CHANGE IN VANCOUVER THEATRE, 1963-80

Malcolm Page

The four events which were to be the key to growth in theatre in Vancouver took place in a few months in 1963-64, though one should note that the city established a Festival as early as 1958, which introduced international culture for a few summer weeks and was last held in 1968.¹

On 19 September 1963, the University of British Columbia Theatre Department presented Salad Days in its new 400-seat Frederick Wood Theatre, which replaced a 123-seat army hut in use since 1952. Five days later a new collaborative venture to promote amateur groups, Metro, opened with Agatha Christie's The Hollow. The Playhouse Theatre Company began its first season of seven plays with The Hostage on 2 October in the handsome 647-seat Playhouse. Finally, on 3 February 1964, the Arts Theatre Club mounted its first play, announced for a run of one week, which was extended: Light Up the Sky.² This list reveals the kind of play thought likely to be popular at the time: three works from Britain and one from America, a comedy, a thriller, a musical and Brendan Behan's entertainment with some serious aspirations.

This chronology isolates two major events. The Playhouse was the regional theatre, its growth to be specially favoured by Canada Council grants. The Arts was to develop slowly in the sixties, but in the seventies became a close rival of the Playhouse. The chronology also identifies two other trends, the quantity of amateur activity which was to decrease as professional theatre grew, and the expansion of university and college theatre.

The Playhouse Theatre Company was created by the Community Arts Council to occupy the theatre built by the city completed in 1962. The booklet issued to mark the seventh anniversary credited seven other organizations with contributing to the formation: the Festival, U.B.C., the C.B.C., the Koerner Foundation, the Little Theatre, the Dominion Drama Festival, and Holiday, which performed childrens' plays. Thirteen individuals are also named, among them two local actors, Robert Clothier and Joy Coghill, and two businessmen who arranged the fund-raising, Alex Walton and Hugh Palmer. The Playhouse shares the main characteristics of the Manitoba Theatre Centre and of the other 'regional theatres' which have followed it. These theatres have a Board of Directors representing local businessmen and the upper middle class; they present six or seven plays between fall and spring; these plays are balanced between classics and recent London and New York successes; and the companies try hard to sell season tickets.

Looking back, it is difficult to realise how small the scale was initially. The Company in the first year had a budget of $147,000. The building was rent-free from the city, instead of money (for the first year only), and there was $8,000 from the Canada Council, $25,000 in donations and the proceeds of the sale of 2,000 season tickets. Michael Johnston served as producer, manager and designer for the first year, with only four others in administration. He recalls: 'I undertook all kinds of things I shouldn't have, like I was the designer, I was virtually doing the advertising. I was virtually the production manager in a way .... Money. They couldn't raise enough. And I guess this is where I started making my mistakes. I was terrified it wouldn't happen. So I started. making these awful concessions. Saying well, we don't need that, or I can do that, or we can get away with not spending money on that.' ³ Jack Richards, the moralistic Vancouver Sun reviewer, hated The Hostage: 'Much of the crowd seemed titillated by the fact that the play is set in a brothel. And, of course, the use of naughty words on the stage is very big .... The blatant vulgarity of the three homosexuals was not really very amusing .... If you like your theatre coarse and vulgar and larded with the lowest in comedy, you may think it's great.' ⁴

The first ten years at the Playhouse were often turbulent. Malcolm Black was Artistic Director for three years, followed by three more for two years each: Joy Coghill, David Gardner and Paxton Whitehead. The problems of the Playhouse in these years turned partly on the shortage of funds. In 1967-68, for example, with a budget of over $400,000, the province donated only $10,000 and the city of Vancouver $17,500, most of which had to be re-paid as rent. The other problem can be expressed as local people versus high standards. The Playhouse emphasized the employment of local actors, for the Festival had conspicuously imported its performers. The Company, however, was new, not a development from existing city amateur groups (as was largely the situation at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, the Crest, and the Manitoba Theatre Centre). Thus amateurs believed that they had been supplanted. Michael Johnston comments: 'At that time the amateur community was active and there was antagonism towards professional theatre. What's so good about you? And the press was somewhat that way too.' A rather different complaint came from the people who supported the Playhouse, that they had created it and raised money for it, then were not necessarily receiving the kind of entertainment they expected. Coghill was the only Director from Vancouver; the others were perhaps more concerned with meeting their own cosmopolitan standards than with pleasing influential local people.

