Non-MX Interviews: Andrew Gillies (3/10 Winnipeg Sun)
Excerpts from Winnipeg Sun 3/18/10 Part 1 and Part 2: Andrew Gillies
School Daze: A feisty hairdresser and an alcoholic prof hit the books in MTC comedy
By Lindsey Ward, March 18, 2010 7:59am
Gum-clacking, cigarette-smoking Rita would never make the grade with the kind of characters Mairi Babb is used to playing.
And really, the local actress - who is known for corsetting herself into aristocratic roles, like Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet, The Importance of Being Earnest’s Cecily Cardew and even The Rocky Horror Show’s Janet - couldn’t be happier about slipping into the stilettos of Manitoba Theatre Centre comedy Educating Rita’s title character.
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While Educating Rita is based on the classic Greek myth Pygmalion - and borrows bits from musical My Fair Lady - Babb says the transformative Rita maintains her working class accent throughout the play, and her only big challenge with the role has been trying to remember what props and costumes go with what scenes. That’s even despite having performed it three years ago, when she and Gillies took it around Manitoba.
Still, the pair had “built in so many layers” during the show’s initial run, that “we weren’t starting back at square one,” Babb says. “It’s like coming back and having coffee with a friend you haven’t seen in a long time.”
Though she’ll also be the first to point out Gillies - an ex-Brit who now lives in Nova Scotia - is “completely insane.
“But I love him!” she says, adding that the film and TV actor and star of past MTC shows The Taming of the Shrew and The Retreat from Moscow has found an honest way to portray boozy Frank.
“The thing about Frank is that he is a functioning alcoholic, so you don’t really see him drunk - it’s just one specific scene. I think (Andrew ) is hilarious - though I’m not supposed to find him hilarious.”
Being Frank is something Gillies does take rather seriously.
“There’s nothing worse, in my opinion, than bad drunk acting on stage,” he says, adding that, luckily, he’s had some practice.
“I suppose it’s fortunate that I’ve had drinks myself. But Frank uses alcohol for self-medication - instead of actually facing up to the facts that he’s dealing with.
“It’s not necessarily true that you have to be a drinker to portray a drunk person. But having a sense of it ...”
Helps? Perhaps.
Gillies’ own teaching experiences go about as far as a couple of acting workshops. But he says he was just as much of a top student as Babb was in high school. Well, mostly.
“I ended up in the top of my classes with one exception: Math was my nemesis. Severely, my nemesis; it caused a lot of problems.”
MTC's feel-good night class is in session
by Prokosh, Kevin
Winnipeg Free Press, Mar 18, 2010
The teacher-student relationship has always been a favourite subject of western civilization but is currently getting more attention -- most of it unwelcome -- than ever before.
Reports of inappropriate liaisons between teachers and their charges are appearing in the media with increasing frequency. It seems chemistry isn't confined to a school's science lab.
Back in the late '70s, English playwright Willy Russell penned Educating Rita, a re-working of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, in which a simple working-class girl arrives at the office of an English professor demanding an education. Audiences fell for the feel-good Educating Rita -- which opens tonight at the Manitoba Theatre Centre -- about a perky hairdresser who tries to make her life better.
In 1992 American David Mamet poured gasoline on a similar storyline with his incendiary Oleanna, which chronicles a power struggle between a professor and one of his female students who accuses him of sexual harassment. The play altered the balance of power in the classroom forever.
Educating Rita must ignore the impact of Oleanna and return to a pre-feminist time when no one would think twice about a young woman demanding wisdom from an older man.
"It's still as fresh and relevant as it was then," says Andrew Gillies, 60, who is reprising his professor Frank role, one that he played during a provincial tour for MTC three years ago.
"You could see it in the faces of some of the young women in the audiences we saw travelling around Manitoba. "The core of the play is about this woman's courageous attempt to say 'I've had enough of my life and I want to change.'"
Mairi Babb, a Winnipeg actress now based in Toronto, rejoins Gillies as the 26-year-old title character from the wrong side of the tracks. In an attempt to better herself she signs up for an evening university course given by Frank, an alcoholic professor living with an ex-student. Her brashness and vitality brings a breath of fresh air to his stuffy book-cluttered office. As she learns from him, he falls romantically for his creation.
"He is desirous of her," says Gillies, who is making his 15th appearance at MTC. "She has given back his life, which is behind the line, 'Sometimes students make the best teachers.'"
Russell knew first hand of the working-class life he wrote about in Educating Rita. As a teenager in his native Liverpool he skipped school to watch an unknown band called the Beatles at the Cavern club. (His breakthrough play was John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert.) He trained as a ladies' hairdresser's apprentice before deciding he needed more education and attended night classes.
The fictional Rita followed that path, but so did Gillies in another English town called Boston.
"I left school at 14 1/2 like Willy Russell and took a ladies hair apprenticeship which at the time I thought would be a swift and easy way to meet attractive young women," says Gillies, who at 21 emigrated to Canada and pursued acting.
Gillies sees definite echoes in Educating Rita of Shirley Valentine, another huge Russell hit about a stagnating middle-age Liverpool housewife, which was very popular at MTC in 1992.
"They both want to do more with their lives, open their minds and have a richer experience," Gillies says.
The 1983 big-screen version of Educating Rita earned Oscar nominations for both lead actors Michael Caine and Julie Walters as well as a best screenplay nod for Russell. It earned more than $14 million at the box office.
"The story's appeal will always be that it is never too late, you can change," he says.
Theatre preview
Educating Rita
Manitoba Theatre Centre
Opens tonight, to April 10
Tickets: $23-$65
© Winnipeg Sun