John D. Huston

John D. Huston has performed in Canada, the U.K. & the States. A member of Canada’s Metis Nation, John’s lively career “culturally misappropriating the works and identities of dead white guys”, includes playing Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, William Lyon MacKenzie in Toronto, Shakespeare in England, & Charles Dickens across Canada. In 2017 he was privileged to portray Louis Riel for the 50th anniversary production of Canada’s longest running dramatic presentation, “The Trial of Louis Riel”.

In 2016, John performed Mark Leiren-Young’s, controversial play, “Shylock” at UNO, Canada’s festival of solo work. “SCREWTAPE”, John’s adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters”, garnered him a Best Actor nomination in 2015 from the Ottawa Capitol Critics’ Circle. His performance of “A Christmas Carol” earned him a second such nomination in 2016, the only non-Ottawa actor to be nominated two years running.

Twitter: @bythebookprodu1
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Tickets to CIVILIZED: https://ottawafringe.com/shows/civilized/#showtimes_list

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Transcript

Welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host of this podcast. This is episode 325.

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Even a retweet of this show will help. You can find Stageworthy on Twitter and Instagram at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website with the archive of all 324 episodes at stageworthypodcast.com. And if you want to find me online, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at philrickaby.com. And as I mentioned, my website is philrickaby.com. My guest this week is John D. Houston. John is a Toronto-based actor and creator who has performed all over Canada, the UK, and the United States.

He’s a member of Canada’s Metis Nation, who has described his artistic practice as culturally misappropriating the works and identities of dead white guys. He’s presenting Keir Cutler’s play Civilized at the Ottawa Fringe, June 17-25. Here’s our conversation.

Tell me about Keir Cutler’s Civilized. Certainly. Civilized is a play about the Indian residential schools told from the point of a civil servant from the year 1907, who works for the Department of Indian Affairs, who is trying to justify and explain why the residential schools were such a brilliant idea.

And he wants people to stop toppling statues of Canadian prime ministers, thank you very much. His attempts to justify this horrific crime do not go well. I imagine not.

Yeah. I mean, we have in recent years, more people have become aware of the residential schools than were previously. When I was in school, even when I started theatre school in the 90s, even though I had never been, I find out now that when I was in university or college, there were still schools operating.

Yeah. And we’re finding more every day. Oh, yes.

Yes. No, it’s interesting. When Keir first started to write this play quite some time ago now, he actually had to have a whole section of the play where my character, William Blank, explained what residential schools were, because people, the average Canadian, just had no idea.

And now, of course, we know very well what they are. What’s really fascinating about this whole thing is that in 1907, a man named Dr. Peter Brice, he held the position of chief medical officer for the Dominion of Canada. And he had submitted a parliament saying, hey, the death rate in these schools, and I’ve inspected 35 of them, is shockingly high.

The Canadian government needs to do something about this. And the Canadian government went, yeah, maybe not. And 89 years later, in 1996, the last school closed.

And in those 89 years, the Canadian government went, eh, do we really need to do something about this? Maybe not. And thousands of people, thousands of children, I mean, children died and were shoveled into unmarked graves. I mean, the Canadian government and many aspects of our society still sort of say, do we really have to do something about that? I mean, we look at the fact that a lot of reservations don’t have clean water.

And I remember two elections ago when Jagmeet Singh was talking about getting clean water to these places, and some of the media outlets were asking, well, how much would that cost? And it’s like, but if this was Toronto that didn’t have clean water, we would just do it without question. Oh, heck, if this was Brandon Manitoba who didn’t have clean water, we’d do it without question. In fact, one of the people currently running for the leader of the allegedly progressive, absolutely conservative party of Canada has said, I promise clean water for everybody, not just reserves.

And I thought, well, everybody else does have clean drinking water, you racist piece of crap. That’s like saying, I promise to stop lynching in all communities, not just Black ones. It’s just revolting.

Anyway, yeah, so this, as I say, my character, William Blank, he’s a senior civil servant with Indian Affairs. In 1907, he’s the first person who reads Dr. Bryce’s report about the residential schools. And he thinks, well, this can’t be true.

They’re just trying to, you know, smear the reputation of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the greatest prime minister of all time. And I’m going to make sure that that doesn’t happen. And as I said, it does not go well for William Blank.