So the series of conflicts is not surprising. Black's difficulties were mostly about money: various undignified squabbles with the city and province about reduced grants and unpaid rent.⁵ Coghill was first in trouble over The Filthy Piranesi, by William D. Roberts, offered as a curtain-raiser to Black Comedy. Alderman Earle Adams opposed a grant from the city to the Playhouse because of this piece, asserting: 'People tell me they view this play with complete disgust. A couple of men loving each other and a couple of women who love each other on the stage. To me, this type of play is completely disgusting. My wife saw it with three other women, and she got it from other women on the golf course .... These are respectable people, a cross-section of the community who support the theatre.'⁶ Grass and Wild Strawberries, George Ryga's play about hippies, in April 1969 was much criticised, both for the loudness of the music and for attracting badly-dressed and dirty spectators.

David Gardner had problems with both finance and censorship. His trial-balloon remark on arrival that it might be fun to put on Hair was poorly received. Then his first season ended with a deficit of over $100,000, and in April 1970 closure was likely. Emergency grants were eventually literally scared up. A secret deal with the provincial government was rumoured: in return for the money, the Playhouse would avoid 'experimental, vulgar or controversial' productions.⁷ Gardner was obliged to make his second season one of retrenchment. He wanted, nevertheless, to go ahead with a new play by Ryga, Captives of the Faceless Drummer, referring to what has come to be called the October Crisis, and the Board objected. The dispute was ostensibly about whether the script could be ready in time, which concealed the argument about possibly dangerous political content. Gardner was over-ruled and the season was completed instead with Plaza Suite and a visiting production of Hobson's Choice. (Captives was seen in Vancouver, anyway, for a short run in the Art Gallery in April 1971.) Whitehead during his two years avoided trouble by giving the Board largely the undemanding shows they wanted; also, he was often absent as he was simultaneously director of the Shaw Festival.

James Barber, drama critic of the Province, writing in 1972, saw the Board as the problem: 'The Boards of well-intentioned, theatrically ignorant and socially enthusiastic people who control the [regional] theatres, through a cumbersome machinery of committees, still cherish the anachronistic belief that they are the holders of a sacred trust, the keepers of a flame without which the theatre will die. Largely they are businessmen and the wives of businessmen. They are not representative of the community at large, or of the artists, be they writers, directors, actors or multi-media innovators. They are both gentle and genteel, basically scared of anything new and untried, dependent for their opinions upon the opinions of others.' ⁸

The Playhouse in the sixties gained a reputation for staging new Canadian work, before the rest of the country was showing much interest in local writers. The record was six in the four seasons selected by Black and Coghill, all world premières, two by Eric Nicol, Like Father, Like Fun (1966) and The Fourth Monkey (1968), two by George Ryga, the much-acclaimed Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967) and Grass and Wild Strawberries (1969), with Countdown to Armageddon, by James Clavell (1966) and How to Run the Country, by Paul St Pierre (1967). Whitehead added four first productions, of a third play by Nicol, Pillar of Sand (1973), The Native, by Merv Campone (1972), the Canadian première of Crabdance, by local writer Beverley Simons (1972), and a work new to the city, Ann Henry's Lulu Street (1973).⁹

Nevertheless, Treasure Island represented the Playhouse at the National Arts Centre in January 1972, and the British Columbia writers were understandably indignant. The rest of the mainstage programme included safer classics (Candida, Arms and the Man, She Stoops to Conquer)and recent West End successes (The Secretary Bird, Forty Years On, Joe Egg). Coghill introduced Stage Two, which survived for eleven shows in 1968-70, occupying first the Electrical Workers' Hall on Beattie Street and then the Arts. Several were Canadian scripts, with James Reaney's Listen to the Wind the greatest artistic achievement. This venture in a short-run, low-budget alternative was unusual at the time, and to become common in the seventies.

