The Ottawa Journal from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • Page 29

Actor Ray Jewers is very much a man of passionate conviction By Duart Snow JOURNAL REPORTER It seems downright insulting to hang one of show-biz writing's hoariest cliches finding similarities between actor and play on the shoulders of a man as refreshingly, passionately unconventional as Ray Jewers. But in a sense, Jewers who will play the lead role in the National Arts Centre Theatre Company's production of Moliere's Don Juan, which opens Monday brought it on Jiimself by quoting the French actor Jouvet's description of the play as '-'muscular theatre." "That's anything but the comedy Of manners it's usually portrayed as. you know, up on your toes and the ribbons and all that non-. sense. You learn very quickly that there's nothing "toes and ribbons" about the 34-year-old Jewers.

A conversation with him is, well, muscular. Immensely articulate and at times brutally blunt, he unsettles you with the unorthodoxy of his opinions and insights, and the passion with which he expresses them. He challenges your intellectual comfort, demands that you think. If jt's clear that you are thinking, he warms to you. It seems quite in character that in this, his third season at the NAC "after nine years in Britain, Jewers is Working in three demanding, thought-provoking plays Pinter's The Caretaker, Don Juan and Christopher Hampton's Savages, a bleak, damning picture of man's inhumanity to man in the contemporary world, with a strong anti-capitalist message.

Plate of mussels Is it possible that Hampton who also happens to have translated the Don Juan text the NAC is using painted too black a picture in Savages, that he overstated his case? It's like touching off a bomb. Jewers' eyes flash, their brightness accented by the dark brown frame of his hair and close-trimmed beard. Until then soft-spoken in his discussion of Don Juan, he surprises you as he leans toward you over his plate of mussels (the interview takes place in the NAC Cafe) and spits out his words with all the deep conviction of Carlos, the Brazilian revolutionary he played in Savages. But he's not playing now. "Can anything be overly black when a half-million children under the age of five are starving (a line War Haendel played the world Atf' from the play)? When this country is helping in the slaughter.

When the exploitation of our own indigenous peoples continues. When two superpowers (the U. S. and the Soviet Union) led by absolute blithering idiots are about to blast us off the earth for a commodity that will be gone in 25 ing years anyway? "In South Africa, did you know they're torturing women in labor, torturing children? Of course, you didn't know. "No, it's not too black at all.

It's not black enough." Formality and ritual Having thoroughly rattled whatever comfortable', distant views of the play you might have had, Jewers returns to his mussels, delivering a final tweak' to your composure by reminding you of the unreality of the interview situation.J$A spurious exercise," he calls it. Of course, he's right. Only rarely does an interview subject point it out, and never as bluntly as Jewers does. Yet far from unsettling or angering you, it puts breaking down the fornWfftyand ritual of the moment. Despite his strong, left-leaning political opinions and his work with Amnesty International, Jewers is more of a skeptic than an ideologue: "My commie friends tell me not political enough.

I don't have an ideology I have attitudes to things." And he really isn't as deadly serious as all that might make him sound "You take the work seriously and yourself not at all. You take yourself too seriously and you're up the creek." Born in Ecum Secum, N. Jewers is the son of a career naval officer and lived as a teenager in Ottawa where he first came in contact with the theatre at HJUcrest High School and Carleton University. But he headed for Britain after university because the outpouring of post-Expo Canadian nationalism in the late 60s made him decidedly uncomfortable. "People running around wearing those silly little maple leaves.

he shudders. He studied at Britain's Central School of Speech and Drama, per- Singer dead LONDON (UPI) Bon Scott, the 30-year-old tattooed lead singer of the Australian rock group AC-DC, was found dead in his friend's car yesterday after a heavy night of drinking, police said. IJ I jjj5 1 premiertfof Violin Concerto. formed with several theatre companies there, as well as taking roles in television series and films like Twilight's Last Gleaming, Valentino and A Bridge Too Far. He also acquired a family wife, British actress Philippa Urquhart, a daughter and a son and a speech touched with a combination of a British accent and precise theatrical diction.

He returned to Canada in 1977 to play in the NAC's productions of Troilus and Cressida and Camino Real. Since then, he has performed in The Floating World and a one-man show which he adapted, Diary of a Madman by Nikolai 'Gogol. He enthuses about the excitement and challenge of working with Jean Gascon, Don Juan's director. The veteran actor-director "is probably the foremost authority on Moliere in North America" and shares Jouvet's "musfcular" interpretation of the play. "It's anything but fluff as he's doing it, anything but sterile.

It's dark. It's about the most visceral of human activities and he's right in there with it. "Like any great director, he has the ability to inspire people, to fire one's imagination. And then the work becomes a corporate one of many minds. "I think he's amazing.

It's also very demanding." Problems for society As Jewers describes it, Don Juan turns on the clash between the conventional morality of 18th-century Spain, the play's setting, and the celebrated rake's determination to be himself. "Don Juan is a man who hates the morays of contemporary philosophical morality, the mindlessness of it, the crassness of organized Christianity. You create all sorts of problems for society if you go around being yourself. "We're portraying him as the anti-Christ. He creates vacuums and people fill those vacuums.