The wonderful thing about this play is it’s not just a screed. It is, there are moments of humor, Black humor, I will admit in many cases, but also genuine laugh-out-loud funny stuff. And it’s, I mean, I’m Metis, and I thought I was reasonably well-informed about this whole thing.

I know nothing. I could not believe the research you did. Most of my character’s dialogue is William Blank quoting from the time, and it will curl your hair to hear what was being said about the schools and the First Nations in, you know, and like all Canadians, I like to think we’re better than this.

Yeah, well, it turns out we’re not. That doesn’t mean we can’t be better. Yes, we can be better.

But we haven’t been up till now. No, and that’s one of the big lies we tell ourselves is that we’re better than that. Yeah.

It’s so much better here than in the U.S., and that’s the lie that we tell ourselves. It’s okay if it’s not quite as good as it could be here. It’s better than it is in the U.S., we’ll tell ourselves.

Yeah, and yet, you know, it was 1960, I believe, before First Nations citizens were allowed to vote in this country. Right. First Nations war veterans were denied benefits because they weren’t white.

Right. There was literally no other reason for that. And someone said to me, well, why didn’t they vote in that? Because they weren’t allowed to vote.

Yeah. Because the only people whose roots go back 10,000 years and more in what is now Canada were considered non-citizens. That’s in the British North America Act.

When Canada became Canada, First Nations and Métis and Inuit became non-citizens. Yeah. And wards of the state.

That’s sort of the thing. I think that sometimes we don’t think about, I mean, white Canada doesn’t think about what the idea of wards of the state means. Yeah.

It means that the government says, these people are not able to take care of themselves. Therefore, we must be the benevolent, quote unquote, overseer. That’s right.

And we must oversee their lives. That’s right. The Department of Indian Affairs, and my character says this in the play, the Department of Indian Affairs was created to be, in effect, legal guardians.

Right. The First Nations, Métis, and Inuit had the same status as children, and at the time, women, because women also had basically no rights. I never learned that in Canadian history class, and I paid attention.

Yeah. I liked Canadian history. They never told us that.

What I remember hearing about my people was that the Métis were ignorant and superstitious, and Louis Riel kind of came in and just gallied them into rising up against Ottawa in the rebellion, as it was then called, of 1885. We now call it the resistance. So, yeah.

And it’s very interesting, as you’re talking to people of my generation versus people of, say, you know, born, say, 30 years later, and two very different viewpoints on all of this. So, you know, some work is being done, which is, you know, something. I mean, in the U.S., of course, they’re fighting very hard against any acknowledgement that anything wrong was ever done.

We’re at least beginning to say, you know what? We were not, in fact, the nice guys. A lot of the time, we did not. Well, I do think we have the same forces trying to prevent us from having those conversations here.

Oh, yes, we do. And indeed, some of them are running for leadership of one of the major political parties in this country. Yeah.

Yeah. Not naming any names. No, of course not.

But, yeah. Oh, yeah. We absolutely do.

Some of my friends on Facebook are basically, you know, can’t they just move on and forget about it? Right. Yeah. You know, it’s like, no, because the Canada you live in was built on the premise that these people were inferior, that they didn’t matter, that we could come in and just bulldoze over them.

And that’s exactly what happened. I mean, you know, it comes down to the whole idea of that is very uncomfortable for a white Canada that’s felt very secure and safe and, you know, doesn’t want to rock the boat that the land that all of our cities and all of our everything is stolen. Yeah.

Yeah. My character, William Blank, quotes quite extensively from speeches and literature of the time. And at one point, I quote from the parliamentary record spoken from the floor of the House of Commons.

And Sir Wilfrid Laurier said it was not contrary to moral law to possess and to take possession and even forcible possession of lands that were roamed over rather than possessed by savage nations. And the justification being, well, they didn’t have our, you know, the European understanding of what, you know, land ownership was. And so therefore, we could just come in and take it.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it didn’t it didn’t doesn’t help that that like, you know, the the the First Nations thought of the idea of ownership of land is a ridiculous thing. Yeah.

Like, how can you own land? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It would be like saying to it would be like saying to someone from from Western society, see that piece of sky up there? I own that.

