Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (17 page)

The call was from Montreal. At the other end of the line was James de B. Domville, the Director General of the National Theatre School of Canada. Would I accept the position of Assistant Artistic Director of the English Acting Section? They would need me to start in two weeks, or maybe it was three, and could I give them an answer in three days. They would pay the costs of our move to Montreal and offered unheard of money, $7,000 a year.

Ouch. What do we do now? For some reason I was home alone that fateful afternoon; Veronica was still at work. Why couldn’t they have offered me the job to start in a year and a half? Why do I have to choose? So soon? Three days to decide the future course of my life? And Veronica’s? Why did they think of me at all? I guess I had written to them a couple of years earlier when the Dundee job had gone up in smoke and I really had been at a loose end. I don’t think they even replied.

A year or so earlier Veronica and I had joined the Bonnington’s Water Ski Club north of London. As far back as my childhood and CBC Radio, skiing had always been a countervailing force competing for my attention with my professional aspirations. London, England, lacked two important ingredients for skiing: snow and hills. Our solution, as we were both keen to ski, was to ski on water. Bonnington’s was more a social club than a ski club, having only a tiny body of water too small for a slalom course and two outboard boats. They did, however, have a pair of trick skis and a jump. It was here that I first began to trick ski, though no one had any idea how any tricks should be done — or even what foot to put the single ski on. Still, somehow I got started in the event in which I now hold a couple of national records in my age division.

Bonnington’s also had a jump, and unlike trick skiing, had one member who actually knew how to do it. For weeks, with more bravado than intention, I had been saying to Veronica and anyone else who would listen that I would like to try that. Well, be careful what you wish for. One day I was doing something up at the clubhouse and Veronica had gone on down to the site. When I joined her a bit later she was in conversation with a young man who turned out to be the experienced jumper. “Ah, Bill, I hear you want to jump. Here’s what you do. Hey Rob, bring the boat around, Bill’s going to jump.” Oh my God. Before I could protest, I was on the water wearing jump skis and approaching a wooden ramp that appeared before me like a giant wall. In seconds I was flying through the air and in another second my skis hit the water with a thump. I don’t remember where I landed, but it wasn’t on the skis. But on my third attempt I finally managed to land upright and ski away. I was now a “three-event skier” — slalom, tricks, and jump being the three competitive events in water skiing.

Some things should not be done under stress, however. Ski jumping is one. Walking downstairs can be another. The day after the fateful call from Montreal, our minds churning with indecision, I happened to be ski jumping at the Prince’s Water Ski Club, just outside London, while Veronica was at work. At almost the same time, she fell down the stairs at her office and I crashed and sprained my ankle. Somehow we both managed to hobble home and somehow managed to set up dinner for Michael Elliott whom we had previously invited.

Sitting around a card table we had set up in the living room, my leg propped up on something, Michael, a genuine mentor, tried to help us with our decision. We agreed that there might not be much to be gained from the further seven months I had on my contract at the National, and to my slight dismay he seemed to think he could deal with the remount of
Miss Julie
at the Old Vic without me. On the other side, if I had ambitions to be an important director, was it a good idea to lock myself into a teaching position? It did seem though that the National would likely release me from my contract and Finney, though he would be disappointed, could get along without me as well.

What finally tipped the balance? I had always planned to return to Canada; remember my ambition was to be Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario by the time I was twenty-nine, and here the National Theatre School was prepared to pay my way and give me a job. And what seemed like a lot of money at the time. But after all the professional pros and cons had been weighed and the result inconclusive, one fact remained. Montreal was a ski town, in the middle of some of the best skiing in Eastern North America. We made our decision.

But there were things to do and quickly. Olivier was generous and helpful, Finney was indeed let down but understanding. The toughest thing to do was sell our Aston Martin. By this time there was such a leak of oil into one cylinder that we had to put in a fresh spark plug every time we started the car. And by the time people were coming to look at it, all the doors had jammed and we could only get into the car through the hatchback. Still, some dealer found a few pounds for us and took it off our hands, and we were on our way to a new life in a new city in my old country, but a new one for Veronica. It would be another thirty-five years before I returned to Britain. And by then I would be an actor.

