Profile of Brian Tree
Actor from London Assurance, The Lark, King Lear, The Tempest, Equus, Diary of Anne Frank, Pride and Prejudice on Critics
Oct 3, 2006
This soft-spoken English actor who works across Canada, is known for many memorable supporting roles in the Shakespearean canon - Stephano in The Tempest, Touchstone in As you Like It, Holfernes in Love's Labours Lost and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream - plus leading roles in modern classics - Kemp in Morris Panych's Vigil and Harry Mitchell in David Stephens' The Sum of Us. Tree, to coin a phrase, is not afraid to go out 'on a limb' when it comes to discussing all things theatre.
I don’t read reviews because as you know if you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad ones."
Your reviews have been positive...
Well, that's good .... but someone asked me about this the other day.There is a story of a man going to market with his son on a mule and this is interesting because this is how I think about my relationship with critics. They are going to market and he puts the little boy on the mule and as they’re going to market they meet some people coming the other way and the people are saying "My God, Look at that poor old man made to walk"... while he has put his son on the mule. So, the people go and the father says yes, they are probably right, so he rides the mule and makes the kid walk and than they come across some more people and they say "Look at that. The poor kid is made to walk..." Well, this goes on and on, until eventually they both between them, carry the mule to market.
I feel that about critics. You are constantly chasing the needle. If you are going to believe what a critic says and even take it into consideration – you can’t do that. You are going down a road to ruin there because then you have to listen to the next one and the next one. Usually a concept of how one plays a character is not arrived at over lunchtime. (Tree likens it to the critical task of casting a show). It is done over a period of weeks or months - sometimes even longer. So, no.. I don’t read reviews. I am my own yardstick and I think most of us are. Yes, we are not always right. We make mistakes. But I am certainly not going to say he should have done this, or he should have done that.
It is very individual these days...
Yes, and why should I be listening to someone that didn’t like the way his eggs were cooked over breakfast down at the restaurant and he’s fuming, or he had an altercation with his wife before he left for work, or he got held up in traffic or he “doesn’t like musicals anyway…”