Yes. You don’t get to breathe that earth. Get the hell out of here.

You can’t own air. Right. Well, you can’t own land either.

Yeah. You know, I mean, if you if you again, if you go by the First Nations code, you know, you can yeah, it’s it’s we hold it in common. And and probably if, you know, our government thought that way, we’d be less likely to build highways over land that can raise really good food.

Yeah. Yeah. And we’d be less likely to, you know, crap and drinking water.

Yes. Yeah. But how does it feel for you to be doing this play civilized in Ottawa at the Ottawa Fringe? Oh, my God, I’m looking forward to this.

Yeah. In fact, one of the things I have to do this week is actually send out invitations to the prime minister, the governor general, you know, I don’t expect them to show up, but I want to at least that, you know what, I’ll keep a seat for you. And this, and of course, as someone of Métis descent, who was adopted by a white family, it’s fascinating.

Actually, when when Kier approached me, Kier has written 20 solos, works that he has always performed. And when he began, I don’t I can’t remember now why, what inspired him to do civilized as it’s now titled. But he knew right from the start, oh, no, this isn’t for me.

I need another actor to do this. And someone said, well, you know, you know, John, get John Huston to do it. So he called me up and said, you want to do it? I said, sure.

I said, are you asking me because I’m Métis? And he went, what? So I told him a little about my adoption story. And he went, oh, that’s great. Do you mind? Can I use that? I said, sure.

So the prologue of the play is now about my adoption. And when I was adopted in 1960, the social worker who handled the adoption warned, literally, that was the word he warned my parents. She had met my birth father, and he was clearly of Indian background, as she put it.

And, you know, yeah, I look like a white baby. But now the funny thing is, is that I was adopted in 1960, at a time when white, quote, unquote, male children were, you know, at a premium. And my parents had been told that they were, you know, look, it’ll be about a year probably before we have a child for you.

So they’d gone off on holiday on Dominion Day weekend, as it was then called. I was born 22nd of May, Victoria Day weekend, so six weeks after I’m born. And they get back home, and there’s a message from the social services saying, hey, we have a kid for you.

And they’re going, oh, my God, that’s too early. We don’t have a, you know, and they’re out running around getting bottle sterilizers and cribs and stuff, because they, it was early. And I was in the system for six weeks when white baby boys were getting snapped up like the last turkey on Thanksgiving Eve.

So I kind of wonder how, and I didn’t, and this never occurred to me until I started to talk to Kira about this for the play. I wonder how many white families said, yeah, no, we’ll wait till we get an actual white baby. Thank you very much.

Adoption, adoption is a strange thing. I’m not adopted, but both my brother and my sister were adopted. And in a similar but different situation, my brother, my brother is Black, my sister was a mixed child, so she was Black, white.

And that’s sort of like, it presents unique opportunities and challenges to a family. And one of the challenges is, for example, as the children get older, as a white family, you don’t know that you have to have a talk about police. Yeah.

Because as a white family, you, that’s not something you worry about. It was only much later that, that, you know, only once we were adults that we realized that, that there was a talk we should have known. We didn’t know we needed to have, but we should have, should have had it.

And also, we also had the issue of, you know, people say ignorant things like, are you going to tell him that he’s adopted? And like, all kinds of strange things. As a, as a, as a Métis child adopted by non-Indigenous parents, was, what was that, what, what moments like that did you have? See, that was, that was, that’s the irony. I never did.

I got my birth mother’s coloring. She was fair skinned and blonde hair. I have dark, I have the dark curly hair of my birth father, but I have the white skin of my birth mother.

Now, my uncles and aunts on my birth father’s side are all obviously Native or, well, in a couple of cases, you could think, oh, maybe French, maybe Italian, but mostly it’s like, yeah, no, no, no. My birth grandmother, my paternal birth grandmother looked white to me. My half siblings on that side of the family look white, but their kids all look Aboriginal.

So, it’s very strange in my family. Like the, the, the, it’s, it’s like the Native features skip generations. So, so that was, that was never an issue.

I mean, in all the years, people would say, oh, are you French background? Are you Irish background? No one has ever said, ah, you’re Métis, aren’t you? Except for occasionally other Métis people that go, you’re Métis? And I go, yeah. I said, oh, I thought so. But so I, so I was very, very, very fortunate.

