Leon Pownall - In Memoriam
Actor Leon Pownall was a powerful stage presence. From Henry VIII to Dylan Thomas; be it writer, director or actor, Leon Pownall did not 'go gentle' into anything.
I met Leon Pownall in the summer of 2004, draped in old shorts, fishnet shirt and a big straw hat. He had returned to Stratford, after 14 seasons with the Stratford Festival.
But he was not on Stratford playbill.
He was there to create a playbill of his own.
Pownall had tried in the past to assist struggling theatre companies in Vancouver, and Toronto, because, Pownall, like his fellow Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, raged against any challenge.
So, Pownall, and several other Stratford actors, designers and directors created Postscript Productions, which was to showcase the work of Canadian playwrights.
Postscript Productions only lasted one season, yet it produced two very memorable shows. Do Not Go Gentle was a re-mount, a monodrama based on the life of Welsh poet
Dylan Thomas, written and directed by Pownall, starring Geraint Wyn Davies which was part of the Stratford Festival Studio Theatre's inaugural season in 2002. The second piece was Canadian playwright Michael Mercer's Goodnight Disgrace, the bitter-sweet tale of the friendship, creative bonds, and inevitable rivalry between revolutionary poet Conrad Aiken played by Nigel Bennett and his student writer Malcolm Lawry, played by Brendan Murray (Pownall was going to play Aiken but had to defer to playing Lawry's father Arthur due to health concerns.)
Lawry is best known for his novel Under the Volcano.
In Postscript's brave, inaugural season, these fascinating companion pieces dealt with the madness, the excess, the genius, and the sacrifice wreaked upon an artist's soul. This merely fuelled Pownall's passion to present these works.
Pownall's foray into the written word began in 1982, when he met one of Canada's true theatre pioneers.
Powys Thomas was one of Canada's first theatre teachers. He was a founding member of the National Theatre School, and Vancouver Playhouse Acting School. Thomas had taught and mentored many actors at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals. Like many of his students, Powys Thomas was to have a profound effect on Leon Pownall's life.
Leon Pownall: "Being a fellow countryman - Powys said to me - every actor has a one-man show, and yours is probably Dylan Thomas, and then Powys died."
"That just stuck in my head and I thought well, I'll do something about it. I started reading and reading and reading, and writing and writing and writing and I came up with the first verse."
"I did it myself for quite a while and then I put it to bed and then came here to Stratford (1986) to do Henry the VIII. Geraint Wyn Davies was in the company that year and we had met before and got to know one another and he had seen the Dylan Thomas pieces and said would you mind if I had a shot at that? So, we did it as a brush-up workshop here and then along the way Geraint expressed his desire to do it again."
"I sort of basically tailored it more for him. I had some new information and developed it with Geraint doing it. There were similarities in our personalities but it's very hard for me to compare, because I am in one of the personalities so I have never seen me do it. I have never seen a recording of me doing it and not full out on stage."
What attracted you to these two pieces?
Leon Pownall: "It is very common and still is, that a lot of writers get involved in substance abuse, and the substance of choice in those days, amongst most writers, was alcohol and they consumed it and got witty and sat around and made one another laugh. That's what Goodnight Disgrace is about."
"It's about artists - and what do you sacrifice to be an artist - the old question. Essentially, it is a madness, and substance abuse is prone to cover up all kinds of pain and inadequacies and so forth.
And if you can come up with a decent piece to read or perform or play or write or sculpt - I suppose there's some merit in that. It's not up to me to judge it, but it's just entertaining."
"You hear of writers who sat on their beachfront and have written manuscripts with a nice little handwriting and it's boring. But these are not boring people. They are entertaining people. Do not Go Gentle has to do with a man realizing how much of his life he wasted, but he still gains some kind of insight into life along the way. Goodnight Disgrace is pretty much the story of how men can fall in love with one another and not turn to their homosexuality or turn to sex as a conduit between them. It is a powerful love story between two men, and we are used to seeing two men who love one other walk around the room, slap each other on the back and rah ha... etcetera."
"But these are a couple of guys who happened to be artists. They happened to be witty. They happened to be sexual with women. They get around a lot and find this extraordinary bond with one another, but ultimately the bond is destructive because the student becomes the teacher, so it is a very broad piece in as much as it deals with love, and the writer, the wit of the writer, the daring of the writer. It's about the stupidity of two men hanging out together and getting plastered and wrestling over a toilet seat as a trophy - all those kinds of dumb stupid things that men do."
"It's nice to laugh at them doing, but ultimately the story ends with this man drinking himself to death and leaving the older man Conrad Aiken thinking about it and looking back and saying 'there was much more to it than just drinking'."
