by AMY BARRATT

He used to have another name. Still uses it in fact when doing the film work that helps pay his bills. But when he’s acting as artistic director of Gravy Bath Productions, or publishing a guide for actors on playing Shakespeare, he prefers the moniker he appropriated from his character in Anthony Kokx’s play Critic.

He swears he’s nothing as romantic as a fugitive from justice, that he just likes being Madd Harold. Still, little is known about the soft-spoken 29 year old who seems to have sprung full-blown onto the Montreal theatre scene about two years ago. We thought we detected the trace of a British accent, possibly Welsh… It turns out he grew up in Ottawa. He did study acting for a while at the London Academy of Performing Arts, and you know the lasting effect those British schools can have on one’s diction.

Prior to that stint, he studied at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York, a city to which he returned after his time in London, to work for a while on off-off Broadway shows and bit parts in movies. It was “instinct,” he says, and a couple of days of film work that brought him to Montreal in 1999. Eager for a change, Madd set himself a challenge: “If I can find an apartment today, I’ll stay.” He could, and he did. (This was just before the current real estate crunch).

It was while teaching a Shakespeare class in the Montreal area that Madd met Kokx, the ambitious young playwright and founder of Gravy Bath productions. Kokx asked Harold to direct his play Christopher’s Story. Soon after, Harold became the company’s artistic director, and Gravy Bath started to create a buzz on the theatre scene producing Kokx plays like Critic and Top Gun Circus, and rather radical Shakespeare adaptations like their Tempest, set in an insane asylum, and Henry V, transposed to the FLQ crisis.

The success of that last production has given rise to a collaboration between Gravy Bath and the Saidye Bronfman Centre, which has offered them a space for their latest project. Ugly, a new Kokx play, directed by Harold, will be presented Feb. 25–March 9 in a transformed Leonor and Alvin Segal Theatre - the sprawling stage will be divided into a black box playing area and a small seating area.

Then, in late summer, the company will inaugurate a Classical theatre festival featuring Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, directed by Madd, and a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Meanwhile, Madd Harold’s very readable book, The Actor’s Guide to Performing Shakespeare, published by L.A.’s Lone Eagle Publishing last October, is doing very respectable sales, largely online (check it out at amazon.ca).

Madd’s current mission: to stay in Montreal and help build Gravy Bath into a force to be reckoned with on the theatre scene. :