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Corin McFadden describes his acting role in the UPEI Theatre Society production of Heartbreak House as the “calm centre around which all the craziness revolves.” Sounds like ideal preparation for another role he is developing, as an in-demand director for groups like ACT and the Jubilee Players.
According to Corin, “Acting and directing are hand in glove…. My background has always been in acting, so I understand the process of generating a believable character. The director helps to make those decisions for the whole play, and as a director I also consider working with the rhythm and pacing of the play.”
Currently, Corin is preparing to direct an ACT production of Deathtrap, a “classic thriller” full of unexpected humour and plot twists. “You have to be very committed to the decisions that you make as a director so that the audience doesn’t see the twists coming,” he says.
Corin has expanded his directorial decisions by branching out into film. He was recently involved in almost every aspect—writing, acting, directing, editing —of the short film Malcolm’s Chain. “I learned all the facets of film-making in a whirlwind fashion,” he says with widened eyes.
“I found directing for film mentally challenging,” Corin says, “because you have to think in many dimensions at the same time. Time is a fourth dimension, since you can take things out of sequence. There’s more latitude in film—you can take a bit from here, take a bit from there, and it’s like a big jigsaw puzzle you try to put together in your mind…. Theatre uses much more broad strokes.”
“It’s like painting a large mural or painting a small painting,” he says. “On stage, it’s a big mural: there can be many details, but a director can focus the audience’s attention on one detail at a time. Film is more like a small photograph you take in all at once.”
Working towards feature-length films, Corin is eager to use what he’s learned. For now, he plans to separate his acting hand from his directing glove: “I wouldn’t direct and play the lead role again,” he admits. “Either I wasn’t directing myself properly—or as an actor, I was getting away with a lot—but I noticed the quality of scenes was different when I was acting and directing than when I was just directing.
“In film, you have to scale back your acting in terms of your closeness to the experience. You’re still aiming for a strong performance, but on a more intimate scale,” Corin comments. “The same performance, you’d have to pump a lot more into to put it on stage.
“In stage work, you can feel the audience coming along with you, and energy from the audience informs the decisions you make as an actor. There’s also the element of theatricality. You have to modulate, to give a character more texture than you’d actually see in real life.”
Corin says another favourite role, in dinner theatre productions of Eddie May Murder Mysteries, combines the theatricality of stage, the intimacy of film, and the fun of improvisation—and provides a hard-to-come-by paying gig.
“In the future, I would like to get most of my support from show business,” he says. “But for myself, I have a family, with two kids. A certain amount of what I do in the day-to-day is making sure they have what they need.”
Corin’s day job, as a hotel catering manager, has “an element of show biz” he makes the most of. “To a large measure, my management position gives me a lot of skills I need in the arts—day-to-day managing and directing people, wheeling and dealing. These are all transferable…. I keep reminding myself of that,” he laughs.
In film or on stage, acting or directing, Corin wryly says, “Often, success is determined by the fewest number of mistakes you can make, so you make as few mistakes as you can.”