by Anny Scoones
Theatre Inconnu means “unknown theatre.” It’s a great name for this little company, which has been performing plays in Victoria since 1978, usually in tiny venues that seat perhaps fewer than fifty people, but then, the intimacy of theatre, of life, is what it’s all about.
Clayton Jevne, the theatre’s artistic director, and I had a drink (or two) at the Fernwood Inn one evening—we sat on high stools by a window that looked out onto yet another drizzly night, and as the rain hit the glass we talked about not only the intimacy of theatre but also its unpredictability. Unpredictability is lacking in traditional theatre, and that’s okay—it’s nice to know what you are getting. Some people don’t like surprises, and even more, some people like to have a good time and see a joyful play with a happy ending, not a depressing one—there are times when we just don’t want to see reality and the truth of our vulnerabilities and limitations. Clayton’s plays are full of truth and reality and it’s often not a pretty sight! But it’s a play, and just because at times the themes are perhaps a bit morose or even gruesome (as life can be) doesn’t mean you cannot enjoy yourself.
When an artist paints a bleak scene with great skill, a scene that moves you, we call it great art, and especially when music brings us to tears, we call it genius, but often when a play depicts something sad or unseemly, we are a bit more uncomfortable—perhaps it is because we are among others in an audience and we cannot either move on or turn it off (as in looking at a painting or listening to music). Our feeling of commitment to being stuck there in our seats distracts us and overcomes the art, the play. Theatre might be one of the few art forms that plays this terrible trick on us—it’s like having our mouths washed out with soap, and yet, perhaps ironically, that makes it a more powerful art form.
Clayton loves plays that “take him by surprise” and that “rip his heart out.” He can face it—he loves it. I attended a play Clayton staged, a one-man production of Hamlet. Clayton played all the characters, and although Hamlet is a sad and powerful piece of art, Clayton had infused humour—the unpredictable. He used balloons for all the characters and as they died (by killing each other off!), he popped the balloons—the message was both dramatically powerful and tragic, yet the drama also had a hint of humour as balloon after balloon popped in the frantic climactic rampage. Clayton combined comedy and tragedy—the opposite sides of the same coin, simply by using balloons. It’s how we all live.
Clayton is devoted to creating theatre that is not elite; his vision of theatre is for the general public’s experience. Superior art is actually not elitist, so Clayton and his theatre company focus on providing non-cliquey theatre; you begin by entering the “lobby,” a little room with local art hung on the white walls, often done by a group of challenged adults. When I saw his Hamlet, the walls were hung with art painted by people with brain injuries. You buy your ticket from a quiet man at a plywood table, and then for a small donation, you can have coffee and locally baked morsels (which Clayton even serves).
Then you go into the dark theatre draped with black cloth around the small stage. There are bathrooms at the back and Clayton said there have been some minor renovations backstage so that actors won’t have to run across the street to the inn to change into their costumes. The seats are basic chairs, not red velvet.
Balmoral Street
The plays are extremely professional, and could sometimes perhaps be disturbing, but what do we call disturbing? Do they make you think about life? That may not be as disturbing as we think—it may be productive. Why is it that we can watch a disturbing film, but find the closeness of humanity in a theatre so much more difficult?
You never know what to expect or what you may feel or experience at Theatre Inconnu. It’s just as Emily at The Paint Box and I said, you never know what’s around the corner and when you might catch it—a delightful surprise may await you at one of Clayton’s plays, a new thought that might change our world!
Fernwood truly is a cultural and artistic hub, but it’s more than that; it’s a place that understands our vulnerabilities, our highs and lows, the momentary leaping of our hearts, our great woes. People in Fernwood seem to know that we are as fragile as a bubble or a balloon, with thin nerves so easily broken, or a tender seedling, but also as tenacious as an earthworm on its way to a warm bundle of microbes, a ukulele band playing a maritime jig, or a strong Turkish coffee. Fernwood feels the human spirit and it attracts people whose emotions are close to the surface—they wear their hearts on their sleeves, and maybe that’s why art and nature play such a major role in this neighbourhood. People here are not afraid of feeling what it means to be human, and art and nature are their strength.