I won what is, you know, the skin lottery. I’ve never, I’ve never been followed by a floor walker in a store. I’ve never had to worry about a cop pulling a, you know, a gun on me because of the color of my skin.

Unlike my, weirdly enough, my adoptive grandmother, who was also Aboriginal background, she had dark hair and brown eyes. And in 1900 in Manitoba, people used to call her Indian and half, that kind of stuff. But yeah, yeah.

So, it’s, it’s, Somebody else, you know, what kind of a life would I have had, or what if I hadn’t been adopted at all. Right. And I was very lucky that I had a family who said, you know, honestly, we don’t care what color the skin is.

Right. Or might become. And my mother, in fact, my, my adoptive mother said, well, you know, there’s, there’s native blood in my background.

I’m fine with that. It later turned out when I finally met my birth father that through a complete random coincidence, my birth mother and my, sorry, my adoptive mother and my birth father are actually cousins. Yeah, my brother and I, my brother is the one child my adoptive parents had.

We are biologically third cousins, but he’s blonde haired and blue eyed. I mean, there’s nothing. And like the Houstons don’t look remotely, remotely aboriginal.

But there is that, there is, you know, I mean, it’s Western Canada, you know, like everybody has some. I just had enough as I say, that it happened to show up on my birth father and the social worker kind of thought, oh, I should tell people. Did you grow up after adoption knowing that you were Métis or was that something you had to learn later on? That was something I learned later on.

I don’t, even my, I mean, again, 1960. I don’t think there was a lot of consciousness in the non-Aboriginal community as to what Métis meant. I mean, people were still using the term half-breed for God’s sake.

And so no, my parents just knew that my birth father had dark skin and native features and that was all they knew about it. It wasn’t until I actually spoke to my birth father on the phone for the first time that he told me, he said, you know, you’re Métis, like we’re a Métis family. And I went, oh, I had, no, I had no idea.

I’d been quite fascinated by the Métis. I’d done several summers of John Calder’s play, The Trial of Louis Riel, playing various groups. So I knew, you know, that history of the Métis, that part of the Métis history.

I’ve actually since played Riel myself in that same production. But yeah, it was something I found out in my mid-thirties. Now, after the discovery, after you found out that you were Métis, what did it mean for you to play Louis Riel? Well, it was the first time I had ever, I mean, I now make the joke about culturally misappropriating the identities of dead white guys, because I’ve played Tommy Douglas and Charles Dickens and William Lyon Mackenzie.

Like my whole career has been playing famous historical white figures. It was, and I’d always admired Riel, and I’d always wanted to play him. And getting to play that, I mean, it’s, I suppose it would be what for an evangelical Christian playing Jesus would be like.

You know, you’re playing the savior of your people, a man who was literally martyred by the powers that be. I’ll be playing him again this summer. I’m actually missing the Edmonton Fringe to do it this year.

And I was, it’s always very, very deeply moving to do this character. Coulter’s play, he was Irish, and there is that sensibility of, yeah, the British are the bad guys. And indeed they were.

I mean, Riel was legally lynched. There’s no other word for it. He was executed under a law that was created, I think it was the 14 or 1500s, and that no one had been charged with in centuries.

But it was like, no, we have to kill this man. He is just too dangerous. It’s, yeah, it’s an immense honor and very humbling.

And every night I go on that stage, I think you’ve got to get this right. Hmm. You have to get this right.

Here’s, in terms of, you mentioned missing the Edmonton Fringe. Now you’ve been touring fringe festivals for a very long time. Longest Canadian fringe touring performer as far as I’m aware.

What was, do you remember, I mean, do you remember when your first fringe was? Oh, yeah. And which fringe was it? It was the no longer, it was the now defunct, I should say, the now defunct Manatee Fringe, a small community outside of Ottawa in 1990, I think it was 91. It was either 90 or 91.

I’m going to say 91. And this was before Ottawa had a fringe. And I did that festival for a number of years.

Then the Ottawa Fringe came along and Manatee kind of just disappeared after that. Yeah, I mean, in those days you got in, you’d apply by mail and you just got in because it was no big deal. It was just a thing that people did.

