Tom McCamus (5/81 Saint Joan, The Magistrate)
The Saturday Windsor 5/30/81: Tom McCamus
Essex Hall campaigner moves up to Mr. Shaw
Niagara-on-the-Lake - Tom McCamus wants to write as well as he speaks. When the young actor isn't on stage at the Shaw Festival this summer, he quite likely will be poring over another draft of a play he is writing, ready to put words in other actors' mouths as well as his own. A love of literature as he was growing up in London, Ont., led McCamus to acting in the first place, and during his three years at the University of Windsor's school of dramatic arts he studied creative writing as well as theatre. The Shaw Festival, dedicated to an author whose genius was in putting ideas into words, has surprised McCamus with its stimulus to his own ideas.
For that matter, he's surprised to be here at all, though perhaps not so much so as another Essex Hall Theatre alumnus, Stephen Ouimette. They are, I believe the first two actors trained at the University of Windsor to have won significant parts at the Shaw Festival. Ouimette had expected to play Hamlet at this year's Stratford Festival, but got lost in the dust-up among that theatre's management. Instead, Ouimette will summer at the Shaw, where morale and ticket sales are high, playing roles in Saint Joan, The Suicide, and Camille (which, through some cannily-promoted sex, already promises a successful scandal.) McCamus was on stage for the opening night of Saint Joan this week, too, as Brother Martin and will take a fill-in role late in the season in The Magistrate, by Pinero. His most prominent assignment, however should be as the young Napoleon in Shaw's Man of Destiny, a short, four-character play in the smaller Royal George Theatre at noon-hours starting in mid-July.
Not bad, for someone who had thought of himself only in contemporary roles. McCamus never dreamed of wearing robes and rolling his "r's" at Stratford, and quickly admits he didn't know much about Shaw. "I just went down to the audition to see what it was all about," McCamus recalled on Wednesday, just before joining a rehearsal for opening night. "They offered me a lot more than I had expected."
We were talking at his make-up mirror, two drawers along the row from Ouimette's in the big cast dressing room underneath the brick-and-shingle theatre that houses the festival's big productions. Of medium height and dark floppy hair, McCamus has a trained baritone voice. Angry-young-man roles in the contemporary theatre would suit him, but off-stage he is eager and open. After two months in rehearsal here the language of Shaw is no longer foreign: he is conquering his "Canadian inferiority complex" about the language of the English classics. Christopher Newton, festival boss and director of Saint Joan, has encouraged his actors to find individual solutions to the characters rather than imposing a set style.
And Joan has connected, too. Her free-spirited refusal to accept rules and regulations for their own sake appeals to McCamus. It's a subject he has written about himself. He writes with an actor's viewpoint, more theatrical than intellectual. Often, at auditions in Toronto, he will use a speech he has written, enjoying the puzzled looks when the directors don't recognize it. After spending only a year in Toronto, he can claim respectable credit that plenty of actors are starving for -- a play each with the Young People's Theatre and Theatre Plus, some touring, and a major role in an instalment of the CBC show For the Record. That's all good for the confidence which is the lifeblood of acting.
McCamus's confidence has been helped by complete support from his family. His mother teaches at the University of Western Ontario in London, his father works for Lablatt's and both are interested in theatre. They watched with approval as the teen-ager started acting as an extension of his interest in books, and then took a director's advice to try the University of Windsor program. There, at Essex Hall, the determination to make a career of it sunk in. He left after three years in 1978 without finishing his degree because Theatre London offered work.
A number of student actors, including Ouimette, have followed that Windsor-London expressway. Several of them ran their own small theatre, too, and McCamus also spent a summer at the Blythe Festival. Such experience no longer qualifies as merely spending time in the sticks. "Theatre London was a credible situation," McCamus said, recalling his work for William Hutt there. "You get a lot of people seeing what you do. And you get confidence in yourself. You know that if you don't get hired you don't have to blame yourself so you keep trying."
The University of Windsor's drama school is also acquiring a certain reputation among the casting directors in Toronto. "A lot of people are finding work and that helps," he said. They certainly are -- the recent hit movie Atlantic City was peppered with familiar faces.
In a business where you make your own luck, McCamus insists he is lucky to have kept working most of the time. Still, sitting in the relative security of the Shaw Festival, he feels a pang of guilt at his stirrings of restlessness. He has passed the 25-year-old post and despite the "luck" of being busy, he is undergoing something on an "identity crisis." It's been four years since I did my own work," he said reflectively. "I think it's time to try again -- go after grants and the spaces to perform in. I can do it, although I don't like it. But it's time."
Like the young Napoleon he will play, he had decisions to make. Writing helps him think them out. In Windsor he learned dedication to the theatre without being star-struck. "The theatre is not about Tom McCamus doing a lead role -- there are so many other things that are important in the theatre," he said.
And so, leaning back and relaxed in the quiet dressing room, he can talk of exploring some of those important things, maybe with one of his own scripts, probably with some of his Windsor-London buddies. Four years after leaving school, he wants to regain some of that old idealism while putting to use the lessons gained watching the old pros. Saint Joan might not agree, but Shaw would, when McCamus says: "You can't go on stage and just perform your ideals."
© The Windsor Star