by Simon Brault, Director General

Another press conference over, I step through the Monument-National's great wooden doors onto the sidewalk. A cold rain is falling, the first sign of a late spring. I scuttle into a taxi and give the National Theatre School's address automatically, my mind on other things.

The driver twists in his seat to look at me. He knows the place well. "I was locked up there a long time ago. It was the Juvenile Courthouse — where they put kids who got into trouble. My parents left me there for a few nights to give me time to think." I tell him I am familiar with the building’s history. Not firsthand — the driver is old enough to be my father — but from reading about Montreal in the fifties and from artifacts. (It’s been only three years since the workmen demolished the last remaining cells in the School’s basement.)

He keeps talking. "Times sure have changed. Now I drive stars like Monique Mercure and Marcel Sabourin to that address. When the doors open, you can hear singing inside. In the spring there are always young people on the front lawn talking or reading. I know it’s a theatre school. I hear it’s hard to get in. For us, the hard part was getting out!"

As I pay the driver and mount the stairs to the School, I muse that history is made of a thousand personal stories. I hasten to my office, where the Journal team awaits me to discuss the content of our special 40^th anniversary edition. My encounter with the taxi driver strikes me as a fitting preamble.

That meeting in March and those that followed were fascinating. We dove into the School’s past, took stock of its present, and listened to its dreams for the future. Our goal was to create a Journal that would somehow convey the thousands of individual stories that together form the history of the National Theatre School. This school would never have reached this landmark birthday in such good health without all the men and women who imagined it, created it, supported it, lived it, defended it, financed it, critiqued it, inspired it and, most of all… loved it.

Our task was to capture the background and atmosphere of the place where, for the past forty years, leading theatre artists and craftsmen have come together to learn and explore. We knew we had to write about the creative process, discovery, and research. We had to convey the way old theatre traditions were passed on, day by day. We wanted to share the birthday wishes from our friends. And of course we would include our graduates’ memories and anecdotes.

Let the celebrations begin! All our family members and friends are invited to this birthday party. Here’s an opportunity to relive our successes, share a laugh over our "disasters", remember those we’ve met through the years, marvel at how far we’ve come and, most of all, to look forward with daring and ambition.

And if you take a taxi in Montreal, I hope you’ll have the good fortune to be driven by the man who saw the National Theatre School make flowers grow on the asphalt of his youth.

Top of article