The Playhouse added theatre for young people to its functions when in 1969 it took over Holiday, which had operated in the city since 1953. The focus switched in the seventies to Theatre-in-Education, work which ended in 1977.¹⁰

Season tickets reached 9,909 in 1968-69, more than half the number of seats available in the standard three-week run: the highest figures subsequently were 8,300 in 1970-71 and 7,740 in 1977-78. Though this indicates popularity, I believe the productions of the sixties usually looked as though they were the best that could be done with too little time and money. Gardner, in my view, was responsible for the most conspicuous progress, what might be termed from small-town to big-time, outstandingly with The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

The story of the Arts Theatre begins with the Arts Club, which in the early sixties provided the main meeting-place for the city's more gregarious writers, painters and musicians. Two theatre enthusiasts, Otto Lowy and Yvonne Firkin, decided to use the upstairs hall for plays, initially with 140 seats in-the-round. Light Up the Sky, the first show, was directed by Firkin with a cast of five professionals and six amateurs. For eight years the standard pattern at the Arts was about six plays a year, for runs of about three weeks, with largely Equity casts. Any Wednesday and The Mousetrap were typical of the fare in these years, comedies and a few thrillers. It is not wholly true, however, as Max Wyman has written, that the Arts 'founded its fortunes on witless comedies for the double-knit set,' ¹¹ as productions in the early years included Maugham's The Circle, Albee's A Delicate Balance and Virginia Woolf and a Pinter double-bill, The Lover and The Collection. The Arts certainly sought to please the crowd; also, the Arts was more stable than comparable groups because it had its own building from the beginning.

The University of British Columbia had set up a Theatre Department in 1958 through the persistence of Dorothy Somerset. The $600,000 Frederick Wood Theatre's opener, Salad Days, was directed by John Brockington, with a cast including Alan Scarfe and Marjorie LeStrange. A pattern of four plays a year, with ten performances each, nearly all directed by Theatre Department faculty, and a season-ticket audience, was formed, and has continued ever since. The main parts were usually played by Equity actors, and standards were high. Productions in the sixties included such rarities as Becque's La Parisienne, ventures such as an all-male Twelfth Night, and The Homecoming and Marat/Sade closely modelled on the original London productions. Marat/Sade had a cast of 35 and ten musicians, and drove away the more conservative members of the audience. Three productions by Donald Soule in 1970-73 were outstanding: Strindberg's Ghost Sonata with the audience moving freely in an expanding labyrinth, and Oedipus and Macbeth with spectators standing on the stage among the actors.¹²

Theatre at Simon Fraser University in its first four years, 1965-69, was led by Michael Bawtree and John Juliani, both of whom inspired substantial numbers of students, though public performances were few. After the departure of these two men, several Theatre Residents, each staying only eight months, failed to sustain much interest in plays. Through the 1970s Vancouver City College's Drama programme, directed by Anthony Holland, was active. The indirect contribution of university and college theatre is the number of graduates who want to go on working in theatre, and find that the only way is by forming their own company. Thus many alternative companies, such as Tamahnous, Touchstone, Janus and Spectrum, are made up largely or entirely of recent graduates from U.B.C. and City College Theatre programmes.

The major Vancouver amateur groups sought more attention and a suitable building in the fall of 1963 through forming Metro, a season-ticket theatre where, they advertised, audiences could see the 'selected best local shows in one location .... All series shows under the professional supervision of Mr Sam Payne.' They took over the old 393-seat Marpole Theatre on Southwest Marine Drive, far from the city centre. Unfortunately conversion was not finished in time for the first season, so the old Kitsilano Theatre, on West Fourth Avenue, was used instead. Twelve plays were announced for two-week runs, but lack of support soon led to a reduction to only one week. Founding groups included White Rock Players, West Vancouver Theatre Guild, Richmond Players, Emerald Players, John Howard Players and Vagabond Players. The Little Theatre Association, the leading city group, founded in 1921 and claiming to be the oldest continuing community theatre club in Canada, mounted The Hollow for the opening. The Metro concept changed in January 1966, and Metro began to pick the plays and directors, to hold open auditions, and often to employ one Equity player.

