Domini Blythe and Peter Hinton
Fanny Kemble star loves the work of famed Montreal director
In fact, t’is The Swanne that led Hinton to his earliest research on Fanny Kemble. Hinton, like Blythe, and her father Richard also fell hard under Fanny’s spell.
For Fanny Kemble, Domini Blythe is onstage in character a good 15 minutes before the show starts. The audience can watch Fanny in her dressing room asking herself “Who I shall enter as tonight?”
Blythe - “Of course I feel the energy of the audience but that’s not what I am concentrating on. I can’t really tell too much about the audience and I don’t want to. When Peter Hinton asked me to do the pre-show my immediate reaction was to balk at it. It terrified me, but he said,‘Well just try it once, and if you don’t like it, that’s fine. You don’t have to do that,’ But in fact, we did have to find a way of getting me onstage because there is no exit but of course I could have done it in a black out as I do at the top of Act Two. Actually having never had done a one woman show before, I had no idea whether I was going to like doing it. All actors ask themselves this. Is it going to be terribly lonely? We are used to very rich backstage life that you use often to feed yourself to go onstage. I am terribly well supported except when, in a few minutes before the show, I am on my own. Naturally, it is me that is going to go out there and actually I found that I couldn’t wait to get out of the dressing room and enter my reality which was the beginning of my journey.”
How do you feel about the natural evolution of the piece ...
"When you perform anything for any length of time especially in repertory, you always weave your way through it slightly differently and that’s the beauty of rep. So it wouldn’t apply any more to this play than it would to any other play that’s been well directed and well written. Depends how I am feeling. Some days you are more edgy than others. Some days you are softer than others, so you are going to bring out those elements. But I do feel very strongly when I play this play I appreciate it more and more because it never falls apart in my hands. It allows me as an actress to have different thoughts about it and follow that particular thought and it won’t let me down. I think Peter is the real thing – a brilliant man and I hope that will he go very far. He should do if he is not crushed by our wonderful Canadian system spitting on anything that’s Canadian."
Do you like Peter Hinton's other plays? …
"I loved The Swanne. I love to have my head messed with.
I think there is a big place for… you want to think sometimes. In the theatre you don’t always want to be entertained. I mean of course you want that too but I am so terribly proud of this play. I think it’s fabulous. I am hoping very much that we can do it in an urban situation now. Because I want to play it to people who have said to each other 'I’ll meet you after work have a quick drink and say let’s go see this Fanny Kemble play.' I want to play it to people who have heard of it word of mouth who are coming because they really want to see something challenging."
Is the hardest work you’ve ever done?
"That’s a very difficult question to answer. I think it’s the best experience I’ve ever had in my professional life. Peter Hinton is exceptional. To work with your writer who is also your director and also a wonderful human being in such an intimate way …. I’ve never been part of something that was written from scratch before.
This was the best experience, fantastic, very magical, loving experience with our whole team: stage manager, the lighting, the music, the sound, the designer, my dialect coach. Everyone circled around me and we became a team in which I was the spearhead in the sense that I go onstage. It has been …well you say Stephen Ouimette was exhausted I can imagine. I don’t know if I could do this everyday, but I am not sure if it is the hardest thing I have ever done.
It was overwhelming at the beginning. When I got the script… only ready six weeks before we went into rehearsal… it was late because Peter has got so much work. He is also head of the National Arts Centre - a new thing which was added to his workload."
Peter Hinton
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