Stephen Hair, Calgary's favourite Scrooge, tackles the role of King Lear

Stephen Hair has played hundreds of roles since arriving in Calgary from Montreal in the early 1970s, including 24 straight seasons as Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

Now, he's tackling the title role in the Shakespeare Company's production of King Lear. Hair stopped by CBC to speak to The Homestretch about taking on one of the biggest parts of his career.

Q: How do you prepare such a monumental role?

A: Its funny. I've had three monumental roles this season [Blow Wind, High Water, A Christmas Carol and King Lear] — and I just look at it as another play, to be honest with you. If I got caught up in all the King Lear hoopla and what it is and what it has been for 500 years, and all the great people who've played it [I'd go nuts!].

I just try and attack it like another play.

Q: But it's so massive.

A: It is massive. It's not every day you get to play a character who goes from being a mighty king to a shell of a person who has a complete mental breakdown on stage. It's not something you get to do everyday and that takes a bit of work, both mentally and physically. But it's the classic. If you're going to do a big Shakespeare, it's the one to do.

Q: How would you describe the character of Lear?

A:  It's [about] a man who's full of power and greed — and all those incredible things that Shakespeare always fills his plays with. His plays are always the grand scheme of things — no small detail-ey kind of stuff. He goes for the big emotions, the big power.

You look around in our world today at these guys with huge egos running huge major  countries … and bringing everybody to the brink of war or fear of it — and Lear is much the same way. Except he's decided to give it all up, but he realizes how hard that is to do when he tries to give it all away to his three daughters.

Q: What's it like to have a major breakdown onstage?

A: It's pacing really more than anything. The hardest part of course  is your body doesn't know it's fake. I'm 67 now, and have done a lot of shows over the years When you're tense, it gets tense all over and the muscles tense up, so you really do need to have a very strong regime of rest and relaxation. To me, it's more sleep than food, lying down and so on, but also if you feel you're going too far and your head is beginning to feel like it's going to explode, you just have to pull back — because after all, it's just a play.

Q: What was it like being directed by Seana McKenna, a longtime Stratford veteran?

A: Seana McKenna is really Canadian theatre royalty par excellence. She had just finished playing Lear in Toronto, actually right before she came — so I was able to pick her brain a lot. Lots of shortcuts there.

And I worked with her last season [at Theatre Calgary] in The Audience, when she played Queen Elizabeth all the way through her reign.

We became good chums and she's a lovely person — because the Shakespeare Company includes actors on [very] different [experience] levels, so there's some young actors in there and us older ones who've been around — and she has a wonderful way of making everyone feel safe and secure, because she has so much knowledge [of Shakespeare's texts].

There's nothing she doesn't know about every single line of that play — and about Shakespeare, and how it's written, how it needs to be spoken.

She said to me the first day, everyone who plays Lear plays their own Lear — and your Lear will come to you. I'm just there to lay the groundwork, and it will fill in for you as you take it over. It's all going to be different — no one's going to be the same. I owe her a lot for this play.

With files from The Homestretch

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