BF26: Benedict Campbell brings experience to the Blyth Festival
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Esteemed actor Benedict Campbell has done many things over the course of his illustrious career, and yet, until this season, being part of the Blyth Festival company had not been one of them.
Campbell comes from an exceedingly artistic family. His parents were Stratford Festival actor and director Douglas Campbell and British actor Ann Casson (the daughter of actor and director Sir. Lewis Casson and actor Dame Sybil Thorndike) and among his siblings are filmmakers and musicians and a painter and sculptor. Campbell said he had designs on a career as either a pilot or an architect as a young man, but his family’s commitment to the arts was just part of the scenery for his life and he eventually found himself on stage at the Stratford Festival as a child.
For their careers, his parents would move frequently. Douglas worked at The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England and served as the artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis before coming to Stratford, where he would stay for many years, being named to the Order of Canada and winning the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award along the way.
Benedict remembers falling in love with the theatre in Sheffield. From there, he decided to try acting in earnest and has really never looked back.
He has done lengthy stints with both the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, serving in Stratford for 11 seasons beginning in 1991 in productions like Romeo and Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, Macbeth, Dracula and more and then the Shaw Festival from 2003 to 2017, starring in My Fair Lady, Heartbreak House, John Bull’s Other Island and more. Over the course of his career he has also worked at Canadian Stage, the Factory Theatre, the Grand Theatre, Theatre Calgary, Drayton Entertainment and the Tarragon Theatre in addition to extensive television and animation voiceover work.
His theatre career, which began in earnest in the mid-1980s (he did play the Page to Falstaff in Falstaff (Henry IV, Part II) at the Stratford Festival in 1965 as a young man) has spanned well over 40 years, touching many corners of this country along the way. And yet, the Blyth Festival had eluded him until now.
After a shift in management at the Shaw Festival, Benedict found himself looking for a stage and he reached out to Blyth Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt expressing his willingness to work in Blyth if the opportunity were to ever arise.
That time has come and Benedict will be the star of both Dry Streak and The Last Mayor of Rusty River. He has a reverence for Blyth and its Festival and he says he’s really looking forward to being part of the company.
After his departure from the Shaw Festival, Benedict wondered if the time had come to call it a career, accomplishing many of the feats he’d hoped to as a stage actor. However, when the opportunity to be part of this year’s Festival season presented itself, Benedict said he didn’t even have to think about it.
For years, both as a patron and someone whose friends and colleagues have raved about the Festival, Benedict has held the Festival in high esteem. He says it’s a magical place that has retained its “youthful enthusiasm”, especially under Garratt, while many of the province’s bigger theatres have lost that edge. He thinks that both of the projects he’s a part of this season carry that same youthful enthusiasm that can sometimes be snuffed out at bigger, more corporate theatres.
And while Benedict had been pondering retirement from a storied and illustrious stage acting career, this opportunity to be part of the Blyth Festival company, admittedly, has him thinking about his work in the later stages of his career. Being part of the Festival company for a few seasons after eyeing retirement, he says, would be a great capstone to the work he’s been doing for so much of his life.
That’s a discussion for another day, he says, but he can’t hide his enthusiasm for coming to Blyth for the first time as an actor. He’s been a patron for many years and has marvelled at the quality of the work and the wonder of the Harvest Stage in recent years, but this will be his first time on the Memorial Hall stage and for him, it can’t come soon enough.