Building a National Theatre: Teaching Theatre in Canada to 1960

by Patrick McDonagh

"It has become something of a commonplace to speak of the theatre as the Cinderella of arts in Canada," wrote the University of Manitoba English professor (and Winnipeg Little Theatre director) George Brodersen in 1947. Prior to 1939, little theatres and amateur productions dotted the national landscape. For the most part, anyone wishing to participate in theatre acquired the necessary skills either through rehearsal and performance, or via private tutelage. But the post-war years saw reams of text on the development of a "national theatre," part of a broad concern with Canadian arts, science and culture in general. And, numerous commentators stressed, a national theatre would need trained theatre professionals. But where would these professionals come from?

"If Canada is to boast the possession of a National Theatre the universities of Canada must do their share to bring it about; and their share is the most important one," opined Emrys Maldwin Jones, a veteran of the Edmonton and Saskatoon theatre scene and a University of Saskatchewan theatre professor, in 1947. Universities were not only equipped to instill students with a knowledge of and respect for theatrical tradition; they also had the facilities to mount productions. Most campuses had something that could pass for a proscenium stage, already being trod enthusiastically by student drama societies — all that was needed was the will and the structure to provide students with professionally guided acting experience.

Some such organizations already existed. Hart House, a prominent theatre committed to the production of new plays, was associated with the University of Toronto from its construction in 1919, although its productions, even when at the forefront of the "Little Theatre" movement in the 1920s and 1930s, generally featured established performers. However, in 1946, Hart House came more fully under the control of the university, and student involvement was encouraged — although not for course credits. At the University of British Columbia (UBC), Dorothy Somerset founded the Summer School of the Theatre in 1939, and taught the university’s first credit courses in theatre in 1946. And the Banff School of Fine Arts had been offering some professional theatre courses since 1933.

Still, young actors struggled to find training opportunities in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1954 Gloria Melanson was a 22-year-old Vancouver actor and schoolteacher with some stage credits to her name. "But everything seemed to be in Toronto," she recalls, so she journeyed east to explore the opportunities. While there, she studied voice at the Toronto Conservatory and understudied the role of Cordelia for a Hart House production of King Lear. When her scant savings ran out, she took work teaching grade one. "Robert Gill [Artistic Director of Hart House] had said that there were equally good resources in Vancouver. This wasn’t exactly true" she notes, "but he gave me some names to contact, so I returned in 1955." The names included Sydney Risk, whose Everyman Theatre (co-founded in 1946 with Brodersen) was one of the more ambitious attempts at professional theatre in Vancouver. He took Melanson on as a private student, and directed her to Somerset’s Summer School at UBC. Through Risk and Somerset, she met Joy Coghill, who later cast her with her children’s-theatre company Holiday Theatre. Training, experience and hard work eventually paid off: Melanson had a lead role in an award-winning 1957 Vancouver Little Theatre production of Peter Ustinov’s Moment of Truth. However, the company did not have the resources to travel to the Dominion Drama Festival in Ottawa. Realizing that theatre was not as good at paying the bills as teaching, Melanson said farewell to the stage in 1958.

By the late 1950s, theatre training opportunities were becoming somewhat easier to find. University programs were slowly emerging; in 1945, the nation’s first Department of Drama, offering some professional courses, was established — with the help of Emrys Jones — at the University of Saskatchewan. The University of Alberta started the first professional BFA program in 1947. Still, by 1955, Canada had a scant eight full-time drama instructors teaching 120 students in four university programs.

In 1951, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, more commonly known as the Massey Report, after its chairman Vincent Massey, expressed, like so many before, the desirability of a national theatre. Professional training was, observed the report, a critical component of the process. Writing for the Commission, the playwright and actor Robertson Davies stressed the need for "a practical theatre studio," modeled on the Old Vic Theatre Centre in London; he also suggested that the Old Vic’s director, Michel Saint-Denis, would be just the figure to carry out such a task: "If not a messiah," he wrote, "perhaps our John the Baptist." However, he noted,"even a thoroughly competent minor prophet would be a blessing. And when such a centre, and its students, were sufficiently strong we might think about a National Theatre."

By 1960, Davies’ recommendation was executed; the National Theatre School was founded in Montreal, with Saint-Denis assuming a leading role. But despite the undeniable progress in theatre training, apart from the NTS and a scattering of university programs, students of the stage still had few professional resources to support their passion and hone their skills.

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