I had only been away five years, but what a change was there. The stuffy Protestant fifties were nowhere to be seen, in Catholic Quebec at least. Money for the arts was flowing from many different sources. I kept asking Jim Domville how things could be afforded. His reply? Canada has lots of money, not a refrain one ever heard in the fifties. In Toronto, the Crest had finally given way; the future was subsidized community-run arts organizations, not family businesses. In Montreal the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, performing in the new Place des Arts, was one of several flourishing French language theatre companies. Regional theatres were being established across the country: the Playhouse in Vancouver, the Citadel in Edmonton, the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg, and the Neptune in Halifax. Money was flowing into opera companies and symphony orchestras. On the negative side, television was now trying to ape U.S. commercial television, and the great drama series that actually presented plays were gone. And radio drama was but a pale shadow of its former greatness.

And then there was Separatism. Canada is divided into ten provinces of varying sizes. One large province, Quebec, occupies a prominent geographic position just right of the centre of the country, although its politics have usually been to the left of the centre of the country. But its significant difference from the rest of Canada is that it is largely French-speaking. One evening when I was still in England I heard Malcolm Muggeridge interview four or five well dressed articulate Quebecers who were making the case that they were a colonized people and deserved to have their own country. I knew little more than that when I arrived in Quebec. Gradually one came to see their point. When we first arrived in Montreal we stayed for a few days with my aunt Marge in Mount Royal, an English-speaking conclave on the north side of the hill that dominates the city and is affectionately called “the Mountain.” She had lived in Montreal all her life, but spoke not a word of French, and while not meaning to be disparaging, referred to those that did as “the French people” in a tone that clearly suggested a class distinction. The English had always been the bosses in Quebec. When I learned to ski at Mont Tremblant in 1950, the owners were English; the French packed the runs on snowshoes. A reckoning was at hand.

In the next few years that reckoning would come to a head. In 1967, the Parti Québécois was founded, devoted to establishing national sovereignty for Quebec. In July, during Montreal’s Expo 67, the French president Charles de Gaulle uttered his famous cry from a balcony,
“Vive le Québec Libre!”
In 1970, a diplomat and a cabinet minister were kidnapped by members of the FLQ (
Front de libération du Québec
); the cabinet minister, Pierre Laporte, subsequently murdered after Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had invoked the War Measures Act to suppress the movement. Many artists and performers were members of the FLQ, and, while likely not supporting violent action, supported the goal of an independent Quebec. Late the same night when the War Measures Act was passed, the FLQ was declared illegal. Early the next morning before that decision was made public, the police knocked on the doors of many prominent artists and asked them if they were members of the FLQ. When they affirmed that, yes, they were, they were arrested. The legislation also made it illegal to publish or distribute the FLQ’s manifesto. Needless to say, you could not find a federalist among the French students of the National Theatre School. Rebellious and idealistic, the French students took on the job of printing and distributing the manifesto. Despite two referenda on sovereignty in succeeding years, the separatists have not achieved their
prima facie
goal of an independent nation, but there is no denying the transformation of Quebec society their movement prompted. The English bosses are gone; French is the language of work; a generation of Francophone Quebecers has no memory of their hat-tipping ancestors of the forties and fifties.

French/English was only one axis of this turbulent time. Add to the mix the conflict of generations — ‘don’t trust anyone over thirty’ (luckily I was just twenty-seven) — the tension between druggies and straights, and an overwhelming distrust of authority, especially in schools, and you have a recipe to challenge the most experienced chef. And yet none of the chefs, nor their assistants, like me, grasped the scope of the changes happening in the generations younger than they. I may have thought I was coming home when I returned to Canada in the fall of 1965, but for all I understood of it I might as well have been landing on another planet.

