INTERVIEW WITH ACTOR
Education Dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with Actor Sara Topham about her work in Travesties.
Ted Sod: Where were you born and where did you get your training? Did you have any teachers who had a profound impact on you?
Sara Topham: I was born in Victoria, B.C., in Canada. I had serious ballet training in Victoria with a woman named Sheila MacKinnon, who was truly a great teacher. She used classical ballet to teach theatre; what she was really teaching was storytelling. She is the person who set me on the path of being interested in how to tell a story to a group of people. I also went to the University of Victoria—it’s one of the major Canadian universities—where I pursued a classical acting degree. After graduation, I put my resume together and an audition outfit in my suitcase and moved to Toronto—just like Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street. I didn’t know anyone in Toronto. I don’t know what I thought I was doing, but I had an instinct that I had to go away and do something brave – and, at the time, moving to Toronto certainly felt brave. I was very fortunate in Toronto because I was taken into the Stratford Festival Company. I did the conservatory training at Stratford and remained in the company for many seasons, which is how I ended up with you wonderful people at Roundabout. At Stratford, I worked with the late, great Brian Bedford, who I miss terribly. It was he who brought me to New York in 2010 and 2011 to play Gwendolen in his production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
TS: I understand that you played Cecily in a production of Travesties at the McCarter Theatre in 2012. What are the challenges of returning to a role that you’ve already played?
ST: I think there are more benefits than challenges. I feel confident that I understand how the play works and I know audiences get an enormous amount of pleasure out of it. I think when you are approaching a part again and your brain and heart are attached to things you had done previously, it can be very hard to do something new. But because it’s been a long time—at least it feels like a long time—I think I’ll be able to adapt to new direction. I am sure I will benefit from my mouth remembering instinctually how those glorious words of Stoppard’s go. Which also means that, hopefully, I will know the words at a deeper level than I did the first time. Laurence Olivier used to say, “It’s not how well you know it, it’s how long you’ve known it.”
TS: Will you talk about how the character of Cecily is relevant to you?
ST: I think she is relevant to me because she thinks deeply about things. I’m very interested in Cecily’s tenacity in exchanging ideas. I enjoy taking on that part of Cecily’s intelligence. There are arguments in the play about what the place of art is in society and what responsibility artists and their work have to the political culture, to society at large, and those subjects are very relevant in our times. Cecily’s wrestling with things that artists have wrestled with for decades, but I’m sure she might not be too keen on being compared to an artist because she is, as you know, pursuing other interests. I think her tenacity in getting ahold of an argument and really wanting to follow it through all the way to the end—that’s important and relevant as well. One of the things that I see happening in the world right now is that people think just listening to someone’s opposing point of view is tantamount to agreeing with it. People feel obligated to shut down any point of view that doesn’t reflect their own thinking. We are losing the capacity to have any kind
8 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY Sara Topham
of exchange of ideas because we’re all so busy holding onto and defending our own. Something wonderful about Stoppard’s play is that it is just chock-full of opposing ideas. An audience can go from agreeing with one of the characters to agreeing with another character who has an opposing view. I think that’s why we go to the theatre. When theatre is at its best, it engages us with both comfortable and uncomfortable ideas.
TS: What do you personally feel the role of theatre is in today’s world?
ST: I think when we grow up, we lose the opportunity to feel challenging things in a safe environment, in the way that little kids do when they hear stories read to them that give them different emotional experiences. The theatre is this amazing place where we can, for instance, see a play about a woman who has lost a child and be with that woman and hopefully experience a deep sense of empathy for her. I believe experiencing that in a theatre allows us, in our own lives, to be more compassionate when we encounter someone like that outside the theatre. I think the theatre is a place for us to be with our fellow human beings and wrestle with ideas, with feelings, with experiences. I think that’s what our job is as practitioners of acting. We are storytellers.
TS: What kind of stamina does it take to perform in Travesties? It seems to me like playing this twice on one day is going to be exhausting; is that true?
ST: It is. It’s not as hard as Noises Off, which I’ve done; Noises Off is the most exhausting play I’ve ever been in. Travesties requires
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