UK Theatre Network

René Auberjonois had been a busy actor on stage and screen for thirty years before he played Odo, the shape-shifting constable on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-99). In 2004 he took the role of venerable lawyer Paul Lewiston on the acclaimed legal drama Boston Legal. Lately, he has appeared in Warehouse 13 and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and has participated in an audio recording of the Bible.

Auberjonois attended Carnegie-Mellon University where he studied theatre in-depth, learning not only about acting but about the entire process of producing a play. After college, he acted with various theatre companies, starting at the prestigious Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. He helped found the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music Repertory Company in New York. Eventually, Auberjonois landed a role on Broadway in 1968, alternating between the Fool to Lee J. Cobb's King Lear (the longest running production of the play in Broadway history) and Ned in A Cry of Players (opposite Frank Langella), directly followed by Marco in Fire!. The next year, he won a Tony Award for his performance as Sebastian Baye alongside Katharine Hepburn in Coco. Other Tony nominations were for Neil Simon's The Good Doctor (1973, opposite Christopher Plummer); as The Duke in Big River (1984), winning a Drama Desk Award; and, memorably, as Buddy Fidler/Irwin S. Irving in City of Angels (1989), written by Larry Gelbart and Cy Coleman. Other Broadway appearances include Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1972); Mr. Samsa in Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov (1989); Professor Abronsius in Dance of the Vampires, and Jethro Crouch in Sly Fox (2004, for which he was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award). As a member of the Second Drama Quartet, Auberjonois toured with Ed Asner, Dianne Wiest, and Harris Yulin. He also appeared in the Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn work, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, at the Kennedy Center and the Metropolitan Opera and played the titular character in Molière's The Imaginary Invalid at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 2008. Auberjonois has also directed many theatrical productions.


