Eve Shapiro
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Eve Shapiro | |
|---|---|
| Born | 13 August 1930 Pretoria, South Africa |
| Died | 1 December 2022 (aged 92) New York, USA |
| Occupations | Drama teacher and theatre director |
| Years active | 1961—2020 |
| Known for | Faculty membership of RADA, London, and Juilliard School, New York |
Evelyn L. Shapiro (13 August 1930—1 December 2022) was a South Africa–born drama teacher and theatre director, who had a profound influence on generations of acting and opera-singing students in the UK and the USA. A talented young amateur theatre director, she left South Africa to train professionally at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London and on graduation in 1961 joined the academy's staff as a director and teacher. In the mid-1970s, Shapiro moved to New York to join the Drama Division at the Juilliard School where she taught and directed. In 1988, she transferred to Juilliard's Vocal Arts Division to teach acting to opera students, and to direct operas. Shapiro continued to work at Juilliard until she was 90. In her working career, she directed more than 100 plays and operas in Europe and the United States.
Eve Shapiro was born on 13 August 1930 in Pretoria, Gauteng Province, South Africa[1] into a musical family in the city's small Jewish community.[2][3] While still at school she showed a precocious interest in drama and became involved in South Africa's then thriving amateur theatre scene. She had an ambition to be an actor but, shortly after leaving school, in 1949 she was asked to direct a one–act play,[4] and, as she confessed in an interview towards the end of her life, at her then age "ignorance was bliss", and she agreed.[2] She chose the play Symphony in Illusion by James Wallace Bell which has a cast of 7 female players.[5] In 1949 the play was entered in the annual competition organised by the Federation of Amateur Theatrical Societies of South Africa (FATSSA)[6] and won the award for the best amateur theatrical production of the year.[1] As a consequence, Shapiro directed many amateur productions in Pretoria over a number of years. After some time she met a female actor from the Vienna Burgtheater who was on tour in South Africa and who was a great influence on her. The actor saw Shapiro's work and advised her that she should become a professional theatre director.[4] Shapiro took the advice and in pursuit of that ambition "I realised everything I was doing was just on instinct but I'd never really trained and so I decided to go to England."[2]
Britain and RADA
When Shapiro emigrated to Britain she went as a student to RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London on a scholarship, though not as an acting student. Because a directing course was not available at that time, she trained as a stage manager. In 1956 the academy's Director of Stage Management, Dorothy Tenham, had started training students to be stage managers in a very limited programme. Shapiro, in 1959, was only the fourth student to enter the course. "The good thing about the stage management program", she recalled, "is that you watch very, very good directors, and I was lucky, I saw some really marvellous people working."[2] To another interviewer she remarked that "I learned from observation, as I went along."[4]
Shapiro also took the opportunity to see as many London theatre productions as she could, often many times. She reminisced in her interview, carried out when she was 81, that she saw plays "almost every day ... it was just so wonderful being there ... people like Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, Olivier ... watching them was inspiring ... I was in the theatre all the time."[2]
Shapiro graduated from RADA with a Diploma in Stage Management in the summer of 1961, at the age of 31.[7]
Anxious to pursue her directing ambitions she approached the Principal of RADA, John Fernald, and asked if she could direct a play for the academy. Fernald had three student-performed plays lined up to tour to Basel, Switzerland, and offered Shapiro one of them to direct, which was Village Wooing, by George Bernard Shaw. She accepted the task and it became her first professional theatre engagement. "I was very lucky," Shapiro recalled. "I had people who had faith in me and gave me a chance."[4] The play was a success and Fernald invited Shapiro to join RADA's academic staff to direct, and shortly after to teach.[2][4]
At the same time, Shapiro, openly lesbian,[8] began to share her life and an apartment in Park Crescent in Marylebone, London with her earlier stage management tutor at the academy, Dorothy Tenham.[9] It was there that Shapiro first began her lifelong habit of inviting students to her home for coaching, to read and discuss passages from drama, particularly William Shakespeare, "dispense wisdom over tea and bake scones together".[1]
Shapiro remained with the academy full–time for 15 years and then part–time for a further three,[2][4] tutoring, mentoring and directing multiple generations of acting students over that period. Well over 2,000 aspiring actors applied for the two–year RADA acting course every year, but the academy had the capacity for an intake of only 20 or so every other term, resulting in 80 students under instruction at any one time.[10]
Many of the student actors Shapiro taught and mentored at RADA went on to recognition and success. Among them were Kenneth Cranham, Henry Goodman, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Robert Lindsay, Sir Jonathan Pryce, Alan Rickman, and Dame Imelda Staunton.
As well as tutoring, Shapiro directed as many as three major student productions every year at RADA for public performance in the academy's theatres. The choice of plays to be produced and their casting was usually the prerogative of the principal of the academy. During her time on the staff Shapiro was invited to return regularly to the works of Shakespeare, directing Richard III, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear among others of his plays. She also brought a wide variety of British and Irish writers' works to RADA's stages with, for instance, plays by George Bernard Shaw (Village Wooing), John Ford ('Tis Pity She's a Whore), John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi) and Harold Brighouse (Hobson's Choice). Playwrights of the European continent were not forgotten, with works by, for instance, Luigi Pirandello (Henry IV and Six Characters in Search of an Author), Friedrich Schiller (Mary Stuart), Jean Anouilh (Antigone), Henrik Ibsen (The Lady from the Sea), Ivan Turgenev (A Month in the Country), Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage and her Children) and Federico García Lorca (The House of Bernarda Alba). Anton Chekhov was one of Shapiro's favourite playwrights, with productions of The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, and others. She liked also to specialise in American works, even musicals. Kiss Me, Kate and Man of La Mancha appeared under her direction, as well as more straight fair, like Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, William Inge's Picnic, and Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. Tennessee Williams was a perennial favourite, with productions of A Streetcar named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and The Night of the Iguana, and plays by Arthur Miller, such as The Crucible and Death of a Salesman.[11][12][13] Shapiro directed 40 or so plays at RADA during her time on the academy's staff. "Interestingly," she told a US interviewer in 2002, "when I was working in England, I always did American plays, I loved them. Williams, O'Neill, Miller; I even did Picnic. I was always the person who did American plays."[4]
In addition to being on the RADA staff, in the mid-1960s Shapiro taught at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London and directed a few productions there. Early in the 1970s, while continuing at RADA, she was appointed associate director at the York Theatre Royal, York and directed occasionally at the Leeds Playhouse in Yorkshire and at the Bournemouth Repertory Theatre on the English south coast. In October 1972 she directed T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral in York Minster as part of that cathedral's 500th anniversary.[11]
Despite a permanent move from RADA to the United States at the end of the 1970s, Shapiro returned to the academy occasionally as a guest director.