And now, of course, it’s completely different. I mean, there’s so many people applying. There’s like, I think someone told me there’s something like 10 applications for every spot available at the Edmonton Fringe now.

And back in my day, like they said, oh, we’ll start accepting applications on such and such a date. And you could apply a week later and you’d still get in. Sure.

And then it got to the point where whosoever courier arrived first with a stack of applications got in. And at that point, it was like, you know what? This is luck of the draw. Let’s make it a lottery.

So watching this thing just take off in a way that really no other country has managed to do quite what Canada does. Yeah, the Edinburgh Fringe is bigger and there are large, unjuried festivals in other parts of the world. But no other country has like basically a tour you can do.

You can start in the East with Montreal and the festivals kind of go like once a week. And I used to do that tour. Now I can find myself pretty much to Winnipeg and Edmonton.

One of the things that I find interesting and the unique thing about the Canadian Fringe is there are US member festivals. Yes. You can start your tour in Orlando and then go to Montreal.

And then like- And a lot of people do. I mean, Melanie Gall, just to name one Canadian off the top of my head is one of many. I’m gonna feel so bad.

Chase Padgett, I’m gonna feel so bad that there are names I’m thinking about. Yes, you’re right. A lot of, well, Chase is American.

A lot of Canadians start with the Florida. There’s now a Tampa Fringe as well. Yes, yeah.

And you’re right. And then they go to Montreal and then Ottawa. I mean, it’s not, again, as easy as it used to be where you could literally just apply for one festival after the other and you could do them all summer.

Now you might have, okay, I got into Montreal and then I’m not in anything again until Edmonton, but I’m on the waiting list in Winnipeg. And the American Fringes, of course, now they overlap. There’s a fringe in Cincinnati and it overlaps.

I wanna say with Winnipeg, I’m not sure about that. So yeah, you have these sort of alternate festivals you can do, but there’s no question the Canadian ones are the bigger deal. Canadians kind of get fringe.

Winnipeg and Edmonton are so massive. And this is the thing I think that for years, I only knew the Toronto Fringe. I knew there was a circuit, I knew there was a tour, but I assumed being like just only ever doing my hometown fringe that this must be what all fringes are like about this size.

And then you hit like Winnipeg and you think, oh, this is massive. And then you go to Edmonton and then you really understand what a large fringe is. Yeah.

Oh yeah. It was always really funny when you were in Winnipeg to watch the Toronto Waters kind of come in and go, oh yeah, how did Toronto, I’ll just kick back on this little Hicktown Festival. And they kind of look around and go, oh my God.

And it’s like, sit down, have a beer, you’ll be fine. But yeah, it was very, and certainly anyone coming into Edmonton was just, I mean, Edmonton was a small city with this massive festival. I mean, every year I did, I mean, I did Edmonton, I cannot tell you how many times.

And every year I would still think, I can’t believe they do this every year. I just can’t believe it. And I was billeted for years with a guy who took his vacation at the fringe.

I mean, he loved theatre. He would see theatre all year round. He had this photographic memory for every actor.

And he could tell you, oh yeah, they were in this, two years ago, and oh, I really liked this. And this playwright is really interesting. And he would see seven plays, eight plays a day for 10 days and could keep them straight in his head.

It was, yeah, it was, I mean, I don’t know of other countries that have that kind of, I mean, just theatre maniacs, you know, and it was so wonderful as an actor. People stop you and go, oh, you’re back. Great, what show are you doing? Or, oh, I loved your show this year.

And, you know, as an actor, I mean, there’s nothing like that in live theatre anymore. You know, it’s- No. I always say the fringes are like the Elizabethan theatre that Shakespeare would have known.

You’re touring all the time. You’re always playing in different venues. You know, it’s an in yard or it’s, you know, up a back street or whatever, the fringe case.

It’s like an empty school room or, you know, downstairs below a laundromat. It could be anything. And it’s just pure unadulterated capitalism.

It’s how many bodies can you get through the door because that’s how you’re gonna get your beer and green onion cakes today. That’s where the money’s gonna come from. You getting those people through the door.