Yet it didn’t look different. The Montreal Canadièns, my favourite team since I was ten years old, still dominated the National Hockey League, cars were as big and plushy as ever, and winter in Quebec was wonderfully relentless, cheering the skiers and frustrating everyone else.

For some it was a dream come true. For me it was a job. Perhaps it was just as well that I was out of the country in the years when the School was being conceived, promoted, and initiated. Would it have been better had I known ahead of time that the institution — I use the term advisedly — had goals it could not possibly achieve, that it had a crushing bureaucratic structure that could only suppress creativity, that it had drawn its models from European dinosaurs instead of the lean and flexible English schools I had come to know so well? Place this cumbersome institution in the turmoil of the times and what do you get?

In the late fifties a prestigious committee of Canadian theatre people was formed to begin the planning for a national theatre school. David Gardner, who once did my makeup when as a boy I played a monkey for the Straw Hat Players, was the Chair (was he unwittingly making a monkey of me again?) and the aforementioned Michel Saint-Denis was the Artistic Advisor. Mavor Moore, also a member of the committee, wrote at the time in his memoir,
Reinventing Myself
, “At long last our theatre has found a national voice that can be heard from coast to coast.” The School was to be truly national in scope, combining and uniting the English and French cultures, ignoring the fact that French actors under the age of thirty had no interest in uniting with the English or that young English actors were congenitally incapable of learning French. Nonetheless it was believed that not only would the school contribute to the creation of a uniquely Canadian theatre, it would contribute to the unity of the country. What were they smoking?

It was certainly a good idea to start a theatre school. Canadian actors needed training and the opportunity to train in their own country, and while some patchwork programs were being developed at some universities, the country lacked a real conservatory program where the training could be specific and not diluted by other educational imperatives. But the ambitions for the School overshot any realistic target. Of course, maybe high falutin’ talk was the only way to get money. I guess if they had just said they wanted a school that would locate talented actors, train them to be better actors, and then send them out in the world, no one would have been interested. But face it, isn’t that what the first class London drama schools were doing?

I should declare my bias before I go too far. The National Theatre School fired me in 1970, or more delicately, ‘did not renew my contract.’ I’ve had many setbacks in my professional life, not to mention my personal life, but I’m not sure any have haunted me as much as this. Going into the job in 1965 I really believed I could make a terrific go of it. That it came to naught has been a mystery that challenged me on many levels both personally and professionally. One would hate to use a memoir to justify oneself as many have done, but as I look back on the School and my time there, I wonder . . . maybe it wasn’t me . . . just maybe.

The National Theatre School/L’École nationale de théâtre began in the fall of 1960 in three rooms on Mountain Street in Montreal. Ironically the school may well have opened on a mountain peak, only to slide inexorably down the side as size and compromise inevitably limited creativity and excitement. Early graduates included Martha Henry (formerly Martha Buhs referred to earlier), Heath Lamberts, Diana LeBlanc, Donnelly Rhodes, Kenneth Welsh, and John Juliani. By the time I arrived the School had expanded and was housed on the upper three floors of an office building at 407 St. Laurent, the street known affectionately as “The Main.” Farther up the street the school had obtained a lease on the ancient Monument-National theatre in the midst of the raucous entertainment section of the city.

Originally intended to be a bilingual school in keeping with Canada’s two official languages, by 1965 its best hope was to be “co-lingual,” a place where the two languages and cultures could live side by side and learn from one another. Even that simple aim flew in the face of the realities of the time. As it was put to me, “If one culture believes it is dominated by the other, it is not going to want to be influenced by it.” And so in many ways the school mirrored the “two solitudes” of the country, only in closer proximity than before. Originally the School was to be in Toronto, but there being so little French culture in Toronto the French students would have been in a cultural wasteland. Anyway, since to a woman all the French students were separatists can you imagine their agreeing to study in Toronto? No, the only possible location was Montreal, but unfortunately that left the English in a cultural wasteland only partially alleviated by moving the school to Stratford for a month in the summer, an experiment that was abandoned after a few years.

