Felix LeBlanc, Alexander Ariate, Darren Martens, Braydon Dowler Coltman, Garett Ross, Morgan Yamada in The Three Musketeers, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Never fear quarrels but seek hazardous adventures….”  — The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas

En garde. The actors are armed and dangerous.

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In the Citadel season finale (opening Thursday on the Shoctor stage), when you see light glint off steel blades, or hear the clang when blades cross, you’ll be seeing the intricate work of fight choreographer Jonathan Hawley Purvis.

The Three Musketeers, a high-speed high-spirited 2015 stage adaptation by the American playwright Catherine Bush of the 1844 historical swashbuckler by the French novelist Alexandre Dumas, is a veritable extravaganza of swordplay, with a story to match. And actor/ fight director/ stunt performer Hawley Purvis is in his element; The Three Musketeers is a swordplay connoisseur’s dream show. “It’s a swashbuckling adventure, fun to see, and fun to do live!”

“It’s a big show…. In the first act alone, there are five fights,” he says happily, making time to chat en route to a rehearsal day. “Every couple of pages, someone is trying to kill someone! (laughter). And there’s another four in the second act. It’s crazy!”

Romeo and Juliet and West Side story (both on the Hawley Purvis resumé) are loaded with hair-trigger violence and street combat, built into the plot. Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra have their moments, to be sure. But The Three Musketeers is perhaps the ne plus ultra of combat challenges. And the Citadel/ Vancouver Arts Club co-production that Daryl Cloran directs is Hawley Purvis’s third version, all different adaptations, in all different assignments.

Fight director Jonathan Hawley Purvis

In his first, Bob Baker’s 2011 Citadel production of a Tom Wood adaptation, he played Jussac, a lieutenant of the villainous Cardinal Richelieu. At the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival, in an adaptation by director Rona Waddington, he not only played Aramis, one of the blue-chip ‘all for one/ one for all’ elite trio, but choreographed all the fights for everybody else, too. “It was fun to direct myself,” he laughs.

And now, a full-bodied version with a cast of 17, outsized action, unstoppable swordplay, treachery, romance…. “It’s got comedic moments that are really fun,” says Hawley Purvis, an actor first before he got captivated by swordsmanship in theatre school in Calgary at Mount Royal College (a semester with stage combat master J.P. Fournier was a turning point). “At the same time it doesn’t shy away from letting itself be dramatic and dark…. It’s like a really good adventure movie, Indiana Jones or Back to the Future. Real stakes, real drama.”

Daniel Fong, Alexander Ariate, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Darren Martens in The Three Musketeers, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

“It’s fast-paced, sticks to the plot,” says Hawley Purvis, of a version with “two different time lines, short scenes, scenes that are happening on top of each other, jumping from action to action. And it allows itself to get dark and sad and heartfelt, when it wants, and laugh at itself and be tongue-in-cheek, too.”

All of which “really encompasses a perfect adventure movie!” he declares. “Princess Bride!” And all of which resonates in the “tonality” (a favourite Hawley Purvis term) of the fight choreography. “Some of it is more flourish-y and fun,”  he says. “Some of it is darker and grittier….”

The biggest sword fight in the show? “Eight people, four against four. There are two other brawl-style fights that happen in various taverns that include even more people, 10 or twelve. And a couple of duels!” Yup, we’ve got a handful!”

Hawley Purvis has the kind of buoyant energy about him in conversation that makes you (briefly) wonder why on earth you didn’t take a turn or two with a foil yourself before now. He and director Cloran have collaborated in the past (Shakespeare in Love, for example). They held the Musketeer auditions together. “Everyone who came through the door we put a sword in their hand and (had them do) some sword fighting.”

As he points out, there are, routinely, dance calls for big dance musicals, like West Side Story; fight calls are much more rare. Everyone in the show we’ll see at the Citadel “has held a sword in their hand at some point in their careers. Which makes my job so much easier, and allows us to take it another level.”

