Click on the link above to see a clip from this interview.

P: Hello Sharon and thank you for agreeing to this interview, the first of two we hope to conduct during your stay as a distinguished visitor in the Department of Drama. I'm Patricia Demers from the Department of English and Film Studies and Jan Selman, the chair of Drama, is joining us for this interview. We're very happy that you're here but we realize that you don't need any welcome to Edmonton. (Laughter)

S: No, I don't.

P: Because you've actually taught at the University of Alberta in the 1970s and at least two of your plays have been premiered in Edmonton.

S: That's right.

P: Blood Relations at Theatre Three and One Tiger to a Hill at the Citadel. You're an actor, a director, a playwright. You've won two Governor General's awards. You've written and continue to write for the stage, radio and television. My first question, Sharon, is about the whole range of your work and some possible connections. Some readers have suggested that your work moves from the epic documentary tradition of Walsh and The Komagata Maru Incident and One Tiger to a Hill to an examination of private life and family politics as in Generations, Doc, Blood Relations, and Whiskey Six Cadenza. I'm wondering what you think about the usefulness of that distinction between political and public, and private and emotional work. Is it illuminating for you in looking at the whole range of your work, or do you see more interlacing rather than polarity?

S: I suppose I see more interlacing. I think on some level, although I don't care to examine it too closely, when a subject sort of emerges I'm interested in power struggles, or power structures, perhaps I should say. The individual who has difficulty meeting expectations of either society or family or those with whom they have personal relations. So I see a line very clearly through them. I kind of see them as all sort of the same play in different settings almost. (Laughter) And sometimes I'm a little disturbed by, say, my later work.

P: Why?

S: Well I look at Nell Shipman or Moving Pictures and I look at Angels Trumpet, which is about Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald and their relationship, and I think that perhaps the death of creativity is when you start to explore the nature of your own work, what you're doing and why you're doing it and how you're doing it.

P: You create your own meta-narrative, don't you?

S: Yes. And, personally, I loathe plays about actors, I loathe plays about ad agencies, (Laughter) I don't like those people. So I find it disturbing when I find myself drawn to subject matter that actually is dealing with literary figures or a creator in the realm of film. Particularly when I look at the world around me, I fear that perhaps one of the reasons why I move a little bit towards that work is that the world around me is so complex it cries out on the one hand for provocative, dynamic theatre about contemporary situations and yet I think we've seen, at least in this country and perhaps in the States too to the same degree or some degree, that we're incapable of dealing with it. Great Britain, I think, is a little bit different at this present time. I think I have a play, Getting it Straight, in which it says reality surpasses imagination - and when I turn on CNN that's what I think, you know?

J: Where does Moving Pictures fit then, in that? You're suggesting a bit of ambivalence about, at least, the starting point of that play.

S: Well, the character - or the person, Nell - was brought to my attention by Brian Richman. He called me up and said, "Would you be interested in writing a play about Nell Shipman? Do you know who she is?" And I said, "Well, I think I saw her name on a women's calendar once, but that's about as much as I know." So I said "I'll go away and read about her and see if she speaks to me in any way." So I read her autobiography and I read some of her stories. She's written some supposedly fictional novels that draw a lot on her own life. And I got back to Brian and said, "You know, I'm not interested in a docu-drama, I'm only interested in tracking the internal of her life, which may use the externals of her life, and the internal of her life is purely what I want to make of it and how it relates in my mind to - I suppose, me - which I have to acknowledge now that the play is written. But also, in a way I see the state of theatre today reflected a little bit in the vertical integration of the film industry and the control of marketing forces and the desire for mass numbers as driving the theatre that I love.

P: Driving and possibly distorting the theatre that you love.

S: And turning it into a rose on the lapel instead of the jacket of society.

