ROBERT A. GAINES John Neville Takes Command: The Story of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Production. Stratford: William Street Press, 1987. 340p, illus, index. $13.95 paper
TOM PATTERSON and ALLAN GOULD First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987. 224p, illus. $24.95 cloth

Richard Paul Knowles

One of the major gaps in the theatre history of Canada is careful study of the Stratford Festival: in spite of the occasional journal article on a limited topic; in spite of extensive but ephemeral journalistic coverage, including books such as Martin Knelman's on the 1980 crisis; and in spite of 'official histories' such as Pettigrew and Portman's glossy two-volume history of 'the first thirty years,' or the Guthrie/Davies accounts of the first three seasons, Stratford has received very little serious attention from scholars, critics, or objective historians. ¹ This being the case, the publication in one year of two volumes about Stratford might be welcomed. Unfortunately, for very different reasons both Tom Patterson and Allan Gould's anecdotal account of the founding of the Festival and Robert A. Gaines's plodding overview of its thirty-fourth season will disappoint the specialist, and most other readers as well.

Festival founder Tom Patterson's book is an easy-to-read, entertaining account of entrepreneurial faith, vision, and brinkmanship, full of gee-whiz naivete and good folksy stories, but containing little that isn't already available in Pettigrew and Portman, the Guthrie-Davies volumes, and Guthrie's autobiography, and containing nothing at all on the artistic process or product. It does print the full texts of letters and telegrams from Patterson and Guthrie, and it amusingly reproduces Patterson's first Festival budget, scribbled in his personal notebook:

And there are good stories, like the one Patterson tells of being sent by Ontario Premier Leslie Frost to see the Minister of Education, 'Dr. Dunlop,' as the only possible source of provincial funding for the festival:

When I met with Dr. Dunlop, he told me, 'We have no money for theatre. The only way we can do anything is if you can show that this Stratford Festival is educational.'

So I returned to Stratford and made up a letter which proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Shakespeare was educational. And we got our $500 grant.

But the most substantial contribution made by the book to Canadian theatre history comes, not in the fabled festival story itself, but in its wake, when the dispirited Patterson found himself shuffled aside from the management of the Festival and turned his energies to the founding of the touring Canadian Players. The story is told in a brief but illuminating chapter that is almost an addendum to the book's central story, and although the style and substance are consonant with those of the book as a whole, the material is less familiar, less readily available, and more welcome.

The book nevertheless disappoints, and it does so because of an almost total lack of interest in theatre: a comment Patterson makes about the Festival's first opening night, in fact, applies all too closely to Patterson himself, both as the entrepreneurial founder of the festival and as the author of First Stage: 'it was as if we could have put on anything, and they would have been satisfied.'

Unfortunately Patterson's comment applies equally well to Robert A. Gaines in reference to the Festival's 1986 season. This is true partly because of Gaines's failure in John Neville Takes Command to discriminate among productions or to assess the kind or quality of different processes or productions. Gaines was given permission to attend rehearsals and interview actors, directors, designers and others involved in the 1986 season, and he sets out, on the basis of this experience, 'to establish a contemporary chronicle whereby others may assess what happened here.' But the book fails even to provide that primary material and becomes rather the chronicle of a wasted opportunity.

John Neville Takes Command becomes, in fact, a model of how not to write a book of this kind. In conjunction with a tone of generalized (and apparently genuine) admiration for anyone and anything having to do with the Festival, there is an ironic, inadvertent tendency to trivialize virtually every aspect of the craft through oversimplification. Actors' invented biographies of their characters, for example, useful in the rehearsal process and valuable if sensitively used in the process of critical analysis, inevitably sound trite and reductive when reported out of context:

Lorne Kennedy, who played Horatio, invented a biography for the character in which he and Hamlet often went to the pub together and perhaps played on the soccer team. While they knew Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at Wittenburg University, those two belonged to the stamp club, says Kennedy.

Major interpretative decisions are treated in a similar way, as when Neville's invented musical prologue to Hamlet is explained exclusively by the comment, 'Neville wanted Hamlet to sing both because Ophelia sings and [Brent] Carver [playing Hamlet] has an excellent singing voice'; or when John Wood's interpolated epilogue to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is passed off with the following: 'Wood says he doesn't know how he got the idea but he does know that he wanted to see both the characters and the hearse again.' These are the fullest analytical or interpretative comments in a book that by imposing its own mechanical organization on production after production flattens what could have been interesting analyses of the different processes of some very distinct directors - from Richard Ouzounian to Robin Phillips, Tom Kerr to David William - working on very different scripts. Each chapter begins with hagiographic 'bios' of the director and members of the design team for the production and a description of the times, places, and conditions in which they met to plan the show; the bulk of the chapters is then made up of pedestrian descriptions of each scene, with little awareness and no analysis of the interpretative or theatrical context - either historical, critical, or in the production's own terms - within which choices were made.

Throughout the book, too, there is a disconcerting willingness to accept and pass on, without comment, casual remarks from interviews as though they were accurate or significant, but without evaluation in the context of Gaines's own observation, research, or analysis. At its typical worst, this habit can result in astonishing triviality:

Festival education assistant Jeffrey Marontate calls [Pericles] the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in the playwright's lifetime.

What insights emerge from the book then, seem to do so by accident and between the lines. The debacle at the Third Stage in 1986, for example, is never directly mentioned, but anyone familiar with the season there might understand the curious absence of director Tom Kerr from the proceedings as described by Gaines. Revelations of bad management, too, seem more inadvertent than deliberate, as when Gaines transparently reports that 'because time was getting tight' designer Philip Silver and Henry VII's director Brian Rintoul had to begin making decisions about the set Henry VIII and A Man for All Seasons would share 'despite the fact that A Man for All Seasons did not yet have a director.'

Ultimately, and in spite of its apparent detail, John Neville Takes Command satisfies little more than the curiosity of the uninitiated about the scheduling of rehearsals and the duties of different personnel at Stratford. Like First Stage, it fails significantly to enlarge our understanding or expand our knowledge of the Stratford Festival. A great gap in Canadian theatre history remains unfulfilled.

Note

ROBERT A. GAINES John Neville Takes Command: The Story of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Production. Stratford: William Street Press, 1987. 340p, illus, index. $13.95 paper

TOM PATTERSON and ALLAN GOULD First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987. 224p, illus. $24.95 cloth

Richard Paul Knowles

1 MARTIN KNELMAN A Stratford Tempest (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982); JOHN PETTIGREW and JAMIE PORTMAN Stratford: The First Thirty Years, 2 vols (Toronto: Macmillan, 1985); TYRONE GUTHRIE and ROBERTSON DAVIES Renown at Stratford (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1953), Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1954). and Thrice the Brindled Cat Hath Mewed (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1955). Other book-length works include GRACE LYDIATT SHAW ed Stratford Under Cover, a collection of reminiscences of the early years of the Festival (Toronto: N.C. Press, 1977); MAURICE GOOD Every Inch a Lear, a rehearsal diary of the Robin Phillips/Peter Ustinov production of King Lear in 1979 (Victoria: Sono Nis Press, 1982), and GUTHRIE's autobiography, A Life in the Theatre (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960).
Return to article