Royal Jubilee Hospital: Surprise Treasures!
The Royal Jubilee Hospital is only a few blocks east of Fernwood Village and has recently undergone some very attractive renovations—it reminded me of the Vancouver airport with great sunlit lobbies, waterfalls, public art, and curved wooden reception counters.
Down a few hallways and up the elevator you come upon a beautiful, sun-drenched courtyard atop a rocky knoll nestled amongst the new brick-and-glass towers. Here you may visit the historic Pemberton Memorial Chapel, dating back to 1909 and lovingly restored in 1998 by the Royal Jubilee Hospital School of Nursing Alumnae.
The chapel is a dear little brick structure and well worth a quiet visit. It is surrounded by a fragrant Victorian-styled garden, patios, and benches, as well as a Japanese garden. Amongst the lavender beds and simple elegant stones is also the restored Pemberton Memorial Operating Room, a National Heritage Site. Joseph Despard Pemberton was the first surveyor general of Vancouver Island.
Who would have ever thought that you could visit a hospital for entertainment purposes? And how civil it is, how compassionate and sophisticated, to include these beautiful gardens and historic features within our hospital facility.
Quadra Street near Hillside Avenue
CHAPTER SIX
Quadra
It’s a funny thing, but quite often the largest and most normal working family neighbourhoods are ignored for exactly this reason, that they are quiet and modest and people go about their day-to-day business and there seems to be nothing original or spectacular or culturally unique in these areas. This applies, for instance, to the Quadra area north of downtown, spreading northward into the peninsula toward the highway and the Saanich suburbs.
Perhaps it is exactly the quiet, normal lifestyle of these hard-working families that is in fact unique; we wouldn’t have a city without these neighbourhoods like Quadra, which are made up of quiet, tree-lined streets, modest family homes with bikes and toys on the front lawn, men washing the car on the weekends, and unpruned lilacs falling onto the sidewalks where children have done chalk drawings and played hopscotch. There are numerous recreational athletic parks and basketball courts where soccer and ball games are played by the local youth after school as they trudge home from public schools with loaded backpacks.
Natural, scenic landscaped parks and gardens in this neighbourhood are not as common as in the seashore neighbourhoods. The parks in the Quadra area serve a purpose other than for strolling and looking at nature—they serve families. There are community centres that hold “teen barbecue nights” and day camps in the summer. Sinewy boys glide along the sidewalks and jump off the curbs on their beaten-up skateboards. Mothers keep watch over their toddlers playing in the sandboxes in the numerous pocket playgrounds, and young girls in sparkly pink T-shirts talk together on the sidewalks as they amble home from school.
This large neighbourhood is not fancy, nor does it have a “poor but proud” feeling, but rather, it just is. The Quadra lifestyle is simply just how we all live day to day, taking care of our families, friends, homes, lawns, and cars, playing sports, paying our taxes, holding garage sales or barbecues for the neighbourhood baseball team, going out to dinner nearby on the weekend, returning books to the library, taking swimming lessons at the local pool, shovelling snow on the rare day in winter w
hen we get it, building a snowman in the front yard. There is something secure about normalness, something calm and nice about creating and living a life based on the routine of having a job and a family and a home.
Quadra Street is long, running from downtown all the way out to the highway, the length of Victoria, actually. At the downtown end, there are numerous heritage churches—huge old brick-and-stone structures with steeples, grand carved entrances, and stained-glass windows. A block farther north there are just as many new churches.
Up Quadra past the churches there are practical shops and services; this is what the Quadra neighbourhood is: practical, down-to-earth, and family oriented. There is a bicycle shop, a tax service, a medi-chair and scooter outlet, and a funeral-planning place where you can select your coffin!
