Kate Trotter
Mrs. Kendal of The Elephant Man on playwright Bernard Pomerance.
Kate Trotter on The Elephant Man's one-play-wonder, plus Caryl Churchill, Tennessee Williams, director Robin Phillips, actor Brent Carver and actress Angelina Jolie
In this four-part series, Kate Trotter discusses her role as real-life Victorian actress Madge Kendal and playwright's Bernard Pomerance progressive vision in The Elephant Man – the only successful play he ever saw produced. Trotter also chats about leading Elephant Man Brent Carver, plus her main roles as Marlene in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, and Alma Winemiller in Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke, in addition to her film work with actress Angelina Jolie in Beyond Borders.
Part One - The Elephant Man
When director Robin Phillips asked Kate Trotter to play The Elephant Man's Mrs Kendal, Trotter immediately answered – Are you kidding? Yes!
"I think The Elephant Man is a really brilliant play, and an important play, second of all, it's a wonderful role, and third or perhaps first of all, it’s Robin Phillips and he's a genius."
You have worked with Robin Phillips before?
"No, I haven’t worked with Robin Phillips before. He has asked me in the past, but I have never been available, so this was my first time out with Robin and I can’t tell you what a wonderful experience it was. It was fantastic."
Mrs. Kendal "does more with a flick of an eyelid than most could do with a movment of their head on stage" – a very potent actress. Do you feel a simpatico with her?
"What I feel is a huge admiration for Mrs. Kendal, and I also feel that playwright Bernard Pomerance took up a wonderful selection of characteristics,and to be straight about it, not all of them positive. The woman starts out, the very first thing she says is shocking. "He reminds me of an audience that I played Cleopatra for in Brighton."
"First of all, how vain, and second who cares? "He has this huge grim head in grimace and utterly unable to clap." What a dreadful thing to say! But that’s the human being that encounters the artist in John Merrick, who goes to bat for him, who introduces him to everybody who's anybody and eventually who gives him the greatest gift a woman can give in that play."
"This man who says "I don’t know what it feels like to see a female body" and this is a man who understands grace and majesty,and elegance and artistry,all those things that the model [Merrick constructs a model of St. Phillips Catherdral in Birmingham from card stock without ever seeing it] represents and yet he will never meet or see a woman except in that period clad in corsets and bustles and hats and scarves and gloves."
Do you think she can be more herself with him? Even though she lives the high Victorian lifestyle, she likely feels a little marginalized because she’s in the theatre, so people may consider her a freak as well.
"Absolutely so, and they get to talk about what is illusion and what is image and what is truth."
Bernard Pomerance’s is an outsider too – this was his only play, vastly very different from 1980 classic David Lynch film with Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, and Anne Bancroft. What do lyou ike about Pomerance’s work?
"Somebody described the production as a piece of fine crystal. A friend came and saw it and said you know in this age where everybody is running to do five different things at the same time and there’s noise and speed and pollution everywhere, there's this little piece of fine crystal that moves at a pace that we breathe to at the end. I think that comes from the play itself.
I love the fact that Pomerance has got the intellect and the courage to combine the religious aspect of the piece and the times, the political aspect of the piece and the times, the art and the theatre and the artistry of John Merrick, and the medical aspect as well. What a thing to accomplish in two hours, and yet he takes a representative of each of those areas right through self-knowledge."
Really it is Dr. Frederick Treves who is much more conflicted than John Merrick.
"Yes it is. But I think everybody starts out without the insight into themselves that they end up with. Why does Mrs. Kendal even come? I think she comes because as she says "I do pretty well as I please, and what pleases me most is this." She does things that are in the face of society but she doesn’t come expecting to meet the man she meets. I think she is completely astonished by what she meets."
The Elephant Man continues at Canstage's Bluma Appel Theatre to November 3, 2007. Watch for Kate in The Murdoch Mysteries on Bravo, also on November 3.
