The Level of the Soil: Theatre Teaching in Canada to 1940

by Patrick McDonagh

The Journal begins a series of articles on the history of theatrical teaching in Canada, starting with a general survey followed by profiles of professors who have each contributed, in their own way, to the foundation and evolution of our theatrical tradition.

Judging for the Dominion Drama Festival (DDF) in its first years was the renowned British actor, playwright and critic Harley Granville-Barker, who wrote in 1936 that "some of the competitors […] have never sat as an audience member in a theatre in their lives." But this observation didn’t dismay him — quite the opposite. "That is […] a thing to rejoice in," he continued. "For in virtue of it, we are down at the level of the soil with firm ground under our feet. Here is a simple and healthy and entirely natural attitude toward a simple, natural and healthy art."

But simple, natural and healthy as the theatre may have been, hitting the bedrock of amateur authenticity presented a conundrum: how would theatre workers acquire the knowledge and means to carry out this art? Where were the actors, playwrights and technicians to come from?

The problem was clear: there was no place in Canada to practice theatre professionally. In 1911, the critic Bernard Sandwell recalled discussing with "a very intelligent and apparently somewhat talented Toronto girl" the possibility of a theatrical career. "‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘that if it were possible to pursue a theatrical career here in Canada, […] I would enter upon it tomorrow? As things are, the chief cause of my hesitation is the fact that I must go to a foreign country even to get an engagement; that I must make New York my headquarters…" Needless to say, professional training at home was out of the question: what would you do with it?

Nonetheless, there was training in those days in Canada, of a sort. Professional actors — travelling foreigners, or Canadians returned from New York or London (where the RADA held sway as the pinnacle of theatrical training) — gave private or group lessons to aspiring performers. Independent theatre schools sprouted around the country. These schools taught a range of theatrical arts to students who were motivated by vastly divergent purposes.

In 1908, the Margaret Eaton School, in its second year of operation, staged public "commencement exercises" over three nights demonstrating the School’s "threefold function in its cultivation of physical, mental and spiritual forces," as a reviewer in Saturday Night noted. One night students exhibited their prowess in physical skills from fencing to "Grecian aesthetic movements." Evenings were also devoted to singing and elocution, with readings from Shakespeare, Kipling and Tennyson, among others.

In 1921, two theatrical schools, typical of theatre training enterprises of the era, opened in British Columbia: Carrol Aikins founded the Home Theatre in the Okanagan Valley of Namarata and L. Bullock-Webster established the BC Dramatic School in Victoria. The Home Theatre’s first production used local farm boys to perform J. M. Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding: reviews were not generous. Subsequently, however, Aikins recruited students for the school through a lecture circuit of drama clubs, civic groups and university organizations. He attracted participants of various ages who wanted to "learn acting," as Muriel Evans, a UBC student, put it. They attended the Home Theatre school during the summer months, picking fruit for a dollar a day each morning, and taking classes in the afternoons and evenings. The aim of the school and its students, as the program for the 1922 show Victory in Defeat (about the life of Christ) asserted, was not "commercial gain or [...] personal glory," but to "infuse new life into the theatre." Consequently, not only were the actors unpaid, but their names were not revealed in the dramatis personae.

Meanwhile, Bullock-Webster’s school in Victoria had, by its second year, 65 students attending small group classes and receiving individual instruction in speech, acting and movement. They ranged from young children to older businessmen, so while "professional training" was, as with the Home Theatre, identified as one of the school’s aims in its promotional material, it could hardly have been its primary goal. Rather, notes a 1928 article in Canadian Forum, "groups of businessmen [including mayors and MPs]" came to "develop their natural gifts of public-speaking […] Ladies of social position come to gain self-confidence, or to read aloud […] children come to correct speech defects […] Many girls of teen age find that dramatic work helps them to overcome self-consciousness, embarrassment and general nervousness." And, the article went on to note, "amongst all these are people with dramatic talent, who enjoy the experience of rehearsals on professional lines." The school would produce a number of small productions and one play a year for the 1600-seat Royal Victoria Theatre.

So, willy-nilly, plays were staged, and actors performed them. By the 1920s, a vibrant "Little Theatre" movement, which included the odd professional "ringer" but was dominated by amateurs like the Home Theatre players, was sweeping the nation. This phenomenon led to the creation of the Dominion Drama Festival, which ran from 1932 to 1970 and provided a focus for amateur performance, drawing competitors from small theatres across the country. The "Little Theatre" movement gained momentum throughout the twenties, and in the Depression, was joined by the equally amateur workers’ theatre, which enlisted unemployed workers to present agit-prop performances in whatever venues were available, from picket lines to conventional theatre spaces.

The workers’ theatre, the "Little Theatre" movement, and the DDF testify to the strong do-it-yourself attitude that prevailed, of necessity, in Canadian theatre, and in theatre training. The theatre season across the country was much like a giant fringe festival, characterized by uncertain quality and aptitude, but unqualified enthusiasm. Most theatre folk honed their skills in rehearsal and performance, with sporadic instances of formal training. But the amateur movement created an artistic scene that finally led to professional theatre, and greater emphasis across the country on theatre training, in the years following the Second World War.

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