Metro shows, which at the upper end of the scale had been as substantial as Christopher Fry's Venus Observed and Tom Stoppard's Enter a Free Man, became in the early seventies strictly the lightest of comedies, which held a loyal local audience. Max Wyman by 1977 was describing Metro as 'the last surviving theatre haven for this city's reactionary right.' ¹³ The next year Bob Allen of the Province was writing that Metro 'should really be given some kind of special museum status for its remarkable ability to unearth utterly forgettable, inane and irrelevant scripts and drag them, creaking and groaning, onto the stage.' ¹⁴ Metro's initial handicap was that it was the right idea at the wrong moment, coinciding exactly with the start of continuing, growing professional theatre. In recent years its struggle-to-survive has pushed it to the all-comedy formula.

Through the sixties the Little Theatre, with its own building, the York on Commercial Drive (acquired in 1923, and previously the Palace Theatre), mounted annually several productions. Successes included The Father, a DDF finalist in 1966, A Man for all Seasons, Your Own Thing (a musical based on Twelfth Night) and Richard Ouzounian's musical version of Love's Labour's Lost. Support waned as the quantity and quality of entertainment available in the city increased. Artistic Directors such as Jace Van Der Veen and Michael Berry were unable to improve matters. During the seventies, amidst talk of fresh starts, improvements to the building, and arts festivals, productions became less good and less frequent, and the York had to be sold in 1978. The decline in quality and appeal of amateur theatre in cities during the seventies (since the end of the Dominion Drama Festival, not co-incidentally) has been insufficiently noted.¹⁵

A number of small companies were formed during the sixties, and rarely survived long. Two of these attempted large-scale plays, to add to the kinds offered by the Playhouse and Frederick Wood Theatre. John Stark's Canadian Art Theatre managed a few admired productions, notably two by Eugene O'Neill in 1966-67, The Iceman Cometh and A Touch of the Poet, with Jack Gelber's The Connection two years later. Then in 1970-71 John Parker formed Actors' Contemporary Theatre, based on a disused movie-theatre on Granville Street. His first two shows, The Boys in the Band and The Fantasticks, were popular but the next, Arthur Miller's The Price, failed to find an audience and the venture ended. A year later Parker tried again with an early Vancouver attempt at supper-theatre in Gastown, with such pieces as The Drunkard and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Vancouver's first lunch-time group was unusually short-lived. Spectrum Players' Chekhov farces, in an upstairs room at 804 West Pender, were closed by the Fire Marshal after eight days (they made one return, with John Mortimer's The Dock Brief, for two weeks early in 1972).

The model for Ken Livingstone was off-off-Broadway, using experimental American texts. A U.B.C. graduate, Livingstone created first the New Studio Theatre in 1967 and then the Gallimaufry in 1968-69. The latter was involved in two controversies. The City Licensing Inspector objected to the actress naked under transparent plastic in the group of twelve short American plays, Collision Course, and then McClure's The Beard was subjected to a lengthy prosecution.¹⁶

The most adventurous work to be seen in the city, however, was that of Juliani's group, the Savage God. Little publicized, the shows were usually free and for very few performances. Juliani explored the more bizarre works of Arrabal and Ghelderode, and incorporated his own wedding into a piece entitled A Celebration spread through several rooms of the Art Gallery. His work in Vancouver reached a peak in 1971 with twenty different plays in twenty days, presented in almost twenty different locations: ¹⁷ another three-week season was held in the Summer of 1972.

Juliani performed despite lack of money, making a virtue of occasional, small-scale and free operations. The highly ambitious work of Stark, and the more realistic programme of Parker, both failed for lack of subsidy, even though the Festival by this time had helped to accustom the city to the principle of subsidy of the arts.

