Most budding child actors don’t start their stage careers by performing the Bard. But at a mere 10 years old, Bermudian actor Rowan Vickers found himself in the throes of Macbeth and was having the time of his young life.
“I got to the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, to do a production of Macbeth,” Vickers tells The Bermudian. “There’s the part of young Macduff in that play. He’s got a great little scene with his mum and then gets to be stabbed on stage. So, I got to go act at Stratford with these amazing Shakespearean actors and get to die on stage every night. It was a 10-year-old’s dream.”
Born in Canada, Vickers was introduced to the children’s version Shakespeare by his third-grade teacher, Miss Hughes, who would put on these storybook versions with her class. Vickers performed in the class’s production of Romeo & Juliet and, even at that young age, got the bug. “I got bit quite early,” Vickers admits. “The bug had its teeth very, very deep [in me] and there was no going back.” Supported by his parents, Vickers auditioned and performed at professional theaters in Canada, including a role in Peter Pan at the Grand Theater in London, Ontario. Moving to Bermuda during that production of Macbeth, Vickers was already well acclimated to the island having spent each summer here, given his father, Ken Vickers, is Bermudian and his family would always visit the island and his relatives here.
“Bermuda has always been a part of my life since birth,” says Vickers. “My parents maintained a house in Bermuda. We went there every summer. We visited my grandparents and aunts and uncles, extended family, cousins, they’d all lived in Bermuda. I loved it. It always kind of felt like home.”
Once living in Bermuda, Vickers found himself performing in various Gilbert and Sullivan Society productions at City Hall and in shows at Warwick Academy, where he was under the tutelage of the drama teacher Matthew McGowan. “Rowan was clearly gifted and talented in performance when I first met him,” McGowan tells The Bermudian via e-mail. “He had a natural ease in front of any audience. It was clear to me that he had had stage experience. He had an excellent grasp on sophisticated theatrical techniques, his vocal skill was exemplary and his ability to play both the Hero and the Comedian and anything in between meant he was versatile in his character work.”
Vickers’s history in Shakespearean performances also led to more performances of the Bard at Warwick Academy. “He was integral in introducing Shakespearean performances to the school and took leading roles in Henry V and Macbeth,” recalls McGowan. “He then acted as assistant director for Romeo and Juliet. However, it was his mature, compelling and raw performance of the title role in Macbeth that captured my imagination. He brought depth and reality to a character that most professional actors can find too big.”
Initially planning to attend drama school in the UK, Vickers decided to audition at The Juilliard School as well, with little hope of actually getting in. Leaning on his Shakespearean roots to audition, Vickers performed a scene from Hamlet for one audition, followed by a scene from a play called I Hate Hamlet for another audition. (“I think I was just trying to be a cheeky 17-year-old,” Vickers admits.) Accepted into Juilliard’s drama programme in 2011, Vickers was one of nine boys, along with nine girls, who entered the acting programme. Undergoing the intensive six-days-a-week, 14-hours-a-day training, Juilliard’s education differed from other acting schools, allowing Vickers to perform in productions from the start.
“A lot of other university drama schools, especially in the States, you don’t necessarily start doing plays or shows until your third or final year,” explains Vickers. “You were doing four or five shows a year for all four years, so you leave school having done fifteen shows minimum. And they’re eclectic. It’s everything from Shakespeare to Chekov to contemporary to new plays to everything in between.”
Since his graduation in 2015, Vickers has been working steadily, booking roles on film, television (including Law and Order: SVU) and Broadway shows, including Lobby Hero and the thirty-seven city North American tour of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, where he played John Carpenter, the A&R (artist and repertoire) man who signed Tina Turner to Capitol Records, launching her comeback. Not that Vickers has forgotten his Bermudian roots. In 2019, Vickers and his wife formed the Venture Theatre and partnered with the Bermuda Festival to stage The Glass Menagerie. They’ve also hosted an annual summer intensive, teaching budding drama students on the island the ins and outs of stage performance, starting with how Vickers began—with Shakespeare.
“We want kids to learn about Shakespeare and we want it to be serious up to a point,” says Vickers. ‘We try to approach the whole thing in the spirit of fun and play and joy. Not making Shakespeare this big, scary task but rather something they could really understand on a fundamental level and on a level of play because at the end of the day, it’s called a play.”
