Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (18 page)

I headed off in September to direct Frances Hyland in
Candida
, the opening play of the Vancouver Playhouse 1966 season. Hutchison Shandro, who would figure in my life later and my cousin Donald’s even later, was playing Marchbanks. One of the biggest stars of Canadian theatre at the time, Frannie was one of the smartest and hardest-working actors I have ever encountered. What a contrast with, say, Judi Dench, whose biography I recently read. Whereas Dench would never read a play she was going to do prior to the first rehearsal, from the time Frannie knew she was going to do the play until the first rehearsal, she had read
Candida
every day. Keeping up with her was an artistic and intellectual challenge. The production was very successful and Malcolm tried very hard to persuade me to direct the third play of his season,
Peer Gynt
. Tempted though I was, taking on another outside production so soon might have compromised my work at the School. It would also have conflicted with the beginning of the ski season but, of course, that had nothing to do with my decision to turn down the offer.

But it was now my job to develop the English Acting Section of the National Theatre School, a task, in the arrogance of my youth, I was confident I could do well. First off, I needed to replace me as Assistant to the Artistic Director and here I made a decision that, in the end, was perhaps a greater benefit to Canadian theatre as a whole than it was to the School itself. I brought my old colleague from Dundee, best man at my wedding, Maurice Podbrey, to Canada. Maurice would later go on to found the Centaur Theatre in Montreal, a thriving institution to this day. While Maurice was an asset to the School in many ways, it was some time before I realized that he was not the inspiration to the students that I had hoped for.

From a twenty-first century perspective the struggle to find good acting teachers may seem odd indeed. Now it seems one cannot turn around in this business without running into an acting teacher, and some of them, not all by any means, are very good. But making matters worse for the English Section of the school, whatever teaching talent there might have been at the time was based in Toronto, or possibly Vancouver, but not in Montreal where there was no work for English-speaking actors, in theatre, television, or film. So why were we trying to run an English acting school in Montreal? Yes indeed. Why were we?

Still, we were able to invite directors from across Canada and Britain to come in for a few weeks at a time, including my old principal from LAMDA, Michael MacOwan. More limiting, at least in terms of developing a coherent vision, were the teachers who worked in both the French and English Sections of the school, and were, in effect, imposed on me. Louis Spritzer was the resident voice and singing teacher and Jeff Henry the movement teacher. And so, while the Warren/Linklater approach to voice was at the heart of my sense of actor training, I inherited two teachers with very different philosophies.

Not that Louis and Jeff were bad teachers. They were very good teachers, but not part of a coherent team, coming from different backgrounds, and as teachers in both sections of the school working in two very different contexts. Coherent creative teams are rare, but wonderful to behold when they exist. When such a team exists, communication is seamless, artistic goals and methods collectively understood, and high achievement possible. There is no need for expensive and cumbersome conferences at Stanley House, a retreat on the East Coast where the staff of NTS all repaired one year for a week of planning. The original planners of NTS may have thought such a team was possible, but given the dual language and culture of the institution, those visionaries were, unfortunately, mistaken.

By this time, the original advisor to the school, Michel Saint-Denis, had died, but from time to time his wife, Suria, would be invited — not by me — to look in on the school and see if her husband’s philosophy, whatever that was, was being carried out. I did read his book, but was no wiser after than I was before. No doubt, Saint-Denis personally was an inspirational figure; his wife was not. Somehow it seemed my work was being measured against the fleeting images of a ghost. Not only was it expected that Saint-Denis’s undefined vision was to be followed but his iconic status remained unchallenged. The truth is, Saint-Denis did not run the famous Old Vic School in London just after the war as is so often alleged; George Devine did. Saint-Denis was the Director General of the larger institution, the Old Vic Centre, and under his leadership the whole edifice collapsed after just a few years. Yet here we were, destined to follow in his footsteps, muddy and dated though they were. Meantime we had in the school, at my invitation, a man who had indeed run a highly successful acting school, but no one asked Michael MacOwan to comment on the School’s founding principles.

But perhaps the question of training begs yet another question: what do we want the training to produce? Can we agree on what good acting is? Even here, the opinions of experts and lay people alike seem to find no focus; one person’s caviar is another person’s catfish. Sometimes, sometimes, there appears to be universal agreement that a great performance has been given, but total unanimity of opinion is rare indeed. But at least I know what I want to see in an actor’s performance: a dynamic reality, a life that flows between the actors, where each actor influences the other, and the outcome always appears uncertain.

One of my favourite ways of assessing acting is to listen to talking from another room or the hallway. I shouldn’t be able to tell whether the people I can’t see are acting or talking. Years later, when I was running the Vancouver Playhouse Acting School, I went by the closed door of the student locker room. Two of the students were engaged in the most fearful argument. I stood outside the door trying to decide whether to intervene when the door suddenly opened and two happy students emerged feeling really good about the rehearsal they had just had.

If the structure of the school were not challenge enough, remember this was the Sixties, when challenging authority was de rigueur. Students were confronting faculty in every school in the province; I believe there was one week when NTS was the only school open in Montreal. There was a huge uproar in the French Section, students demanding that their work be more reflective of Quebec and less of France. Eight graduating students in the French Section quit the program. While nothing so dramatic happened in the English Section, English traditions being famously less dramatic than French, pressure for change was insistent, though what the change should be was seldom clear. And the line between the teacher generation whatever their chronological age and the student generation was far sharper than in my student days. Was it simply because the students did drugs and we didn’t? Whatever the reasons, it was not an easy time to be director of a school, any school.