A little farther along is Victoria’s new police station. It’s a beautiful, streamlined reddish-brown building and the most striking feature about the exterior is the public art on the corner; it’s a sculpture of five people (two are women) holding up a giant, rectangular slab of smooth, white polished rock; the people are leaning with all their might to keep the slab from crushing them. It’s called Trust and Harmony. Inside the station is a small museum jammed with police memorabilia, including old handcuffs, smelling salts, and a rubber contraption resembling a primitive form of some sort of squirt bottle. There’s an old 1938 Harley-Davidson motorbike with a sidecar, and Victoria’s first automated traffic light, large and cumbersome and painted dark green—it stood on the corner of Douglas and Johnson Streets in 1935.
Just beyond the police station is the aged Victoria Curling Rink, which is still used and not just for curling; its enormous, hollow, dim space is home to the giant Times Colonist book sale, a fantastic annual event that raises money for literacy. The first year I went, I stood in a long line and watched people wheeling out stacks of books on dollies and in carry-on luggage, and I thought, “Wow, those people are obsessed with books; I’ll only buy one or two,” but when I got to the massive, musty-smelling rink with its fluorescent lighting and scuffed walls, I couldn’t pull myself away and finally left with two boxes of beautiful, hardcover books that each cost one dollar! One of the books I found was an old nature book from 1932 with lovely coloured illustrations of strange animals and their habits. The fries and burgers at the rink canteen are very good too.
The Quadra neighbourhood has a “village” which makes an interesting stroll in daylight hours (that’s when everything is open). It even has new and handsome purple street banners. The village is a few blocks long and is a colourful mix of ethnic restaurants, secondhand shops, a bridal dress shop and a hydroponics store. There’s the Sparkle Bright Laundromat with immense amounts of steam coming from the pipes on the roof and blowing over the used-book store, and the old retro Roxy Theatre, which still regularly shows feature films.
The art-school students up the street are planting a medicinal herb garden called “The People’s Apothecary” in the large lot behind their graffiti-painted school. They proudly held an open house on a cold, raw May afternoon and showed us the plans for the newly dug and mulched plot. The ambitious students have planted dill for indigestion, sumac for impotence and asthma, and raspberries to help “prepare the uterus for childbirth” (presumably one would eat them?).
On the village bulletin board is an invitation to immigrants to drop into the Immigrant Centre nearby. The Quadra neighbourhood is home to many new Canadians—it’s a multicultural neighbourhood. In the village you can eat Asian kabobs, Chinese duck, Greek souvlaki, Caribbean stew, or Italian pizza. Farther along there is an Italian bakery and a Manila video store, an “Asian Emporium,” and a Mediterranean store full of cheeses, Turkish delight, nuts, spices, pastas, grape leaves, dried fruit, and shelves of colourful cans of olive oil and tomatoes.
There’s a romance to an ethnic neighbourhood, a global, worldly, warm feeling amongst all the little food outlets with the smells of cooking wafting down the back alleys. In an ethnic neighbourhood, people are busy, food is being cooked, and there’s a good kind of human energy—hard, raw, working energy. This is what it means to be human, to be alive, all together with our different global traditions.
One unique heritage feature of the Quadra neighbourhood is its history of the garage! Originally, carriages were kept in carriage houses, but when the car came into fashion garages began to be built; eventually, the garage became attached to the house. “Cars began to move into the house,” says a local brochure on the history of the Quadra neighbourhood. And this in turn led to urban sprawl and suburban development because this design altered the footprint of the home—more room was needed for building when the garage was attached to the house.
The detached garages, carriage houses, or garden sheds are often more charming than the main houses; one might have an old crooked weathervane on its peak, another an ancient climbing rose leaning on its southern side, crawling under the gables, or a little window with original glass and windowsill standing the test of time.
Farther north up Quadra, near the McKenzie intersection, are more shops. Amongst these modern and attractive stores is a genuine old farm store, Borden Mercantile, which still sells items in burlap sacks, and corn, pea, and bean seeds in bulk, displayed in colourful pails. You can buy an antiseptic lanoline cream for a cow’s chapped udder, tractor parts, fish fertilizer, brass hooks and snaps, and bird feeders. In the earthy-smelling store there are faded posters on the wall of poultry breeds and the anatomy of the pig, and racks of flower seeds and stacks of livestock feed, including bags labelled Wet Nurse, a milk substitute for newborn livestock who have been rejected by their mothers.
