Two of Canada’s busiest professional actors are teaming up to play a husband and wife duo in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, the Classic Theatre Festival’s first summer offering, running July 9-August 1 at the Studio Theatre in Perth.

William Vickers and Catherine Bruce play Dr. and Mrs. Bradman, friends of a haunted novelist, who, through an eccentric medium, unwittingly brings back his deceased first wife – much to the dismay of his current spouse.

Sorting it all out makes for one of the most enduring comedies of the 20th century.

Both Vickers and Bruce are decades-long veterans of Canadian theatre, with Vickers spending 21 seasons at the renowned Shaw Festival. A National Theatre School graduate, he’s also trod the boards at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and taken on roles as varied as A Christmas Carol’s Ebenezer Scrooge and Canadian icon Billy Bishop.

The son of opera singer Jon Vickers, William Vickers was studying geography at Bishop’s University when an elective theatre course captured his imagination. In no time he was part of the Stratford Festival’s young company under the guidance of legendary Canadian director John Hirsch.

Vickers says it makes sense he wound up in theatre given a confluence of factors in his youth. His mother, an English teacher, read to him every night, as did his teachers in grades 3 and 4, and Vickers often found himself “lovingly lost in the world of these stories.” Vickers says many people assume actors are extroverts, “but we’re very shy people. We are often observers more than participants in social relations.” Moving around frequently as a youngster, he found it difficult to make friends, and often spent his time on the outside looking in, a position that he says helps him as he develops roles on stage. “When I’m on the subway in Toronto, I’m just casing the joint, there’s so many fascinating people out there.”

Vickers will travel anywhere in Canada to perform, and that drive has seen him on every stage from Northern BC to Nova Scotia, with a dozen years at Regina’s Globe Theatre.

“I feel lucky to have worked not only with people considered the pillars of Canadian theatre, people like Douglas Campbell and William Hutt, but also a lot of the innovative and exciting directors that you don’t always hear about but whose work is just terrific,” he says. It’s their work, he says, that he seeks out, and that’s bringing him to Perth this summer.

“I know [Classic Theatre Festival Artistic Producer] Laurel Smith is a brilliant director,” he says. “I saw her work at the Shaw Festival and said to myself, ‘I have to work with her,’ and this summer I will.”

Vickers says that separation from his wife, performer and director Karen Wood, takes its toll, noting the two have seen each other 6 weeks out of the last 18 months. But the magic of live performance helps offset that separation, as does the challenge of one new role to add to his impressive resume.

“I’m bringing my fishing gear to Perth because I’ve heard there’s great opportunities for that,” he adds.

Vickers may get some tourism tips from Catherine Bruce, who is no stranger to the area. Her parents, Don and Mary Bruce, had a cottage for years on Crosby Lake, and she recalls coming in to Perth during the summer for groceries.

A familiar face on Canadian stage and TV (both in a number of dramatic series as well as commercials for everything from Celebrex and Lotto 649 to a spot as a hockey mom in a Don Cherry ad), Bruce found her calling with one of the title roles in David and Lisa, about the relationship between a young paranoid schizophrenic and her psychotic boyfriend. “I felt with that role that I’d found something I loved doing,” she says of her first stage experience, at Ottawa’s Woodroffe High School. Having her high school teacher tell her she was a natural was a boost as well, and she wound up pursuing theatrical training at the University of Alberta and the Banff Master Acting Class.

After performing in Ottawa experimental theatre, she spent over a dozen years playing the professional stages of Alberta and Saskatchewan, one of the few Canadian actors making a living performing their craft.

Her favourite roles are many, but in particular she points to Marilla in Anne of Gree Gables (at the Grand Theatre) and Lady Macbeth at Calgary’s Theatre Chinook.

“I loved doing Amanda in Noel Coward’s Private Lives,” she recalls of her stint at the Port Hope Festival Theatre. “Noel Coward presents you with such delicious writing, and you laugh so much with it.”

Married to a piano technician, with two fully grown daughters, Bruce also finds life on the road difficult, but is excited to be part of the inaugural season of the new Festival, “another new chapter” in Canadian theatre. “The work of interpretation, the thrill of being on stage, that is never gone. There’s something that is so amazing about theatre—you can’t replay it, you can’t rent it again, yet it’s a magical thing that lives on,” she says.

Blithe Spirit runs July 9-August 1, Wed.-Sat at 8 pm, with 2 pm matinees on Wed., Sat. & Sun. For tickets, call 1-877-283-1283 or order online at www.classictheatre.ca