If the glorious goal of a uniquely Canadian culture was not to be forged in the crucible of a bilingual school, the structure required to pretend to do so limited the possibility of achieving the more realistic goal — good training for good actors. In 1965 the School had three distinct sections: the French Acting Section, the English Acting Section, and a Production/Design Section. Andre Muller was director of the French Acting Section, Duncan Ross, director of the English Section, and David Peacock, head of the Production Section. Since the three sections needed to share staff, space, and budget, they could not be autonomous; all three reported to the Director General, James de B. Domville, sometimes by way of the secretive administrator, Jean Pol Britte, who reported only to Domville. A study in contrasts, Jim and Jean Pol created an impenetrable roadblock. Both workaholics, Jim was a messy, disorganized, chain-smoking arts executive with little artistic background, other than having been a producer of the wildly successful college review
My Fur Lady
. Still, he was gregarious, and helpful to Veronica and me settling into a new city. Britte, on other hand, was reclusive and private, in the office an hour before the school opened with a desk so clean you could eat off it. Problem was, he was so private the finances of the school were a mystery to everyone else. If money were needed for a workshop or to bring in an instructor, it was available if Britte said it was and not if he didn’t, the purported department heads not having access to the relevant numbers.

And so where Michael MacOwan could make the decisions needed to create a dynamic school in the image of his and his teachers’ vision, Duncan Ross could not, as he formerly had at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School — one reason, possibly the main reason, why Duncan (known as Bill) quit after one year. Even such a simple question as length of a class had to be decided by the committee as a whole.

Domville — with the fancy titles Executive Director in English and
Director Général
in French — occupied a large prestigious office while the artistic directors had tiny cubicles. What did that say about the organization? And its values? I was never very clear about what Jim did; all that was certain was that he did a lot. He was at the office until late and always took work home with him. Curiously, when he left the School in 1968 we didn’t replace him. Perhaps some of that work wasn’t strictly necessary?

Duncan (Bill) Ross had been hired the previous spring to take over from Powys Thomas, the original director of the English Acting Program. Former head of the Bristol Old Vic School in England, Bill had been lured away from the University of Washington where he and his large family had settled when they left England. For me to be hired sight unseen as his assistant was a risk for both of us, I guess, but it worked out amazingly well. Our personalities meshed well and our approaches to the work overlapped sufficiently. His hard-nosed British temperament — he had been in the services and he supported the Vietnam War — sometimes led him to dismiss an actor’s emotion as self-indulgent when I, a sentimental Canadian, would find the work true. But we were in accord on most actor training issues.

A red-headed Brit who looked more like a soccer coach than an acting teacher, Bill was one of those brilliant Englishmen who had failed his “eleven plus,” that life-altering exam used in the English educational system at the time to separate the brains from the dross. According to this test Bill was the dross, despite having some of the highest possible marks in English. No one meeting him in 1965 would have thought him either dull or uneducated. Self-educated, he was a living rebuke to the eleven plus exam, which was thankfully abandoned some years later.

My first rehearsal class was Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
, with the first year students. Susan King, now the established actress Susan Hogan, played Emily with a lovely truth that informs all her work to this day. No one taught her that. Others in that class included: Wayne Specht, still the Director of Axis Theatre in Vancouver; Luba Goy, famous for the
Royal Canadian Air Farce
; the playwright John Lazarus; and Bonnie Blair Brown who has had a major American career. Later in the year I did a Shaw exercise with the second year class, a group that included future successful actors Richard Donat, Deborah Kipp, Peggy Mahon, Carolyn Younger, and actor turned director, the late Neil Munro.

My first year at the school was a good year, and I don’t recall ever second-guessing my decision to come to Montreal. I had a contract that stipulated thirty-seven and a half hours a week of work. Remember those days? When one was expected to work hard at one’s job, but then have a life as well? We skied every weekend, watched the Canadièns win the Stanley Cup, heck, even watched television once in a while.