P: But this use of external objects or themes to trace internal reality, I see that in your work from Walsh on. For me it's part of the integrity of your work. I was struck recently, in re-reading, by this wonderful passage at the end of Walsh - an early documentary play. The Northwest Mounted Police superintendent Walsh has just been informed of the murder of Sitting Bull and Crowfoot who've been thrown into a lime pit so that they can't even have proper burial; he realizes that he's been betrayed. All the set speeches that he's delivered have been false, have not rung true, and as he puts his revolver on the desk and before he slams the desk with his fist he hears, in the background, these words recalled from Sitting Bull; I found them so moving at the end of the play: "In the beginning was given to everyone a cup. A cup of clay and from this cup we drink our life. We all dip in the water but the cups are different. My cup is broken; it has passed away." I think we can consider a presentation of Walsh today just as relevant, just as poignant, just as moving, just as necessary as it was in the 1970's. Would you agree?

S: I would agree, and of course it would be silly of me not to agree if I ever wanted it to be produced again. (Laughter) I've always thought that Walsh is a man who follows orders. I've always seen a parallel in Nazi Germany. I see a parallel in the stupidity of the Americans in Iraq, right? So, I do think that, once again - when I wrote it, I was interested at that time in the manipulation of our history and our seeming superiority over the Americans. We were always saying what the Americans did, what the Americans did, and it seems to me that we need to look at what it is we do through turning our head away. The Americans conducted a cultural and an actual war of genocide against the western Native population. Here, we just starved them out, right? We didn't have to waste any bullets. So that's what annoyed me and still annoys me, it's the . . .

P: Smugness.

S: Yes.

P: You said at one point that Canadians take some sort of perverse pride in the fact that our history is dull only because it has been dishonest and expurgated. (Laughter) I think that makes perfect sense. Could we turn for a minute now to Nell Shipman? Could you talk about the reasons, beyond the invitation that you received, to begin this play, to write about a silent film pioneer? Shipman wrote, directed, produced and acted in silent films, some of which were actually set in Canada; "Back to God's Country" was set in Lesser Slave Lake. So what drew you as a playwright to Nell Shipman?

Click on the link above to see a clip of Sharon Pollock answering audience questions at a meet and greet held at the Timms Centre after a performance of Moving Pictures.

S: Well, she had a very dramatic life and she met with, it seems to me, incredible obstacles. She was such a fiery and dynamic personality, it seemed to me, and yet in a way, she reached her pinnacle of success fairly early on and things dropped away on her. I also suppose, in retrospect, when I look back and I see myself at a certain stage in my life and I look at people around me. I never made those cookies for the home and school; I missed that teacher meeting. There comes a time when you think of all the things you've given ... I wouldn't say given up, that you've ignored or priorized on a scale that as you look back at your life you wonder if that priorization was correct. Although I'm not saying that I consciously was aware that that was an attraction. In Nell Shipman I saw someone who had a vision of what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it and she went down that road. As she neared the end of her life I started to wonder how does she look at those different aspects? Her younger self, the actress, who is optimistic and dynamic and performs and overcomes obstacles by, in a way, acting them out.

P: By being Delores Lebeau.

S: Yes. And the producer aspect of her - the producer/ director/writer who has power and control, it would appear, and then the older woman who looks back and seems to have lost or questions everything given where she is at this stage in her life, which is living in a cottage that is rent-free courtesy of old friends, and trying to negotiate those past events. The other thing that really engaged me - and it's funny how those things happen - I was home in New Brunswick where my father has sort of a mythic kind of quality about him and somebody invited me to a party. I didn't know anybody at it but I went and we were sitting around in the kitchen and people started to tell stories about my father. Now everybody knew those stories. We all knew those stories and we all laughed at them as if it was the first time they were told and I started to think about - and it's not original in any manner or way - about what storytelling does. Why we tell stories, how we tell stories. You know there's that old joke that people go to Banff and they take all the snapshots and then when they get home they look at the snapshots and that's when they experience Banff? And I thought, well, wait a second, there's something in that about our life. Maybe we don't experience our life in the moment- to-moment living it. We actually experience life when we tell stories about our lives and we find meaning in those experiences through the creation of story; everyone is a storyteller. I happen to codify in a certain form the stories I tell. But every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every family has those stories that are told about Uncle Harry. What interested me was that the story about, you know, "how I met the man I married" - how you tell that when you've been recently married is one way, and how you tell it, perhaps in midlife, is another way, and then when you get to be sixty-two and you tell that story it's told in a totally different way. (Laughter) Even the story itself, although the event is the same, our take on it becomes different and we see it differently as we age and look back on our lives. That became interesting to me, that idea that you experience life not in the living of it but in the telling of the stories about it. And so in the three figures in Moving Pictures you have a woman at different stages who is a creator and who views her life. At some point as you get older, there's a need to harmonize or balance. I wouldn't call it a definitive truth about the life, but there's a need to bring those various ways of looking at things that have happened together.

