Craig Walker (writer)

Last updated
Craig Walker
Craigaston.jpg
Walker in Pygmalion with Peter Aston
Born
Craig Stewart Walker

(1960-09-25) September 25, 1960 (age 62)
Occupation(s)Writer, theatre director, actor, educator

Craig Stewart Walker (born September 25, 1960) is a Canadian writer, theatre director, actor and educator.

Contents

Walker graduated from Bayview Secondary School and afterwards, began his career in the theatre as an actor with the Stratford Festival, the Shaw Festival and the National Arts Centre of Canada and other companies. After returning to complete an M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in Drama at the University of Toronto, he was appointed to the Department of Drama at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he is currently Professor and Director of the Dan School of Drama and Music. [1]

From 1997 till 2007, Walker served as artistic director of Theatre Kingston, a company for which he has directed many productions including his own Finnegans Wake: a dream play (based on the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce), which played in both Kingston and Toronto in 2001, and Aeschylus' The Oresteia , which was performed with Proteus , a satyr play Walker wrote himself to replace the one that had originally followed the trilogy, but had been lost since the 5th century BCE. In 2002, Walker wrote the book, music and lyrics for Chantecler: a musical (based loosely on a verse play by Edmond Rostand). More recently, he has worked as an actor and director with the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival in Prescott, Ontario. That company's production of Twelfth Night , which was directed by Walker, won the 2012 Prix Rideau Award for Outstanding Production. [2] In 2009 he was appointed as a corresponding scholar with the Shaw Festival.

Works by Walker

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edmond Rostand</span> French poet and dramatist (1868–1918)

Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism and is known best for his 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays contrasted with the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand's works, Les Romanesques (1894), was adapted to the 1960 musical comedy The Fantasticks.

<i>Finnegans Wake</i> 1939 novel by James Joyce

Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. Written over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, the novel was Joyce's final work. It is written in a largely idiosyncratic language which blends standard English with neologisms, portmanteau words, Irish mannerisms and puns in multiple languages to create a refracted effect. It has been categorized as "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables [...] with the work of analysis and deconstruction"; many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of dreams and hypnagogia, reproducing the way in which concepts, memories, people and places become amalgamated in dreaming. It has also been regarded as an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his prior aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the text; Joyce declared that "every syllable can be justified". Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake has been agreed to be a work largely unread by the general public.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Callow</span> British actor, director, and writer

Simon Phillip Hugh Callow is a British actor, director, narrator and writer. Known as a character actor on stage and screen he's received numerous accolades including an Olivier Award and Screen Actors Guild Award as well as nominations for two BAFTA Awards. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to acting by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stage combat</span> Technique used in theatre to create the illusion of physical combat

Stage combat, fight craft or fight choreography is a specialised technique in theatre designed to create the illusion of physical combat without causing harm to the performers. It is employed in live stage plays as well as operatic and ballet productions. With the advent of cinema and television the term has widened to also include the choreography of filmed fighting sequences, as opposed to the earlier live performances on stage. It is closely related to the practice of stunts and is a common field of study for actors. Actors famous for their stage fighting skills frequently have backgrounds in dance, gymnastics or martial arts training.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tyrone Guthrie</span> English actor and director

Sir William Tyrone Guthrie was an English theatrical director instrumental in the founding of the Stratford Festival of Canada, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at his family's ancestral home, Annaghmakerrig, near Newbliss in County Monaghan, Ireland. He is famous for his original approach to Shakespearean and modern drama.

<i>The Skin of Our Teeth</i> 1942 play by Thornton Wilder

The Skin of Our Teeth is a play by Thornton Wilder that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It opened on October 15, 1942, at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, before moving to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway on November 18, 1942. It was produced by Michael Myerberg and directed by Elia Kazan with costumes by Mary Percy Schenck. The play is a three-part allegory about the life of mankind, centering on the Antrobus family of the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. The epic comedy-drama is noted as among the most heterodox of classic American comedies — it broke nearly every established theatrical convention.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benoît-Constant Coquelin</span>

Benoît-Constant Coquelin, known as Coquelin aîné, was a French actor, "one of the greatest theatrical figures of the age."

<i>Cyrano de Bergerac</i> (play) Play by Edmond Rostand

Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. The play is a fictionalisation following the broad outlines of Cyrano de Bergerac's life.

Theatre Kingston is a theatre company located in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patrick Garland</span> British director, writer, and actor (1935–2013)

Patrick Ewart Garland was a British director, writer and actor.

David John Threlfall is an English stage, film and television actor and director. He is best known for playing Frank Gallagher in Channel 4's series Shameless. He has also directed several episodes of the show. In April 2014, he portrayed comedian Tommy Cooper in a television film entitled Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This. In 2014, he starred alongside Jude Law in the thriller Black Sea. In 2022 he received a Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Play for his performance in the Martin McDonagh play Hangmen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medieval theatre</span> Theatrical performances in the Middle Ages

Medieval theatre encompasses theatrical performance in the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century and the beginning of the Renaissance in approximately the 15th century. The category of "medieval theatre" is vast, covering dramatic performance in Europe over a thousand-year period. A broad spectrum of genres needs to be considered, including mystery plays, morality plays, farces and masques. The themes were almost always religious. The most famous examples are the English cycle dramas, the York Mystery Plays, the Chester Mystery Plays, the Wakefield Mystery Plays, and the N-Town Plays, as well as the morality play known as Everyman. One of the first surviving secular plays in English is The Interlude of the Student and the Girl.

This is a list of works by the English writer Anthony Burgess.

Michael Cook was a Canadian playwright known for his plays set in Newfoundland.

<i>Chantecler</i> (play)

Chantecler is a verse play in four acts written by Edmond Rostand. The play is notable in that all the characters are farmyard animals including the main protagonist, a chanticleer, or rooster. The play centers on the theme of idealism and spiritual sincerity, as contrasted with cynicism and artificiality. Much of the play satirizes modernist artistic doctrines from Rostand's romanticist perspective.

Olwen Fouéré is an Irish actress and writer/director in theatre, film and visual arts. She was born in Galway, Ireland to Breton parents Yann Fouéré and Marie-Magdeleine Mauger. In 2020, she was listed at number 22 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.

Manana Antadze is a Georgian writer and translator, and founder of the Tumanishvili Theatre Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seamus Finnegan</span> Northern Irish playwright

Seamus Finnegan is a Northern Irish playwright. He lives in London, and was born in Belfast Northern Ireland on 1 March 1949.

Kim Renders was a Canadian writer, director, actor and designer and a founding member of Nightwood Theatre, the oldest professional feminist theatre company in Canada.

Hélène Loiselle was a Canadian actress living and working in Quebec.

References

  1. "Craig Walker - Queen's University Dan School of Drama & Music". Sdm.queensu.ca. Retrieved 5 January 2018.[ permanent dead link ]
  2. "Prix Rideau Awards - Press Releases". Prixrideauawards.ca. Retrieved 5 January 2018.