2000 Gascon-Thomas Award Winner Kenneth Welsh: Persistent Magic

by Patrick McDonagh

Magic and mystery infuse theatre. Practitioners in the craft are, as the magician Prospero so accurately observed, "such stuff as dreams are made on." As an actor who began his apprenticeship in stagecraft forty years ago, Kenneth Welsh has been a part of many a piece of theatrical dreamwork. Now returned to his native Canada, Welsh was based in the US for fourteen years, doing theatre and film work. Today he continues to appear regularly on screens both large and small. His face is familiar enough to Canadian audiences to have earned him a Gemini Award for lifetime achievement while only in his fifties, as well as numerous other awards (including another five Geminis) in recognition of individual roles.

So what is Welsh’s response to receiving the 2000 Gascon-Thomas Award? "I was completely surprised," he says. "It’s an award given to someone who has contributed greatly to the Canadian theatre, and I don’t think I’ve done that much. Unless they intended it to honour my influence by working in theatre in New York for so long and setting a fine example for NTS students to come," he jokes. But, he adds, "I was deeply and personally connected to the people whose names are on the award, which makes me thrilled to receive it."

Welsh arrived at the School in 1962, fresh from Edmonton, where he had graduated from a Stanislavksy-oriented theatre program at the University of Alberta. The School, and Montreal, provided a solid dose of culture shock. "I was suffering from homesickness, and wondering if I had made the right choice to go on with further theatre education," he recalls. Into this maelstrom of youthful angst stepped Powys Thomas, then Artistic Director of the English Acting Section. Thomas, whom Welsh remembers as "an inventive and inquiring individual," became a critical figure in the young performer’s development. "He was very much a mentor to me. He recognized my talent, but also saw my personal needs and helped me through many difficult times in theatre school."

Thomas was an authority at conjuring theatrical magic. "I saw him as a kind of Merlin figure," says Welsh. "He had a particular knowledge of what the theatre arts were about; he brought mystical and magical things to it. His approach was not as specific as someone who might have written books about the art of acting. Instead, he tended towards an instinctive and poetic approach."

In his relations with others, including his students, Thomas was understated and quiet. But his style, subdued though it may have been, was anything but remote. "He was very encouraging and inviting," recalls Welsh, "bringing us into improvisation to release whatever blocks we had in our imagination, treating each person as their own receptacle of imagination. He taught things at the moment but had a very specific personal system and approach to it, and as an actor he was much the same way. He definitely practised what he preached and allowed his imagination to take him to some pretty extreme choices. When he played Pistol in Henry V, it was wild, broad, funny and big in every way — basically Powys’s own particular reality."

The magic was sustained throughout their friendship, as they performed together and shared ideas about theatre. And consistently, it seems, Welsh played son — or apprentice — to Thomas’s father-sage. The pattern repeated from a television production of The Three Musketeers, in which Welsh played d’Artagnan and Thomas played Athos, to a 1972 production of King Lear, with Welsh as Edgar and Thomas as Gloucester — the last time they performed together.

But even when not on stage with Thomas, Welsh drew upon his old mentor. Before directing a 1974 production of Under Milkwood at the Guthrie Theatre, Welsh says, "I made a sort of pilgrimage to Powys to get his blessing, make sure I had pronunciations correct, and generally talk to him about the writing, the Welshness of it."

Jean Gascon, the other name on the award, was also a close friend and an important influence. "His performance in Strindberg’s Dance of Death inspired me, it was so electrifying. I had just graduated and was looking for someone to show me what I should be aiming for." Gascon had enormous energy, recalls Welsh. "He was more extroverted and outgoing than Powys, and had extremely long arms that he just loved to throw around people because he was a very loving sort of man."

It may have been thirty-five years since Welsh began his professional career, but his love of acting, nurtured by Thomas and Gascon, remains. "It’s always fresh — the next role is something you’ve never done before. That’s partly why actors do it; we don’t want to be confined by something that’s ordinary. In so doing you sacrifice the possibility of security, but you get used to that."

But Welsh has probably come closer to security than most actors, by sheer force of will. He has won recognition for his performances in everything from Twin Peaks to Margaret’s Museum, but has no time to rest on laurels. When interviewed in February, he had just finished a TV movie called The Day Reagan Was Shot, in which he played James Baker, Reagan’s Chief of Staff; Haven, a four-hour miniseries in which he plays Harry Truman, is on television; Revenge of the Land has just aired, while Sanctuary is about to be shown; and he was preparing for a Sherlock Holmes film to be shot in Montreal in March, in which he is playing Dr.Watson. His reputation as one of Canada’s hardest-working actors is well earned.

His success he credits ultimately to a combination of talent, training, and perseverance, which he defines as "the absolute, blind belief that you have made the right choice." And thus, Welsh’s advice, no doubt offered to him by Powys Thomas in the past, for young students: "Be bold and stick to your choices. It will be difficult at times, but the more you persevere the more you find yourself fulfilling dreams. Follow those dreams."

Welsh has courted an auspicious star; almost forty years ago it brought him under the tutelage of Powys Thomas. Today it continues to bring him new roles, different challenges, and, as always, a fresh magic.

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