Absolutely. Yeah, it was and remains one of the two most exciting theatre experiences I’ve ever had was Canadian fringes. And the other one was during COVID doing Shakespeare, the first folio of Shakespeare online with an international cast called The Show Must Go Online.

And we had three days to rehearse. Wow. And of course we’d have the script, you know, on your screen and you’re acting in the camera to another actor who nevermind a different time zone, they’re in a different continent.

Yes, yeah. And we had this brilliant British director, young guy, you know, who just, who like none of my friends are working. Let’s do the first folio.

So we did. And it was just revelatory and everything you think wonderful about, again, about Elizabethan theatre, making it immediate. And, you know, people would watch us who couldn’t go to theatre because they found being around people, you know, distressing people who, you know, neurodiverse.

But, hey, now I can see Shakespeare done by actors. And I could just, you know, I don’t have to worry about other people around me. And it was, you know, we all made friends around the world, you know, from these people we would work with.

It was, yeah, that was, that on the fringe are, to me, that’s what really, that’s what great theatre is. It’s live. There’s no television.

There’s no movie camera. There’s nothing that can give you that experience, even though I’m saying, talking about working on Zoom with another actor. There’s just something about that.

No, that person is there in real time. Yeah. Maybe I can’t touch them, but I know they’re there.

The fringe is, there’s that interesting thing you were talking about, you know, how, you know, the celebrity aspects. There are people who, it’s funny to see, like to see how crazy people will go for a show. Yeah.

Of like an artist that comes back every year and they become massive, but they’re only famous for 10 days during the fringe. And then after that, they might walk down the street and nobody knows who they are. But for those 10 days, they’re the biggest thing in the city.

Yeah. Oh yeah. I remember joking to one fringe artist who I know was pulling in a good, good payday.

Like this particular artist was filling a 300 seat theatre at 10 bucks a pop. And as you know, at fringe, all money goes to the artists. And I joked to him, I said, you know, this week, you’re probably the highest paid stage actor in Canada.

And he said, yeah, I guess I am. I said, but the rest of the year, he said, yeah, rest of the year, it’s, would you like fries with that, sir? Yes. Yes.

And that’s, that’s the thing is, is, you know, you know, there, there are plenty of people who make their, their, the bulk of their money for the year in the fringe circuit. I was one of them. The other part of my, my annual income was doing Christmas carol.

Now I was saying to someone today, could, could I make a down payment on a house? Not on your life. No way. But on the other hand, that wasn’t a high priority for me.

You know, I was making enough money for my priorities. I could pay rent. I could pay groceries.

You know, I could afford to have, you know, a girlfriend. I could afford to travel. You know, I lived very simply.

I was certainly living at or near the poverty line, but I made enough money that I didn’t have to do anything else. Now I, at some point I didn’t have to take a second job, but you know, I was, I was very fortunate. And more importantly, I was doing scripts that I loved doing.

And that meant something to me. Civilized is one of the, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years. Civilized is arguably the best script I’ve done to date.

It’s certainly in the top three. And I just feel so privileged to get to do this. And I think of actors I know, I’ve heard actors bitch about, oh my God, I’m in this play.

I just hate doing it. And my response to them is, then quit. Yeah.

Because I promise you, there are 10 people behind you who would kill to do what you’re doing and wouldn’t bitch about it. You’re an artist, you don’t get to bitch. If you’re unhappy- You know, the thing about that is that fringe is such that, like, if you’re touring the fringe circuit, if you don’t love it, I mean, everybody has bad days and everybody has bad fringes, but overall, if you don’t love it, you are putting yourself through a ringer for something that’s just killing you.

Yeah, exactly. Because it’s a brutal thing to put yourself through every year, if you hate it especially. Oh yeah.

And I should clarify, the actor I was talking to just a couple of minutes ago, he was working in a regular theatre gig, being paid equity wages. And it’s like, that is not a bad life. That’s what we all kind of aspire to, or most of us.

So again, if you’re unhappy doing that, you’re in the wrong profession. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And one thing I can say about what I’ve done, I have never done a script I wasn’t proud or at least keen to do.

I’ve never woken up and going, oh my God, I’ve got to go to work today when I was doing, well, any kind of theatre. I mean, I have actually worked in productions in quote unquote real theatres and been paid quote unquote real money. But I consider myself very blessed.