J: And that's interesting because it's quite a battle in this play.

S: Yes!

J: [A battle in] the attempt to harmonize. I'm interested in the level of battle that you're suggesting.

S: How do you balance someone who commits herself to a vision - whether it's a political or a spiritual or a creative vision - and what happens to the people around her? I think as she ages what she sees is her neglect or manipulation of others for a vision and the question remains - if you can't make the movie, or nobody sees it, well, what are you then?

P: And these pictures of Nell Shipman that you're presenting in the play are literally, themselves, moving, aren't they?

S: Yes!

P: There's a wonderful fluidity. We don't have a single Nell.

S: No and the other thing that interested me, of course, was that I started to read about the film industry in those early years and about Thomas Edison. I read his definition: "the illusion of continuous movement through persistence of vision," which is his definition of film. I started to think, isn't that interesting - the illusion of continuous movement through persistence of vision. At the same time that that's a definition of the form that Nell Shipman creates in, she could perceive it as an explanation of her failure. She has had the illusion of continuous movement because she had that persistence of vision. And the contradiction or the dichotomy or the counterpoint between Edison's words describing the medium she creates in and how that applies to her life - because what we see in the three women - we see, in my mind, three frames. But if you move through all of them one would get the life but there's hunks left out and each of those frames are slightly different even though they give the illusion of seeing a life. So the multiple levels of playing with what happens in storytelling around the stage or in the personification or characterization of one woman played by three different actresses - were interesting to me. Sometimes I think, for me, it's not wise to try and define too specifically why certain ways of telling a story or things strike me instinctively as right and having subterranean meaning that we feel rather than rationally appreciate. To examine that too closely is not a good thing. As soon as I try to define what it is I'm trying to do, it seems to me I limit what it is I'm trying to do. So I leave that to people like Jan or Sherrill Grace to discover it if it's there and if they send me a paper then it's very interesting to read it and I think, "oh my goodness - that's what the playwright was doing!" (Laughter)

J: That takes me to another point. Now you're performing one of your own plays. We have various ways to look at your work and now you're looking at it from the inside of . .

S: Of a character.

J: Yes, performing, well, a third of a character. Tell us about that. You're just, what, a week and a half or two weeks into that process?

Click on the link above to see Sharon Pollock, Kelly Spilchak, Candice Woloshyn and director Heather Inglis rehearsing Moving Pictures.

S: Yes. I've played a role in my own plays before and, of course, I've directed them before. But usually the work has had a number of productions, so by the time that I might take a role in a play of my own I've seen a number of productions and I probably made the minor adjustments, or sometimes major adjustments, to the script that seem necessary. This is a little bit of a different experience because the play has been produced before and I've heard it read on several occasions after that production - not for workshop possibilities, but just people exploring the work - so there are little things in it that I find I don't think are right. (Laughs) In other words, I'm doing some minor changes. So usually I can put the playwright right out of my head when I'm on the stage playing a character. With this play at this stage - although I think we're moving out of it now as we've worked our way through it once, or almost all the way through it - the playwright is still there a bit. So I'm thinking, oh, I don't need that word, that can go out. Or I'm listening to another actor and a character and some percentage of me is listening as Shipman but another percentage of me is listening as the playwright because I think, "oh, I don't need that phrase or they need another phrase or this actually should be split differently". It's a little bit of a balancing act that is a little bit of a challenge.

