John Orrell
In 1961, when I arrived in Edmonton along with a few thousand others attracted by its booming economy, I remember going to the little amateur playhouse converted from a schoolroom down by the river on the Walterdale flats. There, on nights far colder and yet far cosier than any I had experienced in theatres elsewhere, I saw a series of productions that have stayed in my memory more tenaciously than many a lavish show at Stratford or in London. It was partly the excellence of the acting, no doubt, but partly too that we seemed a kind of conspiracy down there in that leaky, ill-equipped shack. Over the river the bland politicians, Social Credit almost to a man, hummed their busy paeans to Money and Oil, only occasionally taking sufficient interest in cultural matters to ban the odd movie like Tom Jones.
Standing in the freezing lobby of the Walterdale, hardly bigger than the entrance to a bus, we would meet the theatre people of the city, mostly educators. Some came from the university, where the drama department ran the Studio Theatre, and others from one of the great high schools downtown, where the students put on public performances. There was no regular professional theatre, but not far from the Hudson's Bay store the Strand cinema and the Trocadero ballroom still stood to remind us of a time long ago when the city, like so many other provincial towns before the first world war, had possessed a busy theatrical life. The Strand was once the Pantages, a vaudeville house, the name still discernible in faded paint across its fly tower; the Troc. had been the wonderfully grand Empire, its auditorium now boarded over to make a dance floor.
There were ghosts down there among the stores and office blocks. Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Sarah Bernhardt, Robert Mantell, Marie Lloyd: there had been a time when the prairie towns saw them all, and Edmonton was no more than representative. With the depression came the movies, and everywhere the professional theatre faded. In its place rose a myriad of little theatre clubs, soon linked together in drama leagues and finally into the famous Dominion Drama Festival. For these players acting was not a living but fun, something sociable and warm. At schools and universities it became rather the subject of study and training, a received part of official culture. It was ubiquitous, organized, fostered and sturdily supported by the educational establishment. As the larger cities grew in the 1950s and 60s, many became populous enough to sustain regular professional playhouses of a new sort, and the glittering 'regional' theatres of our own time arose, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, the Citadel, and most recently the Calgary Centre for the Performing Arts. But they are regional only in their locations and audiences; to satisfy a demand for truly local drama little professional workshop theatres sprung up in their shadows, flourished for a time, and then declined.
This bald scenario outlines the story covered by Ross Stuart's new book. It is a wonderful tale, well worth the telling, but it must be admitted that it might have been better told than it is here. One is reminded of a certain kind of local history: everything is mentioned, the names of all the people are there. Most of the facts are correct, but the difficulty is that there are so many of them that they crowd onto the pages like lists of a directory. Critical assessments are condensed into perfunctory formulae: good things tend to be 'exciting and' - one waits for the other hand to clap -'innovative'; bad things are passed over in silence. The blessed thrill of the stage cannot find room among the jostling and often rather trivial facts, but then perhaps it always was rarer on those hundreds of stages than the vivid Walterdale performances might have led one to think. Who can tell? Certainly this book cannot, for it presents the outside of the story, not its heart.
Yet of course the book is to be recommended. It is the result of long and devoted work, and nowhere else are all these pieces of information to be found gathered together. But be warned: there are sentences here that begin with 'Hopefully', and words like 'predominately' disfigure the page. It is not exactly an enchanting read.