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ROCK ’N’ ROLL
Directed by Donna Feore. Written by Tom Stoppard. Starring Shaun Smyth, Kenneth Welsh, Fiona Reid. Shoctor Theatre, The Citadel. Nov 7-29 (7:30pm). Opening night: Thu, Nov 12. Tickets available through the Citadel box office (425-1820/citadeltheatre.com).

Kenneth Welsh likes to tell the story of being a young man studying acting at the University of Alberta in the early ’60s and being taken aside by one of his instructors, Gordon Peacock. It was a short while before he graduated, and Peacock told him not to worry — he was going to be a success. “He said, almost jokingly, that I was going to make it because I had three good qualities: sex appeal, charm, and personal magnetism.” Welsh bursts into laughter. “He said nothing about my talent!”

Welsh turned out to have plenty of that, too. After getting his U of A diploma, he attended the National Theatre School in Montreal and from there carved out a successful stage career in Stratford and New York, appearing in the original productions of, among other shows, Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. Aside from a few stray CBC productions (including a tantalizing-sounding 1969 version of The Three Musketeers with Christopher Walken), Welsh did virtually no film or TV work until the late ’70s, when he was nearly 40.

But he’s more than made up for lost time — his IMDb page lists nearly 200 credits, everything from forgotten TV-movies to films by Martin Scorsese (The Aviator), Clint Eastwood (Absolute Power), and Woody Allen (Another Woman). He’s played Colin Thatcher, he’s played George Steinbrenner, and he’s played Dick Cheney (or at least a thinly veiled version of him, in the disaster epic The Day After Tomorrow). In the second season of Twin Peaks, he was Dale Cooper’s archnemesis, the brilliant, chess-playing madman Windom Earle. He’s in George Romero’s upcoming Survival of the Dead — he gets to kill a lot of zombies, he says ... but he doesn’t get away with it. And he’s in Edmonton this week to play Max Morrow, England’s most stubborn socialist, in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll at The Citadel.

“I think I was very fortunate, in terms of my career, to have grown up in Edmonton,” Welsh says. “It was the city with the best theatre department in Canada — and was recognized as such across North America. I was lucky — it was right there, and I could not have gotten a better education.”

Welsh was born in Edmonton in 1942. His father managed a B&W Store here in the ’30s, then went to work for CN in the ’40s. Welsh’s memories of the city make him sound like a character in a W.O. Mitchell novel.

“It was a great place to grow up,” he says. “We could walk to school, and after school we’d play any game that used a ball. We’d skate in the local hockey rinks — I don’t know if they still have them, but at practically every corner they’d have a community rink. Inside the shack, there’d always be a wood stove — we’d gather around the wood stove, get warm, and go out for another skate. I just loved growing up there. Growing up under a prairie sky is one of the greatest things imaginable to me.”

Welsh says he went through a phase when he was 12 or 13 of buying movie magazines, but otherwise never gave much thought to becoming an actor until he was 15. His girlfriend at the time had told him that drama was “a snap course,” and so he enrolled in the class, looking for little more than an easy high school credit.

“Me and two of my buddies wandered in, in our leather jackets with our hair slicked back,” Welsh recalls. “The first play I was ever in was called The Yellow Jacket, a traditional Chinese play. I’d come out in a little black beanie and a silk outfit and I had these things to do, like sprinkle snow over the lovers. And I got a few cheap laughs! And I got this sort of tingle up and down my spine — ‘This is really fun!’”

When he moved on to Bonnie Doon Composite, he continued to try out for plays. He got his first substantial role in something called The Silver Whistle, and got some more laughs there. “So then it came time for me to choose what courses I’d be taking at U of A,” Welsh says. “I was leaning toward engineering at the time — my best subjects were trigonometry, chemistry, algebra, things like that. But when I went down the application list, I came to ‘Bachelor of Arts and Drama’ and I checked it off, right on the spot. Right there in the classroom.”

Welsh doesn’t have any fancy explanations for his success. He’s had good agents, he says. Good friends too — his pal Robert Engels, for instance, was a writer on Twin Peaks and suggested him for Windom Earle. (Welsh had never even seen the show.) He’s also determined: “A will of steel,” he says with a laugh. He also thinks it’s helped that he’s a good auditioner, able to give a solid performance even at a cold reading. He went all out when he auditioned to play Colin Thatcher in the TV-movie Love and Hate, one of his breakout roles: “I had to fight for that one,” he says. “Colin was six feet tall and 200 pounds, and I am not. So I rented myself a pair of cowboy boots with three-inch heels, put on a sports jacket that was two sizes too big, and three sweatshirts underneath. ‘You want me to look big? I can look big!’ Sometimes you do outrageous things in auditions to make an impression that’s either going to get you the part or make them think you’re crazy.”

Welsh still considers the director of Love and Hate, Francis Mankiewicz, the best director he’s ever worked with. I ask Welsh if he finds he learns more working with great directors or great actors, but he won’t take the bait. “There’s no way you can define that one,” he says. “A really good director will not only help guide you through the play but also point out things that you can explore in yourself that you might not be aware of. On the other hand, being onstage with a really great actor takes you up a notch. If you’re onstage with Fiona Reid, say, you’ve really got to come there with your best suit on. She’s going to be giving it back.”

It’s no accident that Welsh mentions Fiona Reid: many of the most powerful scenes in Rock ’n’ Roll are the ones Welsh shares with Reid — as his dying wife Eleanor in the first act, and as his daughter Esme in the second. “There’s a heat between Max and Eleanor,” Welsh says. “Max lives mostly in his head; she asks him to give her something more than that, and he says he can’t. It’s one of the most amazing moments in the play. She totally exposes herself emotionally, she says, ‘I want what you love me with,’ and he says, ‘That’s it — that is what I love you with, there’s nothing else.’

“Stoppard has said that Max, as written, is a man who doesn’t express emotion much,” Welsh continues. “Well ... sorry, Tom, but I have to disagree. He’s passionate about his political beliefs, he’s passionate about being a communist, and he loves his wife dearly, even as she’s dying, but he doesn’t express it sentimentally. He loves her on a deeper level than a lot of men would, because he understands what she’s going through. He just doesn’t give in to the sentiment of it.”

Reading the script to Rock ’n’ Roll for the first time is a daunting task: even if you can sort out the huge cast of characters and chart their ever-shifting relationships over the course of 20 years, there’s still all the Czech history and the discussions of ancient Greek poetry to trip you up. If you’re like me, you can spend so much time getting a handle on the play’s intellectual concerns that its emotional content can zoom right past you.

“It’s a love story, really,” Welsh says. “Max is in love with communism. He’s in love with his wife. Jan’s in love with Esme. Max ultimately gets together with Lenka. It’s all about relationships and what goes on between the people — if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be any good.”

And perhaps the most poignant romantic breakup in the play is Max’s ultimate renunciation of communism. “Everyone’s favourite aspect of that philosophy — mine too! — is that phrase, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ It’s the most humane tenet of socialism, and of course, it’s the one that failed the most spectacularly.”

Welsh lets out a short, bitter laugh. “You know, I grew up under socialism,” he says. “I grew up in Alberta! Under Manning, education was free. So I get it. I understand what socialism is. It’s so funny to look at the province now. I don’t know where it’s all gone.”