P: Do you ever find that the playwright and the Nell Shipman character you're playing are in opposition to one another, or do they usually compliment one another?

S: We aren't far enough along in this process for me to know that yet, but I know that that can happen. In playing Miss Lizzie in Blood Relations, I know that I played things in that that if I had been an actor and had come up to the playwright and said, "what was your intention in this scene?" the playwright would have told the actor something different than what it was I was playing. I believe that the actor's job is to enrich my intention. My intention is a clue. By exploring the possibilities - some possibilities will turn out not to work, they won't be right - other possibilities that I never thought of for a moment will enrich and in fact deepen and not change the essential meaning of the play. That's why I usually don't like if an actor asks me, "what did you intend there?"

P: You don't like to answer?

S: Or else I always like to say, "what were you thinking? My intention might have been this but if you're going down another route and I can understand what it is, you should go there and let's see what happens." So I do know that I can get in a position where I don't follow the playwright's advice. (Laughter) You could put it that way. The same thing has happened to me as a director, you know. Actors tell me if I'm directing my own work I don't respect the playwright enough. (Laughter) I was very happy when we did "Angel's Trumpet" a graduate of Jan's department, Danny Arnold, was playing a role in that; I had to thank him afterwards because quite often I would be saying, "I don't think that's right, I think we can cut that line" and he would say, "no, no, no, that's really important" - he writes himself, right? - "no, the playwright wouldn't want you to do that!" He would make a case as to why it would stay in and often I would think, "you're right, you're right". My desire as the director is to make something work, and I don't have to discuss it with the playwright, you know.

J: So in this case, where the play is slightly moving still, and you really need to have a very active playwright brain and active actor brain, how do you negotiate with yourself? Do you try to do one then the other or just live with both at this point? What's it like in rehearsal?

S: Well, I live with both. That's because in a way we're still physically moving through the play. As the scripts go away then the playwright recedes further, goes away with it. You don't have the script in the hand any more and you're starting to actually more play the scene. In a way, it's a craft part at the moment, it's not a meaning part. It's more the rhythm or music of a line or something like that. I think it's more difficult to, rather than negotiate it inside myself, to negotiate it practically within the rehearsal. (Laughs) If you stop for a moment actually saying, "you know that line you just said? That's a cut I want to make." (Laughter) And sometimes it's hard, although those things have been fairly small. Sometimes actors do feel that if only they delivered it differently maybe you wouldn't take it out and yet that's not why I'm taking it out. I think the other thing too is that I believe strongly in the physical realization of a play; that is what makes it different from dramatic literature, which I don't believe exists. I believe plays are just blueprints for performance. They find life in a physical realization and that means that what you're working on and how you're working on it - where you're moving, what your physical body language is, if you want to call it that, which I guess it is - is supremely important to convey meaning and, in fact, meaning that we read, I believe, as more truthful than words that are spoken. And, of course, it's the two in combination that makes the theatre - along with lights and sound and all the rest of it - such an interesting place, or it should be. So that means that a little part of me too - I'm splitting myself into the third now (Laughter) - a little part of me is also thinking, "ooo, wait a second, if this is the physical configuration of us on this three-dimensional piece of art that we're working through and around, and she's there and he's there and I'm here and we're moving this way, that conveys this kind of a meaning and is that supporting the text or is it not supporting the text?" If I was the playwright sitting out there at the end of the day or during the break I could say to the director, "what's your intention in that moment? Explain it to me - I don't understand. That reads to me as such," and I would make my case for that or hear the case or it might be that we're in process and that it isn't what we want to have as the end product, we're just moving towards something.

J: Visual storytelling or meaning-telling.

S: That's right, yes. So it's a little bit difficult sometimes also because I have to find a way to express that for a play at this stage of its life without either undermining the director or the actors, in a way. So that's a tricky thing too.

P: Because your play is such an embodied and physical piece of art, what kind of relationship - and I'm suggesting a fourth part to you now - do you think exists between the playwright and the designer?

