

“They seem like totally different women,” Henry agrees, settling down for an interview in a small boardroom of the festival’s Discovery Centre. Outside, it’s another sticky-hot July afternoon in southern Ontario, but Henry looks cool and composed. She’s wearing a light beige outfit offset by a diaphanous green scarf. Not a strand of her fine grey hair is out of place, and her hazel eyes gaze across the table with the same steadfast intensity that she brings to her performances.

One of Shakespeare’s lesser-known tragedies, Coriolanus is now running at the main Festival Theatre. In it, Colm Feore plays Caius Martius Coriolanus, the great but arrogant Roman warrior who, through his lack of political savvy, blows his chance to become consul; instead, he gets himself banished from Rome. When he petulantly joins the enemy, the Volscians, his loving mother pleads with him not to launch an attack on his own city.

As conceived by Henry, Volumnia is a small but fiery matron who combines shrewd intelligence with pit-bull ferocity; at one point, she even growls and lunges at her son’s detractors. There’s no question where the man gets his aggressive nature, and you begin to wonder if his real tragic flaw is that he didn’t also inherit her brains.

“Volumnia is incredibly smart,” says Henry, “so much so, that she kind of does herself in. She’s built up a war hero and, in a sense, created a man that then has no place to go but under. Now, Colm might not agree that Volumnia has completely created him,” Henry adds with a smile, “and I’m not sure that Shakespeare would agree with that, either. But I think she feels that — that she has moulded and nurtured him, and he has become a monster.”

Ghostly presence: Henry as the widow Helena Alving in a Stratford production of Ibsen's Ghosts. Photo David Hou. Courtesy Stratford Festival of Canada.

When we speak, though, Henry’s mind isn’t on monsters, but phantoms. She has just finished a full day rehearsing the role of that other mother, Helena Alving, in Ghosts, which begins previews July 25 in the smaller Tom Patterson Theatre. Ibsen’s popular and once-shocking drama about syphilis, incest and euthanasia (infamously described by London’s Daily Telegraph in 1891 as “a loathsome sore unbandaged”) is, at heart, about one Victorian-era woman’s belated realization that our lives are haunted by spectres of the past. The widowed Mrs. Alving spent her married life dutifully covering up for her drunken, lecherous husband and protected their boy, Oswald, by shipping him off to a foster home at the tender age of seven. Now, 17 years later, Oswald has returned from abroad. An ailing and troubled young artist, his condition suggests that the sins of the father have literally been visited upon the son.

Like Ibsen’s other masterworks of social realism — notably A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People — Ghosts has been seized upon in recent times for the striking way it seemed to anticipate modern issues, like AIDS. However, Henry sees this as much more than a play about sexually transmitted disease.

“The most interesting thing about it is not the fact that Oswald has syphilis,” she says. “It’s really about the syphilis of the mind. When [Mrs. Alving] talks about ‘ghosts’ that live in all of us and that we can’t get rid of, it’s not just what we’ve literally inherited from our fathers and mothers; it’s all these ideas and beliefs that come into us and we don’t even know they’re there — we behave according to them and we can’t get them out of us. We very often act in ways we don’t understand, because we’ve packed in all these ghosts that, in the play, are very clearly lies. We lie to ourselves, to our parents, our children. We lie to create a perception, either of the way we would like to be seen by the rest of the world, or some kind of fantasy about the way we would like the world to be.”

Ghosts is directed by longtime Henry collaborator Diana Leblanc, and co-stars Stratford newcomer Brian Hamman as Oswald, along with Peter Donaldson, Adrienne Gould and Gary Reineke. The production’s raison d’être is the centenary of Ibsen’s death in 1906. (The Shaw Festival is also paying tribute with its current revival of his Rosmersholm.) Surprisingly, given Henry’s long list of classic stage roles — this is her 32nd season at the festival — she has done comparatively few of the great Norwegian dramatist’s plays.

“I directed Enemy of the People here in the early ’90s,” she says, “and I played Hedda Gabler years ago — the year my daughter was born, 1972. But those are the only Ibsens I’ve ever done.” Emma, her daughter with actor and ex-husband Douglas Rain, is Henry’s only child. As a mother, does Henry find herself identifying with aspects of Volumnia or Helena Alving? Actually, she reveals, the character she shares the closest connection with is Mrs. Alving’s son, Oswald.

“My mother sent me away when I was five, to my grandparents, so I have a very strong and immediate reaction to this sending-away thing,” Henry says. “And I know that my mother, when she sent me away, never thought that it was going to be for nine years, which is what it was. And I don’t think Mrs. Alving thinks that, either.”

Henry was born in 1938 in Detroit, Mich. After her parents separated, her mother found she couldn’t continue to tour as a nightclub musician with a small child in tow. Left with her grandparents, the little girl learned to entertain herself by reading voraciously and eventually developed an interest in theatre. After high school, Henry went on to study acting at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology and then at the fledgling National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. She was lured north of the border by the promise of the illustrious Stratford Festival, where she made her debut in 1962.

Despite a career that has since taken her to the stages of New York and London and seen her star in such films as the memorable black comedy Dancing in the Dark (1986) and the magnificent screen version of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1996), Henry continues to make Stratford her physical and spiritual home. She lives there with third husband Rod Beattie, a Canadian acting legend himself, thanks to his one-man Wingfield Farm shows, which have been touring the country since 1984. (“They’ve just had their 3,500th performance,” says Henry. “It’s astonishing, really.”)

While Beattie criss-crosses Canada in the company of the couple’s 14-year-old female Labrador, Chokydar (Urdu for “gatekeeper”), Henry divides her time between acting and directing, most recently staging the premiere of Joan MacLeod’s Homechild at Toronto’s Canadian Stage this past winter. She also headed up the all-star cast of Ken Finkleman’s latest television project, At the Hotel. Henry played Lucy, boozy grande dame proprietor of the showbiz haven Chateau Rousseau in the eccentric comedy-drama-musical from the creator of The Newsroom. “I loved working on it,” she enthuses. “The writing was just spectacular and I adored [Finkleman]. I think he’s one of the most innovative, imaginative men I’ve ever met, certainly in this business.”

At the Hotel was a lark, but Coriolanus and Ghosts are serious stuff. How does she handle acting in two classic tragedies for a whole summer?

Beautifully, she says. “Right now, to be able to play Coriolanus and then go into a cue-to-cue [rehearsal] for Ghosts is invigorating. One supports and titillates the other. You always learn more about the play you’re not doing than the one you’re actually doing, something cooks in the back of your mind.” Besides, the plays may be tragic, but they do have their lighter moments. “Volumnia gets the odd laugh,” says Henry, if only because she’s the archetype of the military mother taken to the extreme. “And Ghosts may be very funny — there are things about it that I laugh at. I’m very curious as to what will happen with an audience and whether they’ll think it’s funny. I have no idea what to expect.”

Ghosts begins previews July 25, opens Aug. 12 and runs until Sept. 23 at the Stratford Festival of Canada.

Martin Morrow is an author and critic based in London, Ont.

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