Following a now well established pattern, first at Chesterfield, then at Dundee, the man I had been hired to work for decided — for reasons that I’m pretty sure had nothing to do with me — to leave, putting my future once again in limbo. Within a few months of my arrival Bill announced that he would leave at the end of the current academic year. Why had he decided to leave? Who would replace him?

When Bill left the University of Washington for Montreal, his future at NTS seemed uncertain in his own mind. He rented two adjoining apartments in downtown Montreal, one for him and his wife and the other for his many children. He did not resign from the university but simply took a leave. My guess is that he was drawn to working again in a truly professional academy with serious and talented students, but frustrated by the limitations imposed on him by the structure of the school and an artistic mandate created by others. He was a proud man who needed to be his own boss, something the structure of the school did not allow. He was not a fan of the previous regime, the Powys Thomas/Saint-Denis method, if it could be called that. Powys was an inspirational teacher, but to Bill he was more inspiration than teacher. Perhaps he inspired students but he didn’t teach them anything useful. When Bill sat in on one of Powys’s classes, Powys’s direction to one of the students was “think of the Welsh fire.” What is an actor supposed to do with that? Finally, it didn’t help that Bill hated Montreal and longed to get back to Seattle.

I, of course, had no doubt who should replace Bill. The other Bill. Me. It was time the job was held by a Canadian — and, unlike Bill Ross, I still had some sympathy with the optimistic aims for a national Canadian school. True, I was only twenty-eight, but in those early days of Canadian theatre there really was no one else in the country with my experience as both a professional director and teacher. I was the logical candidate. In my mind. A considerable period of uncertainty followed. Domville thought I was a good candidate, but would be a better candidate if I served the three-year apprenticeship as assistant that my current contract specified. All very well, I thought, but who would I be working for during the next two years, and anyway even if it were someone I liked they might stay for fifteen. I would have happily worked for Bill Ross for another two years, but the prospect of someone unknown was worrying. Some of the names I heard bandied about did not inspire my confidence. While I had not known Duncan (Bill) Ross before I came, I knew who he was and he had been highly recommended to me by David Forder from Colchester. Now I was facing a complete blank. Was it time to move on for me as well?

I guess there was a lot of soul searching in ‘upper management,’ but in the end Bill Ross announced to the English students that he had recommended that I take over. I was to be the Artistic Director beginning in the fall of 1966. While it now seemed unlikely that I would make my goal of being Artistic Director of Stratford by the time I was twenty-nine, Artistic Director of NTS at twenty-eight seemed a pretty close second. And Veronica and I got to stay in Montreal, ski in Vermont, and cheer for the Montreal Canadièns.

Veronica landed firmly on her feet in Montreal working with Peter Desbarats, first on his new magazine
Parallel
and later with him and Laurier LaPierre on a new current affairs program, eventually hosting her own show in Ottawa. After a couple of years we could afford a lovely apartment at the corner of St. Marc and St. Catherine’s, just a couple of blocks from the Montreal Forum, and a small A-frame near the ski area, Jay Peak, in Vermont. When the school moved to Stratford in the summer we were able to weekend in Muskoka and holiday there in the summer break. Once again life stretched out happily in front of us. Once again it would not last.

Directing opportunities arose in some of the new professional theatres across the country and NTS was supportive of the faculty maintaining professional credibility. The first of these was a production of
The American Dream
at the Red Barn Theatre, a summer stock company in Jackson’s Point, north of Toronto. Malcolm Black, the new Artistic Director of the Vancouver Playhouse, saw the production and invited me to direct
Candida
, the opening play of his 1966 season. I had known Malcolm, a mild-mannered Englishman, years before when he was General Manager of the Crest in Toronto and my summer stock partner Karl Jaffary was the House Manager. Karl described Malcolm’s mysterious interruption of financial discussions. They would get to a certain point when regularly Malcolm would excuse himself and go to his office. Eventually, Karl figured out that Malcolm had never learned to multiply — another failing of the English educational system? One must remember that this was not only before computers, but before the simple calculator. How Malcolm coped in his office, Karl never knew. Perhaps he had a slide rule.