S: For a first production, I think a close relationship is imperative and I would include the director in that. I've worked very closely with Terry Gunvordahl, who's designed a number of my sets and he's a marvelous designer - also, come to think of it, a graduate of this program!

J: Yes, he is. (Laughter)

S: He knows how my brain works and the kinds of visions I have - not that he will ever create them. When we sit down and talk I always have these. I think impressionistically or I have maybe a strong visual image and I never intend that to actually be put on the stage but it opens the door to the kind of feeling that you want that physical set to give to the audience and what you can work on that stimulates a certain kind of movement and relationship between your characters. I've seen design kill a show, a premier of a show, because you couldn't mount the play and the relationship between the characters on that set. It did not support certain kinds of physical movement.

J: Again you're back to the three-dimensional art form that we're in.

S: That's right. We talk about the teams - the team of designers and directors and actors and stage managers and all your technical support people. I think for me, at any rate, I like to be aware, I like to have this feeling of the whole and the whole encompasses the people in the front office and why certain decisions are made, even about what shows. It's why I've worked in so many areas of the theatre. Maybe that makes me a control freak, but if it does, I must be terribly unhappy because I've controlled so few things. (Laughter) But that awareness of how you balance artistic integrity with fiscal responsibility to me is very, very interesting. I'm fascinated by how the shape of buildings, not only on sets, encourages certain kinds of interactions in them. If you go into CBC - have you ever noticed? - you go in and then it's always a maze. You walk around and you end up back where you came in, which tells me that really they want you to leave. (Laughter)

P: Welcome to the labyrinth!

J: Right up there with Ikea!

S: They want you to go, right? Or welfare offices or unemployment - you know, where they've got a glass thing between you and the person you're talking to so immediately not only do you want to pound on it but it suggests that that's what it's there for because people are going to act in a certain way there, which in a way gives you a pass to act that way. I was in a stage management class this morning. When I've been in some classes, they put the tables together and I might be told to sit at the head. So it was interesting in the stage management class that we arranged the chairs in a circle and immediately a different kind of relationship is set up. I never think of the theatre or what it is I do as "playwright." Someone's selling the tickets; what do they say to the people who phone and ask about a show? Everything creates something.

P: It all connects, doesn't it?

S: Yes. And that's another thing I've noticed. Have you ever noticed that our "culture palaces" look like fortresses? I always think if there was a revolution it would be where the establishment went to hold off the rebels.

J: They're actually quite scary to walk in if you don't know it and you don't feel at home. That notion of what will happen to me when I walk through the door? I entirely agree with you.

S: People used to phone when we had the Garry Theatre and they might want to see a show, and we wouldn't have anything on, and there might be something that was on at The Centre and I would say, "go to The Centre" and they would say, "well, is there a dress code there?" No, there is not a dress code there! You've been told a million times, everybody tells you there's no dress code there, but that's really a stupid thing to say, in my mind. If you go into a church - and theoretically there's not a dress code there now - and you happen to be wearing a bikini, you know it isn't what you should be wearing. You know that that "no dress code" doesn't mean anything. And so when you go into certain surroundings that have a lot of brass and maybe maroon -

P: And velvet!

S: Yes, and you know that even if everybody is in jeans, there's a feeling that that actually isn't what you're expected to wear there. The place reads a certain way, which is why I like sort of alternative spaces.

P: It's almost the protocol of the appointments, isn't it, that you respond to when you go into these grand theatres?

S: Yes.

P: I think that we've had a good conversation. Do you have another question, Jan?

J: No. I think we should save a few.

P: What we plan to do is to revisit this conversation and to have our second interview with you after the play has opened; maybe we'll conduct the second interview on the set itself and in the company of the two younger actors who are playing earlier versions of Nell in this play. Does that seem appropriate?

S: That sounds wonderful.

P: Then that's what we will do. Thank you so much for today.

J: Thanks Sharon, it was great.

S: Well I look forward to doing it again.

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