THE GUARDSMAN
Where: Roxy Theatre, 2657 Quadra St.
When: Thursday, July 6 through Sunday, July 16
Tickets: $20.50-$42 ($15 for students) from bluebridgetheatre.ca
Theatre director Kevin McKendrick moved to Vancouver from Calgary in 2015, with the long-term goal of gradually winding down his four-decade career in theatre.
He resettled in Victoria five years ago, at which point his plans changed. He was given the opportunity to direct Blue Bridge’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 2019, and jumped at the chance to direct Men Overboard, from Victoria’s Bema Productions, last year. He’s set to work with Theatre Inconnu in January, following an upcoming collaboration with Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre, fully squashing his move toward semi-retirement.
“I’m in that position now where I don’t have to work, which is great,” he said. “When Tamara McCarthy took over as artistic director at Blue Bridge [in 2022, I reached out to say hello, not looking for work or fishing for a job, and she asked if I would be interested in doing The Guardsman.”
McKendrick first saw the 1910 play by acclaimed Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár decades ago, when he was a high school student in Calgary. The verbally complex tale about love and infidelity immediately grabbed the self-professed “young, impressionable” theatre student, who said he was captured by the absurd plot and comedic ideas.
He did not cross paths with a production of The Guardsman again until four years ago, during a sightseeing trip with his wife through Europe. While visiting the Harry Houdini museum in Hungary, McKendrick came upon a statue of Molnár that was erected nearby, triggering his memory.
“It was a reminder of the impression that he had upon me when I was at that nascent stage of getting into theatre,” he said.
McKendrick studied at the Canadian Mime School in Ontario during the 1970s, and later toured the world with ARETE, the Calgary physical theatre company he co-founded in 1976. In 1990, he switched from acting to directing, frequently applying what he learned during 13 years with ARETE.
Those same skills are relevant today, he said. “Just because you say something on stage, that doesn’t mean its true. An action is always true. If you see someone drop a pen, they dropped a pen — there’s no two ways about it. The world that the words live in, that’s really important.”
McKendrick has extensive training where non-verbal movement is concerned, and tasked his cast of young actors in The Guardsman with finding “the space around the words.” Molnár’s text is all important, he said, but he liked the novel approach of underscoring the script with a newfound sense of physicality.
“How do you make a play that’s so wordy relevant and interesting to an audience that is largely visual today? In this rehearsal period, the actors really took to the idea of finding physical comedy based on the behaviour of people in the play, and not just relying on the words.”
He wanted his actors — David Sklar, Cherise Clark, Sophia Radford, Andrea Lemus and Jenn Griffin — to find ways to support what each character was saying, with behaviour that was not on the page. With extensive post-secondary experience as an instructor at Calgary’s Mount Royal College, the University of Victoria, and the University of Calgary, his approach was designed to empower his cast of young and inexperienced actors.
“Two of the six, this is their professional debut. But that is something Blue Bridge has tried to do on a consistent basis. By bringing in young, emerging professionals, from its own community, and mixing them with seasoned performers from other areas, those younger voices can start to be mentored on their way to what we think are going to be some pretty promising careers.”
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