South African drama teacher and theatre director
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.
Early life.
Eve Shapiro was born on 13 August 1930 in Pretoria, Gauteng Province, South Africa into a musical family in the city's small Jewish community. 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, and, as she confessed in an interview towards the end of her life, at her then age "ignorance was bliss", and she agreed. She chose the play "Symphony in Illusion" by James Wallace Bell which has a cast of 7 female players. In 1949 the play was entered in the annual competition organised by the Federation of Amateur Theatrical Societies of South Africa (FATSSA) and won the award for the best amateur theatrical production of the year. 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. 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."
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." To another interviewer she remarked that "I learned from observation, as I went along."
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."
Shapiro graduated from RADA with a Diploma in Stage Management in the summer of 1961, at the age of 31.
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." The play was a success and Fernald invited Shapiro to join RADA's academic staff to direct, and shortly after to teach.
At the same time, Shapiro, openly lesbian, 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. 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".
Shapiro remained with the academy full–time for 15 years and then part–time for a further three, 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.
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". 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."
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.
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.
The United States and the Juillard School.
In the mid-1970s Shapiro was invited to teach and direct in the United States of America. She spoke about the move in an interview in 2002. "RADA had a summer school for young people, but also for teachers at various universities and colleges. I always taught the teaching group, and they kept saying to me 'Why don't you come to the States?'. Then one morning I woke up and thought , 'Why "don't" I go?". Shapiro got in touch with a friend who worked at the Juilliard School, a private performing arts conservatory in New York City, USA. Through that contact she met the then artistic director of the school's Drama Division, Alan Schneider, when he was visiting London. He saw her work and in 1976 invited her to New York to direct Juilliard Drama Division second year students in "Richard III" as a rehearsal project. She had first directed "Richard III" seven years before at RADA. She accepted the invitation and stayed in New York with the production for three months.
When Shapiro was due to return to London Schneider asked her to step in to direct final year students in Athol Fugard's South African play "Boesman and Lena" whose director had had to leave the production after only one week. Shapiro remained in New York to carry out that task, after which the school asked her to stay longer. Shapiro consulted with John Fernald at RADA in London who said "you can stay, as long as you come back". She then for three years taught in both London and New York for six month periods in each city. "For a while, I was working at both Juilliard and at RADA; the best of both worlds, in a way."
When Michael Langham took over the Drama Division at Juilliard in 1979 he wanted Shapiro to be there full-time, so she made the decision to relinquish her place on RADA's staff (though for the rest of her life she continued to direct there as an occasional guest) and she was appointed full-time to the faculty of the Juilliard Drama Division which by 1979 had a reputation as America's pre-eminent acting programme.
Shapiro settled permanently in New York and remained there for 43 years, until her death, establishing herself from 1983 in an eighth–floor Upper West Side apartment on the corner of Riverside Drive and West 84th Street in Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River. Shapiro also bought a small 1985–built townhouse in the town of Rhinebeck 100 miles north of Manhattan, up the Hudson River. She sold this house in 2015.
Shapiro's work with the Juilliard Drama Division, similar to her experience at RADA, involved teaching, mentoring and directing acting students, the two dozen or so chosen each year from any of up to 2,000 applicants for a four–year course. Among the many students who came under her influence at Juilliard and who have since become familiar faces on stage, film and television were Viola Davis, Greg Jbara, Val Kilmer (at the time the youngest person to be admitted to the Drama Division), Kevin Spacey (though he did not graduate) Jessica Chastain, and Kelly McGillis who, struggling with her key role in the 1985 film "Witness", "in the deep of the night ... calls her old acting teacher, Eve Shapiro, who says, "Trust yourself, Kelly. Live the life of this woman and forget you'."
In her time at Juilliard Shapiro directed more than 20 major drama productions with third and final year acting students, among them several plays by George Bernard Shaw ("You Never Can Tell", "Getting Married", "Heartbreak House", "Man and Superman", "Misalliance", and "Major Barbara"), three by Anton Chekhov ("Uncle Vanya", "The Seagull", and "Three Sisters"), some classical fare like John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera", Henrik Ibsen's "The Lady From the Sea" and "Hedda Gabler", Ivan Turgenev's "A Month in the Country", "The Winter's Tale" and "Richard II" by William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest". There was a sprinkling of more modern works, including "Another Part of the Forest" by Lillian Hellman, C. P. Taylor's "And a Nightingale Sang", "Artaud at Rodez" by Charles Marowitz, and - a favourite of Shapiro's - Caryl Churchill's "Top Girls". Of her production of "Top Girls", "a richly complex study of bourgeois feminism", Shapiro relished "the intense positive atmosphere of rehearsals due to the deep connection the women have with the work".