"Follows Delivers Real Thing On, Off Stage"
Richard Ouzounian

Actress shines as 'homewrecker' in role of Annie Soulpepper produces classic Stoppard play

You know that when Megan Follows is on stage, you're going to get the real thing - a committed performance that blazes across the footlights with its honesty.

But if you go down to the Young Centre for the Performing Arts between now and the end of July, Follows will also provide you with The Real Thing as well.

The talented 38-year-old star is currently appearing opposite Albert Schultz in a revival of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play about the fine lines separating art and reality, intellect and emotion.

She plays Annie, an actress who breaks up the marriage of Henry, an intellectually inclined playwright.

When you factor into the equation the knowledge that the role was originally played by Felicity Kendal, who wound up being author Stoppard's second wife, it all starts to wind up like looking into a fun house mirror of truth and illusion.

And that's exactly how Follows likes it.

"For me, it's totally Alice in Wonderland time," she said during a break from rehearsals, "you open a door and step into a strange world for a few hours. It's up to you to make sense of what you find there. It's such a great gift. It's like inheriting someone else's reality for a while."

It was just a year ago that she burned up the stage for Soulpepper as the incestuous May in Sam Shepard's Fool For Love and she admits that - even though passion is the dominating force behind both plays - things are a lot different this summer.

"The journey I go on for this character is a very different kind of ride. Instead of shooting out of the cannon and going from zero to 60 in five seconds, I lurk in the background for a while on this one, only gradually coming into focus later."

The other major difference for someone like Follows, who is used to engaging the spectators' sympathies (all those years as Anne of Green Gables can't go to waste, you know), is that "you come into the piece and pretty soon you realize that, as far as the audience is concerned, you're the homewrecker.

"It isn't a question of being good or bad," she hastens to add. "Life isn't like that and it would be pretty dull if it were. Annie is a very complicated character, both morally and ethically. After she marries Henry, she ends up walking a very fine moral line with her fidelity and loyalty which gets challenged by a variety of events."

One of those events is her realization that while Henry may have been willing to commit adultery to possess Annie, he saw that as a one-time-only event, whereas for her, "she's rather greedy.

"She can't help being enthralled when another man falls for her."

It leads to a rather complicated situation for Annie and Henry, which Follows describes as "a battle between the head and the heart."

As Follows discusses the characters in the play, she does so with a combination of detached analysis and empathetic involvement that makes it possible to see why her work is so successful.

"Henry, the character Albert is playing, is the representative of extraordinary intelligence and wit, that uses language almost as a weapon, or a barrier. He's smarter than most people, but he also uses it to deflect people.

"That's the very thing Annie loves him for, but it also drives her crazy. Henry always has to have the perfect final thing to say, to wrap everything up in an sophisticated argument.

"Annie isn't like that. She's like everyone else in the play, racing to keep up with Henry and that phenomenal brain of his.

"As one of the other characters finally tells him, 'You may have all the words, but having all the words isn't what it's about. Life is messy.'"

Follows smiles. "Still, they're wonderful words to speak and Stoppard gives them to all of us. Even those on the side of the heart get the most amazing language to express what we feel.

"I should only be so lucky as to able to access those kind of phrases when one of my relationships is falling apart."

Over the years, Follows has had a chance to examine many kinds of relationships as they rise and fall.

Her own parents, actors Ted Follows and Dawn Greenhalgh had a marriage which Greenhalgh once described as "just like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" before it finally ended after many years of strife.

Their daughter married Christopher Porter in 1991, had two children with him and divorced him in 1995.

Her partner for many years now has been actor Stuart Hughes.

"I had to learn that when you're attracted to someone," says Follows, "it's not necessarily love. It may just be lust. It's a chemical high, it's adrenaline rushing through your system, it's sexy in every sense of the word ... but it may not last for long."

Which brings us to the final and inevitable question what is "the real thing"?

Follows pauses before answering sagely. "If you can find someone who's your true partner, your real thing, it doesn't mean that things will always go smoothly, but you have to work at it."

"And isn't that what we want today, even more than ever, because of this f------ world we live in?

"You can come home to at least one person who's on your side."

Source: Toronto Star