Two particular rehearsals stand out in my memory. At one of the first rehearsals after I joined them, Michael began as usual talking about the play and related ideas. I’m a director and I could feel Albie and Maggie becoming energized, anxious, and ready to begin rehearsing. If it were me I would have had them on their feet; clearly they were ready. But Michael went on talking — and talking. Gradually Albie and Maggie slumped back in their chairs and engaged in the discussion. ‘What kind of director is this,’ I thought. He doesn’t know when his actors are ready to begin? Only later did I realize he didn’t care whether his actors were ready to begin; it was not his job to get a professional actor in the mood to work — they are professionals, they can do that on their own. It is his job to get them ready to work in the right way with the right understanding of the work they are to undertake.
Of course, they did finally get on their feet and rehearse the play. One day the rehearsal was electric, sparks flew between them. Had I been the director I would have been thrilled. What was Michael’s response? As I described earlier he took a slow puff on his cheroot, nodded his head, sat down with them at the table, and talked for two days. Britain may have had a class system in 1965, but it was a pale shadow of Sweden’s class system of the nineteenth century; the actors needed to understand, to feel, to embody the chains of that time so that on this Midsummer’s Eve they could rattle those chains, challenge that prison, and fail. Again, good acting was taken for granted. The work is to do the right acting.
Speaking of good acting, Finney was in such good form at one rehearsal I was sure he was improvising; his work was so fresh, so spontaneous. I kept checking the script. He was word perfect. Michael was leading Maggie to some of her best work ever. He would never let her rely on a trick. He took away all her mannerisms, all her props, leading her unerringly to the heart and tragic pain of the character.
In the middle of the play, the stage is invaded by a mob of peasants whose state of uninhibited release, permitted by the once a year tradition of Midsummer’s Eve, echoes and reveals the primal lust being released in the next room by Julie and Jean. The scene is brief, but powerful, dramatic, and chaotic. Michael gave the performers an inspiring talk and then turned the scene over to his choreographer Litz Pisk and me. Not that being a sounding board for Michael wasn’t illuminating, but finally I had something to do.
Was the play the success it should have been? Not entirely. It played in a double bill with Black Comedy and followed that piece, which in its original form might have set up Miss Julie nicely, but metamorphosed as it now was into a slapstick farce, the two plays were quite mismatched and certainly presented in the wrong order. Yet, a year later Michael wrote to me — I was by then in Canada — to tell me that when the double bill moved to the Old Vic in London Miss Julie had come together beautifully.
It is small wonder that Finney had to make a leap of imagination to grasp Strindberg’s experience of class structure. One day after the company had moved to Chichester for the summer he invited Veronica and me to dinner at the house he had rented a few miles south of town. Rather than give us directions he suggested we follow his car in ours. His car was a chauffeur driven Rolls-Royce — his insurance would not allow him to drive himself, not that he was a bad driver, he was too valuable an asset — while our car was a thirteen-year-old Aston Martin DB2 that might or might not last the short trip. When we arrived the four of us had drinks in the living room — he had his current lady friend with him — before moving to the dining room table, which was set for six. Before I could make a fool of myself by asking if there were more guests coming, the four of us were joined at the table by the chauffeur and the cook. The son of a bookie, Albie had not let his money betray his class.
One day I was watching a dress run-through of another play in the repertoire, Armstrong’s Last Goodnight, in which Albie was playing the lead. Although not a full dress rehearsal, it was pretty close to it; I was startled when Albie stopped the rehearsal before a long speech of his and said to the director, “I don’t know how to get into this.” What happened next, I don’t recall. But what has stuck with me to this day is there is no point chattering on with a long speech if you don’t know what gets you into it. I often tell students to rehearse the start of a monologue — no point rehearsing the rest of it if you don’t have the beginning working.
Before we moved to Chichester for the summer the manager asked me to make sure I saw a performance of Royal Hunt of the Sun in the London theatre, as I would be assisting Desmond O’Donovan when he directed the remount of John Dexter’s production in the fall. Duly noted. Duly done. But what neither of us predicted was that in the fall Desmond would not be available — illness, I think, but I don’t recall. So guess who is directing the remount of someone else’s production? That he has seen once several months earlier? The good news was that Dexter would return after the first week of rehearsal; I had only to man the ship until then. So my job along with an equally bewildered stage manager was to block five new leads into the production. Rehearsals went something like this: “Does anyone remember where X was standing at this point?” “Oh, thanks, Y move over to there, and where was Z then?” “No one knows? Well, try there, let’s see if that works, etc.” Hardly the best way to introduce oneself to this prestigious company as the dynamic young director of the future.
Gradually though it was becoming apparent that assistant directors at the National were just that, assistants. They weren’t seen as apprentice directors who would be given their own productions anytime soon. But another unexpected opportunity appeared. Finney asked me if I would assist him when he directed his first film. He was going to star in it so he needed a director to work with him. We both had seven months to go on our National contracts, but the project would begin at the end of that. Meanwhile we could location scout on weekends.
And so, while film was not a great ambition for me at the time, a working life stretched out in front of me, a longer horizon than most in my field. Veronica was well settled into her publishing job; we had a new garden flat in Hampstead, our aging Aston Martin was running as well as could be expected, and we had found a new water ski club. What’s to complain?
And then the telephone rang.
A Fork in the Road
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 d
o 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.
Canada Redux
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.
The National Theatre School of Canada
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?
Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir Page 17