By L. W. Conolly
Oxford University Press
312 pages, $50
ISBN: 978-0-19-544611-1

             In the early sixties, Niagara-on-the-Lake was a quiet, sleepy town with a drugstore, a five-and-dime store, shoe store, and hardware store. Apart from large homes for the very rich, its principal features were a golf course, church, and lake. Some visitors thought it was seedy and rundown, its grand old estates decaying and collapsing. Christopher Newton (who was a member of one of its early acting ensembles and who would eventually become the longest-reigning Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival) remembers it as a town that “had not come to life, that it was sort of drifting around in some other world.” He and other actors would head to Buffalo and Niagara Falls for excitement. Calvin Rand, an American citizen and philosophy professor at the University of Buffalo, lived in the town and he believed a “torpor” had overcome it. There were no steamers from Toronto anymore, no trains, and the military presence (regimental camps each summer on the Commons) had diminished. He, his neighbour Brian Doherty (a lawyer and retired RCAF wing commander), and a group of other citizens met in 1962 to discuss how to enliven the town. Doherty’s passion was theatre: his comedy, Father Mulcahy’s Miracle, had run on Broadway in 1937-38 for 125 performances, and in the 40s he had produced shows in New York, helped found the Red Barn Theatre at Jackson’s Point, Ontario, and the New World Theatre Company in Toronto. He had also served as adjudicator for the DDF. His sudden brain wave was to stage Shaw in N-O-L, and, so, was born the Shaw Festival, whose first season opened on June 29, 1962 with a literal reading of Don Juan in Hell by four amateur actors seated on stools and reading from lecterns on a bare stage. The small audience (fewer than 200) had to deal with a stiflingly hot night, and at the end, patrons burst through the exit doors, gasping and choking. Only in the third season was an air-conditioning system installed.

            A very modest, difficult beginning for what was to become the world’s only festival whose principal mandate and raison d’etre are the plays of George Bernard Shaw. In some ways, the story of the Shaw is similar to that of the Stratford Festival: the similarities lie in a town going to seed, its inhabitants not really interested in the arts; the lack of a suitable theatre; the role of foreigners in the formation and development of a festival; battles with local and national governmental bureaucracy; but the eventual consolidation of theatre on a high professional level. The Stratford Festival is older than the Shaw, and its chronicle is dominated, of course, by the contributions of Tyrone Guthrie, Michael Langham, Robin Phillips, and Richard Monette—only the last named being Canadian born and bred. The Shaw, too, has been dominated by the contributions of a few eminences: Paxton Whitehead, Christopher Newton, and Jackie Maxwell. Interestingly, none of these was born in Canada, though it is fair to say that all of them have had their substantial careers made here and that Newton and Maxwell have made a significant contribution to Canadian theatere. Maxwell is also the first woman to helm one of the two largest repertory theatres in the land. 

The Shaw has just turned fifty and has by now staged about 400 productions, involving more than 2000 actors, directors, choreographers, stage managers, technical directors, musicians, choreographers, and administrative staff. To celebrate its first half-century, the festival has produced a handsome chronicle, gorgeously embellished by production photos (mainly in full colour), and clearly written (though the small print strains the eye) by Leonard Conolly, an academic of considerable distinction. However, I wish that Conolly had not relied so heavily on newspaper reviews for his record. Such reliance is, I contend, a definite limitation. There are only four English language dailies in Toronto, and only two give any generous space to theatre criticism. More substantial reviews and criticism can be had in journals and on blogs, but I suppose that it is a question of size of mass consumption and name-recognition rather than of anything else. Conolly usually refrains from passing judgment on the shows, and when he does deign to make comment, he is usually charitable rather than daringly provocative. His real intent is not so much analytical as it is descriptive and appreciative, and he eschews high definition writing performance. But, he gains almost by default, producing, ultimately, a better balanced though less lively chronicle than was Robert Cushman’s Fifty Seasons at Stratford.