Photo by Suzanne Vanweddigen

CK: Are you going to do another play in the near future?
RA: If I do another play, one possibility is L’Avare - The Miser.
CK: Ah, yes! You said you might want to do that.
RA: Yes. So we’ll have to see if we can make it happen. It’s a tough play. We just were in Paris and we saw the Comédie Française, their production of it, which was extraordinary in some ways and very wrong-headed in other ways. I suppose the problem with doing a classic that is so well known, to find a new way of telling it, sometimes people kind of push it out of shape. The hard thing is it’s very easy to say that The Miser should be dark. Molière had darkness in him but he was basically a comedian and he had to deliver the laughs. He was like Neil Simon. And so to deny that clowning is to counteract the work, I think.
CK: Right, I completely agree. You said you might want to do King Lear some time.
RA: No, I didn’t. You never heard me say that.
CK: Oh yes, I read it in an interview.
RA: If you read it in an interview, how do you know it’s true?CK: Well, that’s true. (Laughs) So, you don’t want to do it?
RA: No, it’s not that I don’t want to do it. It’s that I did it, you know. I played Lear when I was very young and of course I couldn’t possibly achieve it, but it was a tremendous challenge and it taught me a tremendous amount. That was at ACT. And then I went on to New York City, to Lincoln Center, and I played the Fool in the play with Lee J. Cobb…and then a few years later, I played Edgar with James Earl Jones as Lear, that was the one that Raul Julia was in. So I’ve done the three best parts in the play. And I’m not sure what I have to offer the part. It would have to be a wonderful director who wanted to do it. I wouldn’t want to do it just so that I may say the lines, and slog through a mediocre production. And you know, my friend Stacy Keach did a wonderful production very recently, and I went to see my friend Robert Foxworth just a month and half, two months ago in San Diego playing Lear, and I saw Dakin Matthews playing Lear. So I’ve seen a lot of Lears recently, and they all had brilliant parts. But it is like Everest. It is a mountain that will defeat you ultimately. So you know you’ll just have to be humble in the face of it. You need a great director. I had a great director in Ed Sherrin in the production in Shakespeare in the Park with James Earl Jones. It’s on video.
CK: Yes, usually theatre productions are so boring when you watch them on video but this one is very exciting.
RA: I can’t watch it because I know that the real experience was so much more. You know, it was pretty powerful.
CK: I hope you’ll do something in London, too.
RA: I know, you keep saying that.
(Laughter)
CK: Tell me, what are some of the dramatists you appreciate?
RA: Beckett—who I suspect perhaps actors enjoy performing and the audience sometimes less watching it. Sometimes it can be a difficult experience. Beckett is wonderful. Chekhov, which I’ve got to do very little of, really, but I feel an affinity, as if the little bit of Chekhov that I did, that I have done, has had a real influence on me as an actor. When I think of any play and any character…because what Chekhov was so brilliant at is defining his characters: how intricate they can be, their foibles, weaknesses, arrogance, all things that he saw in people, shimmering like water. That’s a wonderful thing, if you can achieve that as an actor. Also showing a lot of different facets of a character. Beckett and Chekhov, and Pinter, who I’ve also done very little of, then Shakespeare. I would love to do David Mamet, but I am the kind of actor that he would think: “Oh no, he can’t do my plays.”
CK: Why would that matter?
RA: Living playwrights have casting approval. When I first played Tartuffe, I got to play Tartuffe because Richard Wilbur, whose translation we were using—it was a revival of a production that the director had directed a year or so before—Richard Wilbur would only give them the rights to the play if the actor who played Tartuffe in the first production didn’t. And that was why I was cast. The actor who he wouldn’t let play it was a brilliant actor but a very eccentric, quirky kind of actor and I think Richard Wilbur felt he distorted his work…but he was a wonderful actor. So what I’m saying is: I can’t imagine Mamet casting me in a new play for him, to have just written that play and say, “Oh, maybe that guy could play this part!” I don’t think he would ever do that. 
CK: In Germany, we have a different kind of theatre. You probably know post-dramatic theatre where the director is really the creative force and the writer is almost unimportant.
RA: Like movies?
CK: No, it’s like the death of the character. There are no real characters, the actors just say lines but they are not a character. They might express a certain mood, maybe, but it’s like Richard Wilson or, I don’t know if you know Elfriede Jelinek, she won the Nobel Prize, she is a good example. We have a lot of this kind of theatre in Germany. Would you be interested in doing anything like that if it ever was offered to you?
RA: Oh, I don’t know what exactly…I’m not clear on what it is, but I’m always interested. Do you know the work of Steven Berkoff by any chance?
CK: Yes!
RA: Well, I did Metamorphosis on Broadway with Mikhail Baryshnikov and I loved doing that. Now he’s not everybody’s cup of tea, you know. Some people just hate Steven Berkoff. One of my friends came to see me rehearsing it and saw a run through and she said, “How are you doing this?” because it was all so articulated, and timed and lines coming out in a certain way. We were the family of Gregor Samsa … And when we were eating it had to be a certain way. When we were saying the lines—dom, dom dom….you know.
CK: That goes in that direction, yes.
RA: I loved doing it. I just loved it. Once you learn it, it’s like a dance. Once you learn it, the steps, then you forget it, you just dance. There’s such a foundation. It’s not improvising. Improvising can be wonderful, but it can feel dangerous because you can lose it and not be interesting. But dancing like that and having rigid form that you then forget that you’ve done all that work and you just….
CK: There is a really exciting play—Every Good Boy Deserves Favour—which is shared by an orchestra and actors.
RA: You know that I did that.
CK: Yes, I do! I just saw it in the National Theatre. I thought it was so great. I never saw it before, I had only a record of it.
RA: Ah, with John Wood, right…John Wood must have done the recording.
CK: It’s Ian Richardson and Patrick Stewart.
RA: Oh, really?
CK: Yes, and Ian McKellen.
RA: That’s interesting, because John Wood created the role the first time it was performed, and then I did it when they came to the Kennedy Center in Washington and John Wood moved over there and we went to the Metropolitan Opera in Los Angeles with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with our son Remy, he was playing the boy. It’s a wonderful piece. You know, for a while I thought, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it will never be done again. But now I think it’s time to keep it active. It would be fun to do it again.
CK: You could do it in London!
(Laughter)
RA: Yes...
CK: Michael Grandage said he was thinking of you. Now he is not going to take over the National Theatre, unfortunately….
RA: He isn’t?
CK: No, he says he now wants to concentrate on his creative work. He wants to direct but he could always say, “Well, I want to do this thing. Let’s ask René if he wants to be in it.”
RA: Ah, that’s nice.
CK: Thank you very much for your time.
RA: Thank you, Carolin. 