The cast arrives at stage combat from different directions, with different skill sets, he explains. Hawley Purvis’s starting point was dance. He grew up in Calgary, a kid who was “pretty heavily into it, very busy with lots of competitions,” as he describes. “But in my heart I kinda knew I didn’t want to be a dancer as a career. I wanted to be an actor.”

“I totally fell in love with it and it made sense to me,” Hawley Purvis says of his theatre school discovery of stage combat. … I was always a huge nerd. Princess Bride was my childhood. I loved swords and knights in armour…. It took me on a long journey, as an actor who kept training (in combat workshops), into stunt work in film and TV…. I love action!”

In choreographing a show, Hawley Purvis, who moved back to his original home town Vancouver in 2018 with actor wife Alanna Hawley Purvis (their twins are nearly six, “can you believe it?”), is apt to borrow the dance lexicon in talking about stage combat. “Dancing more than fighting, as in martial arts or boxing… For one thing it’s something you’ve got to do with your partner,” otherwise, presumably, stages world-wide would be littered by punctured corpses.

The theatrical stylization of violence — “representing violence in a way that’s believable but comes from a place of storytelling and craft, the art and science of execution” — is at the heart of fight direction, as Hawley Purvis muses. “It’s problem-solving and it can get quite technical,” but the telling of the story is the thing.

There is never zero risk in stage combat, to be sure, although “risk mitigation” is central to Hawley Purvis’s line of work. That risk would seem to the outsider exponentially increased in stunt work (he did stunts for the TV series The Last of Us, filmed in Calgary).

Has he ever been terrified working in the stunt industry? Hawley Purvis pauses, and laughs. “The first time I was lit on fire…. Hmm, OK, not terrified because I knew what I was in for, and knew all the safety requirements were being met, but I remember being very aware that it’s taking a risk.”

“My first high fall into a pile of cardboard boxes…. You have to trust the people around you,” he says. “And they’re the most amazing people. Very cool, from very different backgrounds, smart, with amazing skill sets.” In Alberta many stunt people are “ex-rodeo folks, bull riders, chuck racers, often still with farms. In Vancouver, a lot of martial arts people, from gymnastics, a few dancers.“

In 2018 he and his wife, actor Alanna Hawley Purvis, who met in a Citadel production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, moved to Vancouver. “We wanted to start a family,” he says (their twins are almost six, “can you believe it?”), and film and TV contracts, shorter than theatre, are more amenable to home life. “And I’ve keep my foot in theatre through fight choreography. Something keeps driving me back!”

Daniel Fong and John Ullyatt in The Three Musketeers, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

How does he start rehearsing a fight scene for the tumultuous world of 17th century France, as filtered through Dumas, Catherine Bush, and a cast of varied experience (including a couple of fellow fight directors) in gender-bending assignments?  Hawley Purvis’s mind works in questions. “I always come from story first. My first priority is ‘what is the point of this fight in the show? Why is it written in here, and what is the arc? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What is the arc?’”

And then, “‘what is the tone of the fight? how does it fit in tonally into the show?’” He doesn’t plan out individual moves in advance, though. He waits till he’s in the rehearsal room with actors, “discovering their individual strengths and weaknesses, what they’re comfortable with.”

Ah, and “what’s repeatable,” sword in hand. In theatre, unlike film, the actors perform live, eight shows a week, as we’re about to see. The theatre mantra belongs to the story: “All for one and one for all.”

PREVIEW

The Three Musketeers

Theatre: Citadel Theatre and Vancouver Arts Club

Written by: Alexandre Dumas, adapted by Catherine Bush

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Alexander Ariate, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Darren Martens, Daniel Fong, Scott Bellis, Jade V. Robinson, Garett Ross, John Ullyatt, Farren Timoteo, Bahareh Yaraghi, Morgan Yamada, Nadien Chu, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Felix LeBlanc

Running: through May 12

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com