At the northernmost part of Quadra Street is Rithet’s Bog, which buffers the neighbourhood of Broadmead, a newer suburb that stretches over the rocky bluffs and then slopes down toward Cordova Bay. The bog was donated by the Guinness family in 1994 as a nature sanctuary, and a group of devoted citizens has taken on the stewardship of the bog (with the Saanich Parks Department). Their most recent restoration project was to cut back a very aggressive, invasive bulrush, which if left unchecked would quickly grow over the entire wetland.
Rithet’s Bog is a peat bog. Peat bogs all over the world are diminishing; they are either being drained and developed or, more likely in many countries, the peat is being removed to be used as fuel or for horticultural purposes. Peat bogs form over thousands of years from decaying plants in a wet and poorly drained watershed. As plants decay, and the water and soil develop a high acidity level, plants such as sphagnum moss and other vegetation, insects, grasses, and fungi thrive and also die and decay, creating the bog and the layers of peat. Peat can actually be the first stage of coal development. Some bogs, such as Rithet’s, are called “domed bogs” because the centre is raised from the heavy buildup of material—in Rithet’s, the dome consists of coniferous vegetation.
It takes about an hour to stroll around the lovely gravel trail at Rithet’s Bog; on one side is a mass of bulrushes and willows, reeds and grasses, and then the trail takes you through the damper, darker, more forested section where dead trees are rotting back into the earth amongst the ferns and pines and dense native shrubs such as Indian plum and snowberries.
Throughout the walk there is a distinctive smell—a fresh, soft odour of natural decay, of nature working with all her microbes to decompose everything in the bog; the smell reminded me vaguely of Gran’s kitchen in summer at dinnertime, when we’d have boiled peas from her garden and new potatoes with mint. Decay does not have to be foul-smelling—in a bog it is a wonderful, working whiff that filters through the thick growth that Mother Nature is labouring on.
Rithet’s Bog is named after the prominent Scottish businessman (and mayor of Victoria from 1884 to 1885) Robert Rithet, who owned much of the land in the area and bred racehorses in the early 1900s. One of his most famous horses was in fact named Broadmead, which really does sound like a winner. Rithet’s businesses were shipping, flour, steel, real estate, canning, and Hawaiia
n sugar.
Rithet drained the bog (which originally was a source of cranberries) for agricultural purposes, using his draft horses, which had to wear large flat wooden shoes so they didn’t sink in the mud. As soon as agricultural production ceased, however, Mother Nature quickly took the cultivated field back to the deep, wet, decaying bog that it truly wanted to be, for all of us to enjoy.
West Bay Marina
CHAPTER SEVEN
Up the Gorge,
Vic West,
and View Royal
The Gorge is a waterway running about four miles up from the Inner Harbour to a wide bay called Portage Inlet. The Gorge has immense diversity and history and can be visited by kayak or canoe, bicycle, on the chubby little harbour ferries, on foot, or by car.
First, let it be said that in the Victoria region, one is never at a loss for things to do, to attend, and to learn. In Victoria’s “heritage week,” I saw a small announcement inviting the public to attend a lecture and slide show at the public library in the Gorge area on the history of the Gorge. If you make the effort to dress for the cold weather and drive through the dark, wet streets on a drizzly, raw February evening to learn about our city, you will not be disappointed.
I bundled up and crossed town to hear a gentle and educated man speak on the topic. I parked and braced myself against the cruel wind as I made my way across the dark parking lot and into the warm and friendly library—the little talk and slide show were to be in a cozy corner, and there were coffee and soft chairs. The speech was only an hour long and the old photographs were amusing and interesting—I was so glad that I had made the effort to go to this modest event with perhaps a dozen other people. It was a comfort, an escape from the bitter winter and day-to-day stresses. There is something very secure and good about a library: one just assumes that everyone who goes to libraries is intelligent and thoughtful—there is nothing bad about a library!