And I think if you ask pretty much any actor, particularly fringe actors, who’ve been doing it for a long time, they would almost certainly tell you the same. You’re right. It is a pretty hard scrabble.

When you go to fly us in to see your show and they just look at you like you’re dirt under their foot and go, how many stars did you get? Yeah. It’s like, well, if you really want to know, I actually got five. But you know what? Since you asked and that’s all that matters to you, you probably wouldn’t understand what I’m doing anyway.

And that is the, yeah. When I, there’s only, there’ve only been a couple of cities that I went to when I was touring the last time where people will, you’d be flyering and people would look you in the eye and say, oh, I’m not coming to see your show. Yeah.

And we’re like, you know, you don’t actually have to tell me that. Like you could politely take my flyer and then throw it in the garbage when I’m not looking. You don’t have to tell me that you’re not coming.

Yeah. My response is usually, oh, okay. Thank you for saving me the flyer.

Yeah. If they’re kind of natural, I go, well, it’s your loss. And I just move on.

And what’s funny is if you say, well, it’s your loss, generally the people around, because I’ll say it loudly, they’ll laugh. And if you can get them to laugh, even if you’re doing something fairly serious, it’ll pique their interest. Yeah.

I had somebody try to return the flyer to me and say, oh, save the tree. I was like, tree’s already dead. Yeah.

It’s a flyer. Yep. Yep.

Absolutely. So. I would be, I would be remiss if I did not ask you about A Christmas Carol and what first drew you to that and how you’ve been performing it.

Do you use the Dickens performance text or do you, have you created your own? I do use the Dickens performance text. And in fact, I use the Dickens stage directions. My particular performance of A Christmas Carol is an attempt to recreate the story as the author first told it.

Now, Dickens performed it over a 12 year period. And during that time, he shortened it and rewrote bits of it and whatnot. My version is kind of a midway between the two.

I always say, Dickens walked on stage with the expectations, you’ve all read the book. Yes. You’ve come to see me play the characters.

I walk on stage saying, you haven’t read the book but you’ve all seen a different film version and you’re here to see me do whatever I’m gonna do with it. So one of the things I started doing early on was to put in scenes that Dickens had cut. He seems, we know he performed, but that he cut.

And the first one was a little tiny scene that I’ve since seen in a couple of film versions. But when I first did it in the play in 1992, at that point I had never seen Don. And it’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

And it’s two people in debt to Scrooge and he’s gonna throw them out of their house. And the husband comes home and says, he’s dead. And the wife initially goes, oh, thank God.

And he goes, oh, no, that’s a terrible thing to say. He’s a human being. But still, and I love that scene because at the time I started doing it, no one, unless they’d read the book, and even in the book, it’s like literally a page and a half.

People don’t know that scene. And so they’re going, oh yeah, I know what’s coming next. Oh, wait, what? Yeah.

This is new. And secondly, it’s a really dick move on the part of Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Like, it’s a woe sucker punch, you know? Because Scrooge, just before the scene begins, Scrooge says, oh, please.

Isn’t, you know, he’s been shown the dead body on the bed, who he does not realize is himself, but of course we all know. And he says, oh, Ghost, you know, please. Just, isn’t there anyone who feels pity for this poor dead man? And Ghost says, well, let me show you something.

And it’s like, it’s a total dick move. And the scene exists, as far as I know, only a handful of films. There’s a BBC TV version with the guy who plays Jacob Marley opposite Alastair Sim.

I’ve just blanked on his name at the moment, but he’s playing Scrooge. And that scene, despite the fact this is a very short version of Christmas Carol, that scene is in that. Then I think the Patrick Stewart version has it.

And there’s one other one, I think, where you see it. But again, it’s not done very often. And so I put that scene back in early on.

And then I began putting little descriptive bits because of course Dickens is a master at describing things. He had to be, because there were no movies. He had to paint a picture in his readers’ minds.

And there’s a lovely bit where Scrooge is going, is coming back to his house and it’s late and it’s dark. And he lives in this massive, like 200-year-old building that the city has kind of grown around. And now it’s this great big building in this tiny little cramped yard.

