Michael Blake made minor characters seem major, leaving an indelible impression on the stage | Canada Voices

Memories of Michael Blake on stage have been flashing through my mind as I’ve grappled with the sudden death of the actor, one of the most dedicated Shakespeareans of his generation, and the sad realization that I saw what will forever be his entire body of work at the Stratford Festival.

His Othellos – first at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach in 2009, second at Stratford in 2019 – were major milestones in his career.

But, in this Shakespeare-saturated critic’s cerebrum, my thoughts fly first to other minor characters from the canon, ones that Blake made seem major and that he completely owns for me.

I can easily summon his gentle Clarence in Richard III, so persuasive and soulful that, for a moment, I thought the men his brother hired to kill him in prison would back down; his jovial, trusting Mr. Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the mirror image of his Othello that season; his loyal Cominius, who created a monster in Coriolanus and then tried and failed to keep him under control.

Shakespearean actor Michael Blake was a mainstay of Canadian theatre

Blake made some of his most indelible impressions on me playing characters who were kind, friendly, open-hearted or good-intentioned. He always complicated them, showing how wearing your heart on your sleeve could be foolish or wise, comic or even creepy depending on the circumstances.

He was great at being a bit odd too – though my favourite of his weirdos wasn’t in Shakespeare, but in a Jon Fosse play called Someone is Going to Come produced well before the Norwegian writer won the Nobel by Toronto’s One Little Goat. Blake’s unnerving smile as a stranger who pops up at the main characters’ house is still a touchstone with the friend I saw it with. (What a shame he never did any of Pinter’s comedies of menaces.)

Blake wasn’t normally a showy actor, though, and as such, the repertory system in Stratford was ideal for him. The depth of his craft and talent was often most evident when seen in contrasting performances – as was the case in his final (sigh) 2023 season when he was scheming bastards in both tragedy and comedy, playing Edmund and Don John in King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing respectively.

By the time Blake joined the Stratford ensemble for the 2011 season, he’d honed his Shakespeare skills in Winnipeg and Vancouver and starred in the Bard’s plays at Soulpepper (a sweet, affable Orlando) and as part of the National Arts Centre’s short-lived English Theatre company (his Mercutio ad-libbing: “Hi-ho, hi-ho, to Capulet we go.”).

His breakout Stratford season came in 2016 when he gave tremendous performances as two avengers of different stripes: a noble but human Macduff in Macbeth and an intensely vulnerable George Deever in Arthur Miller’s play All My Sons.

Pictures of him in character as both ended up on the cover of the New York Times arts section atop a flattering article that described him as a “powerful young actor” (he was in his 40s).

In Macbeth’s most terrible scene, Macduff is informed that his wife and children have been slaughtered (“All my pretty ones?”).

But the key line in Blake’s heartrending take on the character came after, when he is implored by Malcolm to channel his grief into revenge against Macbeth and “dispute it like a man.”

“I shall do so,” Macduff responds – and here Blake took a pause.

Then he unleashed this line of iambic pentameter, in a way that drilled deep into me: “But I must also feel it as a man.”

Blake galloped through these words with fury before pulling on the reins to land lightly, delicately on “man” – letting all his character’s pain and bafflement fill it.

He imbued that one syllable with all the weight and wondering of one of Hamlet’s monologues – while simultaneously exploding all the poisonous stereotypes about men that infect that play and our world.

Blake had gifts and he grinded. He described himself as a disciple of the Toronto Reference Library, the fifth floor specifically, where its rich performing-arts collection is held; he enjoyed delving into what a punctuation mark in the Folio might signify. This can seem mystical to outsiders – but the work paid off.

While I made a lot of small talk with actors over the years that I was a theatre critic, Blake always wanted to have an actual conversation whether I ran into him on the street in Stratford or he saw me mid-workout at my local YMCA.

I appreciated every time he shared with me his experiences as a Black actor in Canadian theatre by e-mail or in person; his career in the classics straddled a time where that changed a lot in many ways and less so in others.

For context: The first Canadian Black actor to play Othello at Stratford was only in 2007; a year later, a Black actor playing Juliet, depressingly, caused a stir.

But as the old institutional obliviousness to racism both systemic and sometimes blatant was replaced by a desire and a need to make theatre more diverse, there have been moments where the self-conscious, often outward-facing conversations about inclusivity could cut in their own way.

I remember how bothered Blake was when just two years after his triumph as George Deever, the Miller estate would not permit a Black actor to play the same part in the 1947-set All My Sons on Broadway – ostensibly for progressive reasons. “I was worried that it would whitewash the racism that really was in existence in that period,” Rebecca Miller, the late playwright’s daughter, explained to The New York Times.

I asked Blake in 2019 what it was like to act as directors, and artistic directors, shifted from talking about “colour-blind casting” to “colour-conscious casting”; he didn’t really have time for anything that felt like a justification for people who looked like him acting in plays.

“This is all rooted in an idea that I’m joining something, versus me being in it,” he said. “I don’t want to ever feel as though I’m being tolerated or allowed to play these parts.”

In that same conversation, Blake offered me insight on Othello that helped me understand why I find it more satisfying than most of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The Moor of Venice was not, in his words, entitled, not a prince or a king – but someone who had ascended in a world, one where he was an other, through his own merit.

In the part of that interview that was published in The Globe, Blake said of Othello: “He’s also an Other in a society that is clearly very fragile – where, you know, one guy says the right thing to certain people and it undoes him.”

I went back to my original full transcript in the wake of his death and found that I had cut his next line: “It’s almost like being an actor.”