As Jean says in rehearsal, after you've come in contact with Don Juan, you will never be the same again. Your life will not be the comfortable, secure cubbyhole it once was." The' interview over, the notebook closed, Jewers relaxes visibly and the talk becomes informal. Later it occurs to you that what you might have experienced was not Jewers, but Jewers playing Jewers. That's no reflection on his undeniable sincerity, but a measure of how he succeeded in unsettling you. Makes you think, doesn't it? Ottawa most detailed TV listings and highlights30 rHE OTTAWA JOURNAL THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21 1 980 SECTION PAGES 29-40 Haendel triumphed in premiere of Pettersson Violin Concerto By Jacob Siskind MUSIC AND DRAMA CRITIC "I very seldom have difficulty with the technical problems in a work for the violin, but this piece was different." Ida, Haendel, who played with the NAC Orchestra Tuesday, was talking about the Violin Concerto by Swedish composer Allan Pettersson, work she had performed at its world premiere in Stockholm last month.

"The piece bristles with difficulties, passages that are awkward for the hand and which require the utmost flexibility and virtuosity. Pettersson was a violinist and he deliberately made the soloist's part as awkward as humanly possible. Very near future "But that is all part of what he wanted to say and so it has to be ac- cepted." Ida Haendel's performance of the concerto was broadcast by Swedish Radio and the work was, recorded immediately after the premiere performance, so there is the chance that music lovers outside Sweden will be able to hear the work on records in the very near future. As well; there are plans afoot; to have the Stockholm Radio Orchestra tour North America with that concerto as part of its repertoire, though the likelihood of a concert anywhere in Canada is rather, slim. "I was very moved because Pettersson was so satisfied with the premiere that he has not only dedicated the work to me but has asked that I be its only interpreter in his and my lifetime." IHBIMlMBlim Ray Jewers is Don Juan There could be no greater accolade.

Apparently Pettersson has had a life of incredible hardship and physical suffering. Only recently has he had the recognition that many musicians in Sweden and elsewhere feel he deserves. The concerto depicts his. struggle with the community in which he has lived, his own physical and emotional, difficulties and his eventual recognition and triumph. The work is heavily orchestrated, so heavily scored In fact that at times it is almost impossible to hear the solo violin.

Herbert Blomstedt, the director of the radio orchestra who conducted the premiere, asked the composer if it would be possible to thin out some of the orchestration. He refused. Cisco Kid's By Dan Tedrick f. CARLSBAD, Calif. The breeze whistles through the wisteria and Spanish daggers.

Coyotes howl at night, and rattlesnakes twist across the ground as they did before there was a Cisco Kid. Cactus, brush and mud caked hard as rock stretch as far as an eye see it's five kilometres to the nearest ranch, eight, to the Pacific and 50 to San Diego, the only way but is a dirt road that winds skyward and washes out with every rain. A cross on the highest hill stands MP in the NAC production It was exactly what he wanted, he explained. The violin solo represents his own voice struggling to be heard over the clamor around him and its final, chorale-like statement represents his vindication in his own eyes and those of his peers. The work is long and dark and Ida Haendel found herself affected by the continuous rehearsals, concerts and recording sessions, which lasted nearly two weeks.

That, combined with the two hours of daylight in Stockholm at this time of the year, left her feeling that the world is a far from ideal place. On her return from Stockholm, she brought with her a recording of the Pettersson Symphony No. 6, completed in 1965, by Okko Kamu and the Norrkopings Symphony (CBS 76553), which is not available in North America. The composer was in an even ranch to be restored where actor Leo Carrillo, whose-hideaway this was, buried Conquistador, the Palomino horse he rode in the 1950S television series The Cisco Kid. Carrillo, who had been the original Cisco in the movies, played the faithful sidekick, Pancho, to Duncan Renaldo's Cisco on television.

Carrillo loved the place, which he called Rancho Los Qulotes, Ranch of thef Spanish Daggers, and sometimes jokingly Pancho's Retreat. Along the edge ran Camino Real, path of the first Spanish priests and PETER BROSSEAUAIOURNM. of the Moliere classic. more bleak period at that time than he was when he composed the violin concerto, but the music has an. undeniable power and magnetism.

It should be given a hearing here. Since Ida Haendel speaks no Swedish and the composer's knowledge of English, German, Polish, Russian, Spanish or Italian was not sufficient to allow communication, the two conversed and exchanged notes in French. One of her most cherished mementos of the experience is a note Pettersson sent her after the premiere. Translated freely, it reads: "Dear madame, You reach into the depths of man, where words no longer exist. You are able to expose hidden suffering and your violin is the voice for those who have none.

A thousand thanks. your devoted. Allan Pettersson." There really Isn't much more that need be said. soldiers with whom Carrlllo's great-great-grandfather rode in 1769. When Carrillo died in 1961 at the age of 81, his will left the estate to the public.

His only child, an adopted daughter named Marie Antoinette, lived there until she died in 1978. Now the city of Carlsbad looks after the buildings and 10 acres of land with plans to restore the ranch and create an early-California: park. A88OCtATt0 PHE83.