British film actor Allan Corduner brings his talents to the McCarter Theatre stage.
By: Janet Stern
Following a screening in Princeton of Mike Leigh’s unforgettable 2004 film Vera Drake, the person in front of me turned to her companion and said, "That was the best Mike Leigh film I’ve ever seen." I still recall how elated I was that I live in a community in which people had seen so many Mike Leigh films, they could actually rank them!
Even devotees of the acclaimed British director’s films, however, would be well advised to forego the popcorn and treat themselves instead to a ticket to McCarter’s production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, Sept. 8 to Oct. 15, where Allan Corduner, one of England’s most gifted and intelligent actors, is in the cast.
Mr. Corduner’s remarkable portrayal of Sir Arthur Sullivan in Mr. Leigh’s academy award-winning film Topsy-Turvy (also starring Jim Broadbent as Sullivan’s collaborator, W.S. Gilbert) is among the outstanding screen performances of the past decade.
Though recognized in the U.S. primarily for his role in Topsy–Turvy, Mr. Corduner, who has been acting for 33 years, has appeared more recently in the aforementioned Vera Drake and in The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino.
Yet it was a performance onstage that led directly to his appearance at McCarter, and hence to the good fortune of local film buffs and theater enthusiasts alike. In an interview before a rehearsal on a recent Saturday morning, Mr. Corduner told me that until July he had been starring in Mr. Leigh’s latest play, Two Thousand Years, at the National Theatre in London. McCarter Artistic Director Emily Mann saw his performance, prompting her to ask if he would consider appearing in The Birthday Party.
That he said yes reveals something of Mr. Corduner’s approach to his performances both onstage and in film. Whether he is in a starring role at the National Theatre or one member of a gifted ensemble at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, whether he is Sir Arthur Sullivan in Topsy-Turvy or a psychiatrist in Vera Drake, Mr. Corduner finds richness in every part and fulfillment in collaborating with his directors and fellow actors.
Mr. Corduner, in fact, is a graduate of the unofficial college of collaboration, by virtue of his work with Mr. Leigh. Mr. Leigh is renowned not only for shooting his films in sequence (uncommon in filmmaking today) but for the workshops he conducts with his actors weeks before film or play rehearsals begin. Although Mr. Leigh does not wish his precise methods disclosed, this much Mr. Corduner could reveal: Mr. Leigh conveys to the actors only skeletal information about the project, for example, "There’s a Jewish theme," and it is up to them, according to Mr. Corduner, to "find their characters via various means, guided by Leigh."
"You build up the character his place of birth, family members, and so forth; you have enormous input. And then finally you’re introduced to another character, but it’s sequential in that person’s life. In Two Thousand Years, the actress playing my wife did her work and I did mine, and then we met and shared what the couple in real life would know but kept secret those things that even married couples don’t share. So it’s entirely like a real relationship."
What results from this organic and sequential process are the hallmarks of Mr. Leigh’s style: naturalistic, almost documentary-like dramas and deeply human, poignant and incisively etched characterizations that reverberate in viewers’ minds for days afterward.
In the Topsy-Turvy workshops, says Mr. Corduner, the first person he encountered was not Jim Broadbent playing Gilbert but the actress playing Sullivan’s mistress, because Sullivan knew her before he met Gilbert.
By the time he and Mr. Broadbent met, he was prepared. Just as Mr. Leigh had spent years researching life backstage at the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in the late Victorian era, Mr. Corduner had thrown himself into his character. Already a gifted pianist, Mr. Corduner set out to learn conducting, not from a contemporary musician but from an elderly conductor whose style was "old school." "Sullivan’s father was a military musician," says Mr. Corduner, "so Sullivan often saw military bands play. Thus, his own conducting style was more formal, more military."
In addition to conducting lessons, Mr. Corduner "copied passages from Sullivan’s diaries in longhand every night to get into his skin." In this way, the actor absorbed and then enacted Sullivan’s genuine relationship with Gilbert, "a man he respected enormously and didn’t hate," says Mr. Corduner. "But they weren’t friends."
What happened at the party following Topsy-Turvy’s premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1999 validated the year of intense work on the film. An elderly man slowly made his way across the room to where Mr. Leigh, Mr. Corduner and Mr. Broadbent were standing, grasped their hands, and said, "That was the absolute best film about collaboration that has ever been made." Extraordinary praise, coming as it did from Adolph Green, longtime collaborator with Betty Comden on projects like On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain "a man who really knows what it is to collaborate."
"Collaboration isn’t all roses," says Mr. Corduner. "You do have disagreements, but they are part of what fuels creativity. If you agree all the time, you’re not challenging each other."
Mr. Corduner’s capacity for finding every part stimulating and every collaboration enriching is bearing dramatic fruit in McCarter’s production of The Birthday Partystarring Allan Corduner, plays at McCarter Theatre Center’s Berlind Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, Sept. 8-Oct. 15. Performances: Tues.-Thurs. 7:30 p.m.; Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 3, 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m.; Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $33-$48. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org