The last time Jim Mezon worked on the stage in this city, more than a decade ago, the bed and breakfast he's now staying in was a ramshackle rooming house for gay men. Today the brick building is a lovely little B & B, and Mezon's cozy home away from home in an unforgiving Maritime winter.
And while the veteran Canadian stage actor can't complain about accommodations this time around, he has had great difficulty procuring a tumbler of John Power, his preferred brand of Irish whisky. It's hard to believe, considering Halifax's vast number of drinking establishments and deep Celtic roots.
A week before his newest show, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, is set to open at the Neptune Theatre, the smooth liquor is Mezon's medicine for a sore throat.
"We never shut up in this thing," he said in a recent interview, explaining his strained vocal cords while sucking on cherry-flavoured lozenges. "It's talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Nothing but talk. Your voice gets tired."
Frayn's award-winning play, directed by Diana Leblanc, opened Friday in its Canadian premiere production, starring three heavyweights in Mezon, Michael Ball and Martha Henry.
A dramatization of an actual meeting between Danish scientist Niels Bohr (Ball) and his former student and colleague, German scientist Werner Heisenberg (Mezon), the play depicts a secret meeting in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen at the height of the Second World War. Henry plays Bohr's wife, Margrethe.
Offering up what is arguably one of the most important moral debates of our time, the audience is invited to decide whether this particular night in September, 1941, affected the outcome of the race to build the atomic bomb.
Mezon, who first read Copenhagen while still at the Shaw Festival last summer, said the play is one of the most complicated he's ever taken on. Even after 50 readings, the dialogue still seemed impenetrable.
"It is the densest piece I've ever done," Mezon said of portraying the author of the famous Uncertainty Principle. "The sheer volume of the lines is extensive, and the density of what you're saying is incredible. You're always saying something extremely important that's usually in code of some kind."
The actors met in Toronto before rehearsals began for a three-day crash course in physics.
"As an actor you always feel like a bit of a con artist because you're portraying somebody that you are not," Mezon said. "But in this case, you really feel like you're pulling one over on the audience. We're expecting them to believe that we understand completely what we're talking about. And people spend their lives in rooms in universities working on this stuff. For us, it's a bit daunting -- fast neutrons, slow neutrons and isotopes -- and all those things. You have to have some connection to what it means, otherwise it's just memorization."
From Frayn's perspective, the characters are dead, and the story is told in a number of different time frames. They exist in 1941, step back and observe 1941, and move past it, all so that the action is not confined to a time period with which the audience may not be intimately familiar. Mezon thinks it works, and he would be a more than competent judge.
This will be the actor's 20th season with Ontario's venerable Shaw Festival, where he has acted in and directed more than 40 productions. Born in Winnipeg and a graduate of the Playhouse Acting School in Vancouver, he has worked at the Stratford Festival, and in theatre across the country. A journeyman who loves the rigorous challenge of plying his trade before regional audiences, Mezon has no desire to test his considerable talents in New York or Los Angeles.
In fact, he sees himself one day running a small theatre in a place such as Thunder Bay. Theatres, he says, are merely buildings. He will work for anyone doing something worthwhile, regardless of where they are doing it or how much money they promise to pay him.
To Mezon, the differences between acting and directing are enormous and incomparable, although he easily admits to enjoying both. He was not, however, ready to take over the Shaw Festival, when Christopher Newton was looking for his replacement last year.
"I had talks with Christopher Newton about it," he said. "He asked me about it and I thought about it and I decided that I wasn't made to do that job. It's a very difficult job and I don't think I have the personality for it. Mostly, though, I was afraid it would stop me from doing what I love to do. I worried if I took that job on I would have to stop acting. And I didn't want that."
Nor is he ready to surrender the comfort of Shaw.
"When you do it in an environment where there's a great deal of care and craft and love of the work, the great thing about Shaw is they keep bringing all these things to me; new designers and directors and actors to work with. They keep offering me wonderful parts. And I think, where am I going to go? I don't want to get terribly involved in New York or Broadway, because it's not about acting . . . it's about the business, the machine, and what that can lead to."
After the run at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Mezon will take five weeks off and spend much of it working on renovations to an 85-year-old farmhouse he recently purchased in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., the Shaw's hometown. His work at Shaw begins in April and keeps him busy until October.
For now, his mind is deep in quantum mechanics and molecular mass. He hopes audiences in Halifax and Ottawa derive from Copenhagen what he, Ball and Henry have put into it, but concedes that some may walk away from the play shaking their heads.
"I know people who've seen productions in London and hated it," Mezon said. "It's not everybody's cup of tea. It's a very difficult play. As an audience you're being asked to participate. You can't just sit back. This play will twist your head around if you've decided you want a light evening's fare. You have to come and participate.
"But I think the rewards are there. I know people who've seen productions and one person didn't understand or like it, and the other person said it was one of the best pieces of theatre they've ever seen and they couldn't stop thinking about it." Copenhagen is at Neptune Theatre in Halifax through Feb. 9, and at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa from Feb. 20 through March 8.