Conolly’s structure is chronological, with each chapter focussed on an artistic director (there have been seven so far, beginning with Andrew Allan), with exceptions made for Paxton Whitehead, Richard Kirscher, and Leslie Yeo who are (because of their brief tenures) covered jointly in a single chapter. There are also topic-related chapters, such as The Pavilion Controversy, The Royal George Theatre, The “Risk” Series, Newton Outreach, Neil Munro, Shaw’s Contemporaries, Maxwell Outreach, New Roots, and New Directions. The book is equipped with appendices, sources, an index, and a gorgeous selection of mainly full-colour production photos, beautifully assembled by graphic designer Scott McKowen who brings his considerable craft and art to the overall design. The preponderance of these photographs is by two photographers: Robert Ragsdale and David Cooper, whose differing approaches to their craft make for a simply dazzling contrast in photo illustration. Ragsdale is the supreme artist of the posed still—a sort of Karsh of the theatre—who excels in capturing the essence, personality, and persona of an actor in a particular role, under controlled conditions of lighting and posture. Cooper, by contrast, shoots on the run, so his photographs have a dynamic flashiness: they suggest spontaneous focus, an illusion of the present, as if motion were suddenly frozen in the instant. But both are superb examples of theatre photography at its best.

The chronicle has many interesting sidelights that increase its appeal to audiences. It records, for instance, that Barry Morse worked so hard to transform the physical look of the Court House by painting the walls, sweeping the floor, and doing PR that he didn’t know all his lines for the Man and Superman he was directing at the time. Conolly also throws in a tidbit about Kate Reid being given notes by Leslie Yeo while she was in her bathtub and he was on a toilet seat. There is no mention, however, of Jennifer Phipps bumping into a fern and apologizing to it in the jungle-like foliage of Misalliance, and Heath Lamberts doesn’t get his full due either for his comic genius or for his eccentricities, but, then, no record can cover everything.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the most valuable sections of the book are on Newton and Maxwell because of the details regarding the nature and scope of each of these artistic directors’ aesthetics and administrative policies. Besides re-interpreting Shaw as a “surrealist,” Newton created an authentic sense of a company that was blissfully uncontaminated by egotistical star power—which is not to say that the Shaw lacked for star quality players. Conolly shows that under Newton, the most produced playwright (after Shaw) was Noel Coward, although Newton balanced things by introducing audiences to old-fashioned American dramatists (Kaufman and Hart, William Gillette, John van Druten, and Clare Booth Luce, for instance) and to rarely performed English playwrights, such as Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Harold Brighouse, St. John Harkin, John Galsworthy, and, best of all, Granville Barker. Boasting “You’ll see plays at the Shaw that you will never see anywhere else,” he also staged works by European playwrights on the order of Bertolt Brecht, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jean Giraudoux, Henrik Ibsen, Luigi Pirandello, and Jean Anouilh, though there wasn’t necessarily a pay-off at the box office. 

Jackie Maxwell succeeded Newton, and Conolly’s book ends with her remarkable tenure that in some ways has changed the Festival’s direction while in others it has consolidated what her immediate predecessor had achieved. Though she likes some emoting on stage and “slushy, sexy, overwrought American dramas” or the “hot worlds” of Irish drama, she has broken down formulas in the programming, allowing a stronger role for the Canadian voice (Michel Marc Bouchard, Sharon Pollack, Ann Marie Macdonald), and attempting to find female directors and feminist plays. While surviving various grave threats to the economic stability of the Festival (SARS, the recession, and shrinking government funding of the arts), she has extended Newton’s strategy of defining a continuum between Shaw and contemporary playwrights, and she has considerably altered the rubric of the Shaw in terms of its outreach programs, community relationships, co-productions with Toronto theatres, colour-blind casting, etc.

In summing up Maxwell (though it is still premature for a final summary), Conolly celebrates her embrace of diversity, and he ends by predicting that she will ensure that the Shaw’s second half-century will begin on “ very different footing from the first.” Only time will tell how accurate his prediction will be, but his chronicle is an eminent success on its own terms and well worth its price in the literary marketplace.

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