Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir

by William B. Davis

  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. Perhap
s 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.

  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 scho
ol, 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.