And Dickens describes the house as looking so out of place that it looked as if it might have run there playing hide and seek with other houses when it was very young and forgotten the way out again. And it usually gets a bit of a chuckle from the audience because it’s this rather cute little personification of this gloomy old place. That again, most of my audience have seen in the movies.

So they had in their head, oh yeah, it’s like the Addams family house. You know, it’s this creepy place. And suddenly you’re being told to imagine this as this little childish house playing hide and seek and getting lost in this little tiny yard and like just sort of growing old there.

It’s a fascinating thing because I think that the Dickens descriptions are so interesting and vivid because of how he moved through London. Because he walked. He walked all the time.

When he was writing, he was walking. Where he got his ideas. It’s why he’s so evocative.

He’s why he’s able to describe London in the way that he does because he saw it as a living, breathing city and the people in it were living, breathing. And he knew them. Yes.

And his descriptions are so vivid because of that. Yes. And it’s why even decades later, people were able to say, all right, Dickens is describing, well, for example, Scrooge’s house.

Someone was able to pinpoint it’s this building. It was a house built in the 1600s after the great fire. So it was this large, you know, had been at one point this very grand house.

And then as the city grew around it, it had become, as often happens, you know, the area that had once been very grand and lovely now became sort of undesirable and kind of slummy. And the house got divided up into offices and small apartments. And, but was very much a feature of Dickens’ 1843 London and stood for several decades thereafter.

And that was the other thing is Dickens expected his readers to recognize landmarks he describes. Yeah. Sometimes he would, you know, he’d name them like the Iron Bridge, for example, which is a very prominent site in Gildoret.

And sometimes it was just, okay, I’m going to say, you know, Scrooge lived, you know, near, you know, near, I think it’s Corn Hill, you know, in this particular part of London, which was geographically a very, very small city in 1843. And I’m going to describe vaguely what this place is like. And I will expect you, the reader to go, oh yeah, he’s talking about that.

You know, he’s talking about that really creepy old dump, you know, two blocks over. So yeah, it’s, Dickens is marvelous. And, you know, he used to see his characters, this living, breathing three-dimensional people.

He talks about writing Christmas Carol. And, you know, he put it aside because he was also working on a novel, Martin Shufflewood at the time. And he said, Bob Crash and Tiny Tim would come and they would tug at his sleeve to ask him to complete their adventure.

So, yes, when it gets toward Christmas time, we’ll have to talk. I’m doing, I should mention, I’m doing Civilized and the same place I do Christmas Carol when I’m in Toronto, at the Red Sandcastle Theatre. I’ll be opening Civilized at the Red Sandcastle on September 30th, which is of course the Day of Truth and Reconciliation.

Right, right, right, yeah. I’ll be there for a week. But as you, you know, quite rightly, I’m actually gonna open the tour in Ottawa in just, well, I think it’s, was it second Friday in June? I haven’t got the date in the top of my head.

I wanna say the 16th of June. Yes, it’s coming up. Yeah, yeah, it is, it is.

We’ve been, of course, rehearsing on FaceTime and Zoom up till now. I actually today had my first in-person meeting face-to-face as well as rehearsal with our director, Paul Hopkins. He’s a wonderful man.

He directed Montreal Shakespeare in the Park for a number of years and was at Stratford Festival and his time on TV and stuff. So it’s been, when Keir said, you know, I’m looking for a director, I said, you know, please, if it could be someone I’ve never worked with. I never went to theatre school and I would like, so for me, the fringe was my theatre education.

Sure. Whatever possible, I wanna work with someone I’ve never worked with before because I know I’ll learn something. Right, right.

Well, as we sort of draw to a close here, I hope that, I hope you get the prime minister out to see the show. Yes. Or other members of parliament and just that the Ottawa fringe really embraces this show.

I certainly hope so. I think I’ll either be ridden out of town on a rail or carried out on the multitude’s shoulders. Either way, you know you’ve done something important.

Yes, that’s right. I always say to people, the worst, you know, I don’t mind someone saying, I hated that because at least I got a reaction. That’s right.

The worst reaction is, eh, it’s okay. Yes, that’s terrible. That’s terrible.

Yeah. Well, John, thank you so much for talking with me tonight. Thank you for your patience and I look forward to September and seeing the show.

Thank you, Phil.