Ross Stuart
What is the institutional equivalent to vanity publishing? Celebrating! subtitled Twenty-Five Years on the Stage at the Shaw Festival and The Pictorial Stage, or Twenty-five Years of Vision and Design at the Shaw Festival are slimmer than coffee-table books such as Arnold Edinborough's The Festivals of Canada but they serve the same function: they allow the Shaw Festival to applaud the Shaw Festival. They aren't 'written' but 'edited,' and the editor is Katherine Holmes who, it is not mentioned, was the Director of Communications for the Shaw Festival.
In the introduction to Celebrating!, Christopher Newton writes, 'These photos are artifacts from our beginning and they stimulate questions like "Why is that man holding his hat in that manner"' and "Who is the woman watching?" and always, inevitably, "Why? Why? Why?"' The question 'why' recurs often while reading this book but not in the way that Newton intends. Why was the book written at all? Why was this included and that omitted? Why, even, should anyone buy it? It has little to offer the theatre historian except a comprehensive listing of productions. A very synoptic history of the Festival is squeezed between fifty pages of photographs, arranged chronologically. The facts are accurate but stripped of controversy: the observation that 'Paxton Whitehead left the Festival following the 1977 season' is true but says nothing of the machinations involved. Calvin Rand's fiscal and organizational acumen helped the Festival survive the lean years but he appears only as an afterthought in a small picture on the last page.
Maybe the book is designed for the Shaw Festival regular: the patron who attends summer after summer and wants a souvenir of seasons past. Certainly many favourite performances are recalled but just as many are ignored. For example, there is not one picture of Ian McLellan in Man and Superman (1977), which many critics remember as the finest Shaw Festival production up to that time. However the book ultimately fails as an exercise in nostalgia because of the photography. Most of this haphazard collection, primarily by Robert C. Ragsdale prior to 1980 and David Cooper after, are posed stills of one or more actors rather than shots of live action showing the set. They may help us 'Remember!' but they don't help us 'Celebrate!'
The other book, The Pictorial Stage, sans exclamation, makes much more sense. It accompanied an exhibit of the same title mounted at the Niagara Historical Society Museum in Niagara-on-the-Lake in the summer of 1986. Cameron Porteous, Head of Design for the Shaw Festival, in his precise introduction neatly defines a designer as 'a visual story-teller,' and notes, 'Design is dependent upon the harmony of a team, but when it transcends the demands of pragmatic purpose - when design goes beyond the requirements of the text - it can create its own special art form within the complex series of events we call a performance.' He dedicates the book to the many designers 'who have, out of love and sometimes under the most stringent circumstances, laboured to carry their vision forward over the past twenty-five years.' The Pictorial Stage is effective at demonstrating the evolution of design at the Shaw Festival because it shows, again to use Cameron Porteous's words, 'many testaments to the designers' work apart from the usual graphic or photographic documentation . . . such as preliminary sketches, scene renderings, models, plans and costume sketches which are the working tools used to communicate the designer's ideas to everyone involved in the cooperative process of producing theatre.
Curator Daniel Ladell provides a useful overview of the history of design at the Shaw Festival to open the book. Like Celebrating! the rest of the text is arranged chronologically from a photograph of the Lion in Androcles and the Lion in 1963 to Cameron Porteus's sketches for Back to Methuselah in 1986. The book emphasizes the importance of four seminal productions. The first real test of the potential of the still-new Festival Theatre by a major international designer came with Leslie Hurry's 1975 Caesar and Cleopatra. Michael Levine, the youngest designer to work on the Festival stage, broke away from the restrictions of Shaw's own descriptions in Heartbreak House in 1985, and created a fantastical environment. Cyrano de Bergerac in 1982-83 and Cavalcade in 1985-86, both designed by Cameron Porteous, placed imposing demands on the technical resources of the Festival and by their very success opened up new possibilities for future Shaw designers.
As George Bernard Shaw is quoted on the title page, 'I have often seen a play in which the scenery was of a much higher order of art, and enormously more skilled in its execution, than either the play or the acting upon which it was wasted.' Indeed many of the illustrations in this book almost erase the memory of mediocre productions. For one example, the photograph of The Madwoman of Chaillot (1985) is vibrant and imaginative, qualities distinctly lacking in the actual production. The book carefully shows us world-class design while overlooking less-than-world-class acting and directing.
The Pictorial Stage stars designers, with actors as walk-ons. Celebrating! puts the actor centre stage. The Shaw Festival would have produced a better Silver Anniversary memorial to itself by combining these two volumes and unabashedly transforming them into a real coffee table book. If you are going to publish a puff piece - and Canadian theatre could use more of that sort of effrontery - do it right!