One staff member left the school to set up a utopian group in rural Quebec and took two of our best students with him. Fortunately, one of them, now known as Chapelle Jaffe, returned to the school and has had a distinguished career as an actor and administrator. Nothing was ever heard of the utopian theatre group.

Meantime, I continued to direct in theatre across the country as well as in Vermont where I directed
A Winter’s Tale
for the Champlain Shakespeare Festival. I returned to Vancouver in 1967 to direct another play with Frances Hyland, and then had a wonderful time in Halifax directing
The Subject Was Roses
at the Neptune with Ron Hastings, who would later become a stalwart in my company at Lennoxville. These outside gigs were a breath of fresh air for me. Was there something stifling about the School? Whatever the reason, I always returned to the School after these projects with a renewed sense of purpose and confidence.

The academic year 1969–1970 was a pivotal one for the School, for me, and for marriage number two. As I indicated earlier, when Jim Domville left the school, to glowing praise and ceremonial send off, we did not replace him. The School would be run by a triumvirate consisting of the directors of the two acting sections and David Peacock, the Director of the Production Section, who would chair the committee. There would be no Director General. I was delighted with the plan; the artists would be running the school, as so they should. However well it worked, it didn’t last; I should have been suspicious when David moved into Jim’s large office. After a time he proposed to the Board (curiously all three of us never reported to the Board, only David) that he be made Director General, and they agreed.

David, another Englishman, for whom “the army never did me any harm,” was, I imagine, an excellent stage manager. He might well have been a good teacher of stage management and related production techniques. We got on well, travelled across the country together each year on the audition tour, but I couldn’t say we ever shared a sense of artistic purpose. The book
The Peter Principle
came out around that time, the central idea being that people keep getting promoted until they arrive at a job in which they are incompetent and there the promotions stop. So, almost by definition, most people are in jobs for which they are not suited. David said he found this ‘the most frightening book he had ever read.’ Unfortunately, he did not let that observation affect his career path. Nor, I have to admit, did I.

If you dropped in on the Sixties from the twenty-first century you might think you were on another planet, and not just because there were no cell phones. The Sixties must have been one of the strangest eras in Western social history. It is not my role here to endeavour to explain it or even to describe it, but I am trying to come to terms with my role in it, how I dealt with it, and how it dealt with me. Separation of faculty and student, so jealously protected now in the twenty-first century, was challenged by students in all institutions. Students demanded a voice, a loud voice, in how their schools were run. The further removed faculty were from the students, the greater the dissension. I remember Fred Euringer, then running the Drama Department at Queens, saying the location of the coffee was critical to a successful department; it needed to be located where faculty and students would mingle. And yet, at this very time, the National Theatre School was planning a new building, its current location on St. Denis, and the design called for the faculty to have separate quarters on a floor where no student would go unless invited. I insisted that if the School proceeded with this plan, it might not survive. In 1970, I was probably right. By 1972, I was wrong. And I’m still wrong as the school survives to this day. That historical moment flared out as fast as it flared up.

But while it was in flare-up phase, educators everywhere were challenged. Most of us, raised in the fifties when everyone ‘knew their place,’ struggled to find common ground with this strange generation of students, who demanded new original thinking, but had no agreement among themselves about what that thinking should be. I was young enough to have one foot in their world, but too old to be one of them. I was almost thirty, after all. For me, it was an opportunity to examine the creative process itself, to experiment with ways to enhance a student’s potential, to make the talented actor more talented, not simply more skillful. Among the experiments was a marathon encounter group — marathon encounter groups were all the rage at this time — conducted by the noted cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis. In retrospect, was this an appropriate activity for a first-year class at the National Theatre School? Well, the class did agree to it in advance and the work they did afterwards was astonishing. Efficacious or not, a national theatre school, established to serve all students in the country, may not be a place for experiment.

A glimpse of the times. Earlier that year, 1969, one of the first year students, Judith Hodgson, whose family had a farm in the Eastern Townships south of Montreal, invited the class and some faculty to a party one weekend at her farm when her parents were not going to be there. Veronica and I drove up from our cabin in Vermont and walked into another world. I think Judith was the only one not completely fried on some kind of drug and with whom we were able to have a conversation. Maybe they weren’t all stoned, maybe we just arrived too late, but we soon excused ourselves and left. We probably didn’t need to excuse ourselves; I’m not sure we were even noticed.

Another glimpse. Three of the students invited me to a Janis Joplin concert at the Montreal Forum. Joplin, high on Southern Comfort, gradually stirred up the crowd, high on other things, and urged everyone sitting higher up to come down to the floor, maybe to dance, I don’t remember. So we trekked down the stairs and attempted to enter at one of the lower entrances only to be blocked by some of Montreal’s finest. Others might have challenged them, but I wasn’t going to. I turned my back and started out when one of the cops followed me and gave me a huge shove even though I was already leaving. Now I understood why they were called “pigs.”

On this other planet, this 1969 planet, personal relations between staff and students were very different than they are today. So far as I know, no one worried whether a liaison between a student and staff member might affect his or her marks, not relevant in a theatre school anyway as there were no marks. Married people tried to keep liaisons secret as they do now, but single people felt no such inhibition. Students are people. Faculty are people. Why shouldn’t they interact as people? Sex too was very different on this planet. It was an era of breaking down barriers. People slept around. A lot. But it was not like now; sex was not a recreation as it seems to be now among the young, it was a serious connection with another person. Sex between staff and students was not only not surprising, it was expected. Or so I comfort myself by thinking.