It seems only fitting that the Lyceum should finish its season with Chekhov’s final play. After all 2010 is the 150th anniversary of Chekhov’s birth and Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre recently staged Three Sisters, the third of the playwright’s four great plays, so it seems like good planning for the Lyceum to complete the series with The Cherry Orchard. That said this production is no mere intellectual exercise. Byrne’s bold Scottish adaptation, coupled with Tony Cownie’s 1979 vision for the play, make it different from the hallowed versions of Chekhov we’re used to seeing. Different in a good way, that is.

In terms of the plot, the production remains close to the original: a land-owning widow (Mrs Ramsay-Mackay) and her family are swamped by debt and face the loss of their ancestral home with its beloved cherry orchard, until a local businessman (Malcolm McCracken) proposes a commercial venture that will allow them to save face. So far, so Chekhov, only the action is transported from Russia to the Highlands. This is an inspired parallel given both locations share a sense of romantic idealism, perfectly captured in Michael Taylor’s set, complete with its full-length faux Raeburn portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

The family’s idealism is also a rich source of comedy in Chekhov as he sends up the aristocrats, most obviously the widow’s brother, who can even wax lyrical about  the nobility of a bookcase that  has ‘served the family’.  While this comedy translates well into the Scottish version, with the brother, Guy Ramsay, as the archetypal toff, Byrne really comes into his own with his mastery of local dialect, especially in curses and put downs, for example, the servant Fintry on a broken coffee pot: ‘bloody hoor of a thing!’. Meanwhile Grant O’Rourke is hilarious as the accident prone Sorley Shanks.     

That said the play does not shy away from the harsh politics at the heart of Chekhov’s ‘comedy’, when post-Revolutionary Russia saw the rise of the middles classes in direct opposition to the gentry. Instead it transports us to a time of equally significant social change in Scotland’s recent history. Setting the action at the start of Thatcher’s reign, a time still fresh in Scottish memory, when ambition was rewarded and notions of community and local industry thwarted, Cownie ensures we are shown both sides of the story.

On the one hand we admire the ambitious McCracken, who has been successful, despite the odds. We also empathise with his frustration towards the Ramsay-Mackays, who refuse to even acknowledge their financial downfall, let alone listen to his solution. It has even been suggested McCracken’s character is a self-portrait of Chekhov, himself a victim of his father’s squandering and subsequently a self-made man.

On the other hand, the play also accommodates a more sympathetic view of the Ramsay-Mackays. Even McCracken does not place himself in direct opposition to them. This psychological complexity is expertly gauged by the actor Andy Clark, especially in the scene where McCracken tries to comfort Mrs Mackay, almost admitting  his own solution is harsh, however practical. Perhaps this again reveals Chekhov in McCracken, showing the playwright’s own ambivalence towards the declining aristocrats, especially given he was dying as he wrote the play. Indeed however eccentric and amusing the idle rich are shown to be, we are also made to face how devastating the loss of their home is to their sense of identity. They don’t know who they are anymore and we feel for them, not least due to Maureen Beattie’s exquisitely sensitive portrayal of Mrs Mackay.

In fact the entire cast is very impressive. Predominantly RSAMD trained, each actor makes an impact through Chekhov’s typically anti-star structure in which there are no lesser roles. Indeed it is the production itself that sparkles, reviving the classic play with contemporary relevance and humour, making Chekhov’s concern that his writing was too specific to have relevance outside Russia impossible to believe.

Felicity Thomson

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, adapted by John Byrne, directed by Tony Cownie

The Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

16th April- 8th May 2010