Paul Gross Speaks

One of the special features included in the Slings & Arrows Season 3 DVD set is a 2006 interview with Paul Gross.  Although the third season was devoted to King Lear, the interview ranges back to Season 1 and Gross's experiences with Hamlet.  This was an added bonus to an already excellent season!

The first question posed to Gross was how the role of Hamlet informs an actor's work.  He comments that it is inevitable that the role will influence what the actor does.  Anyone doing Hamlet will be interesting, he says, because the "part is undoable," and the corollary to that is that the actor cannot fail.  As Gross comments later in the interview, an actor "can do anything with Hamlet and it's pretty much OK."  (That is not a blank check, though.  More later.)  The role marks the actor.  Gross relates a comment by Joseph Ziegler, who directed Gross in the role at Stratford.  Ziegler divides an actor's career into "pre-Hamlet" and "post-Hamlet."

The interview continued with a discussion of why Shakespeare still works in modern time.  Gross describes Shakespeare himself as part of Elizabethan "pop culture."  The Bard's writing was at times high-end and at times bottom-end.  Shakespeare would pull from wherever in order to make human qualities get out from the stage.  The problem, though, lies in modernizing to too great an extent.  One cannot take a classic play and throw in "Madonna tunes or Coca Cola cans."  It's a very fine line.  If the modernizing "doesn't support the text or the text doesn't suggest it, it's stupid."  I wanted to applaud this statement.  Everyone who directs a so-called modern adaptation of a Shakespearean play should take note!  Gross recounts a production of Richard III that included the line, "A tank, a tank.  My kingdom for a tank."  Ugh.

Gross does not take a stuffy conservative ideal, however.  He does not see the Bard's words as unalterable holy tablets.  He believes that even Shakespeare would have adapted his own words, and a director who will not change the text "should be fired."  That said, though, such alterations have to be sensible and in service to the play.  His final comment on this topic is a thing of beauty.

"There are a lot of purists about Shakespeare and I think they're kind of wrong because I don't think he was.  And on the other hand, if you're doing stuff that's just stupid then it's just stupid."

Additional topics of conversation include the connection between the arts and commerce (You can't leave without exiting through the gift shop) and setting the series in a theatre (It's an employment comedy).  All told, it was a short interview, but an interesting one nonetheless.