Two organizations which have continued started in 1970-71. Sheila Neville and Doug Bankson established the New Play Centre in the fall of 1970, which began with rehearsed play-readings on Sunday evenings and grew to a script-advisory service. Workshopping of promising scripts followed, then performance of new plays: the first was A Compulsory Option, by Sharon Pollock, at the Art Gallery in August 1972. Now the Centre is one of the three operators of the Waterfront Theatre. Pamela Hawthorne, who became Managing Director in 1972, was largely responsible for this steady growth.¹⁸

Theatre Workshop was formed in the Summer of 1971 by some U.B.C. graduates, among them Larry Lillo, who continues with the group, and John Gray. Soon the name became Tamahnous, the Chilcotin Indian word for 'magic.' Dracula 2 and The Bacchae, the first productions, were remarkable ensemble work. After several struggling years Tamahnous; began to get regular grants and then in 1977 the status of resident company at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. The group has moved in several different directions in its ten years, shaped by changing personnel. Four main types of work have been new Canadian plays, such as Jeremy Long's The Final Performance of Vaslav Nijinsky (1972) and Liquid Gold, by Bruce Ruddell and Glen Thompson, about rum-running from B.C. during Prohibition in America (1978); politics, performing Brecht, David Hare's Fanshen, and a response to Social Credit government called 84 Acres; Charles Ludlam scripts from New York's Ridiculous Theatre Company; and difficult, personal creations with titles like Foolproof and Vertical Dreams.¹⁹

Three events make it possible to identify a second phase in the development of theatre in Vancouver beginning in 1972-73. The Playhouse in 1973 acquired Christopher Newton, a Director who remained six years, and thus was able to achieve many of his aims, as none of his predecessors could. The previous year saw Bill Millerd become Artistic Director of the Arts, and preside over steady growth there. Further, 1972-73 were the two years of generous Local Initiatives Projects and Opportunities for Youth grants, and many theatre groups were created with their aid.

Newton's view of the role of the Playhouse was clear: 'I think it should become - and I don't like the phrase because I think it's a little pretentious - a kind of "national theatre of B.C." That is, it provides classics, to show what our heritage in the theatre is and it has to do new plays and they have to be pretty much equally balanced .... [New plays means] important plays that haven't been done here.' ²⁰

Newton sought to solve problems and improve the quality of the work of the Playhouse in four ways. First, administrative. He claimed to have solved the difficulties of his predecessors simply by taking charge himself: 'What I really said was that I'm in control. I have financial control as well as artistic control .... There is no longer an administrator and an artistic director. Now we have myself at the top and then on the next level I have a director of operations.' Second, efforts to raise standards. Recognising inexperienced direction as a major shortcoming, Newton brought in several overseas directors, among them Liviu Cielei from Roumania (for a brilliant treatment of Büchner's Leonce and Lena), the expatriate Pole, Yurek Bogajewicz (for Seneca's Oedipus, audaciously on the mainstage), and Derek Goldby, Philip Hedley and Alan Dossor from Britain. He established a Theatre School in 1975, for twelve students only, headed first by Powys Thomas, followed by Roger Hodgman and David Latham. Third, expansion by reviving the second stage in 1975, with four smaller-scale productions annually. Uncertainty about its purpose is suggested by name changes, first the New Company, later New Stage and New Series. Fourth, to fulfil Newton's ideas about ensemble work, a permanent company for each season, on 36-week contracts, also first achieved for 1975-76.

Outstanding shows in Newton's years included Camille, by Robert David MacDonald, poetic and elliptical, bizarre yet powerful; six imaginative Shakespeares; and excellent mainstream productions of Tartuffe, Pygmalion, Equus, Travesties and, among Canadian works, Leaving Home and Of the Fields, Lately. The best new play was Sharon Pollock's Komagata Maru Incident.

Newton can be criticized for a failure to present enough Canadian drama and, linked with this, for never developing a clear policy for the second stage. He also had troubled relationships with the local theatre community, accused of using too many imported actors - his company, in fact, seemed one everyone loved to hate. In September 1974 Newton was denouncing the purely negative criticism as 'criminal': 'If you stop one person from attending any theatre in this town, you're killing something which is just at the beginning of its growth .... The working atmosphere in Vancouver is overwhelmingly negative.' ²¹

Despite the changes and innovations of Newton's regime, the Playhouse did not experience unrestricted progress. Summer 1976 presented yet another crisis, a $90,000 deficit on the previous season. Box office, donations and sponsorships were all less than anticipated. Consequently, staff and the size of the performing company were cut back. The New Company was no longer separate, but used actors from the mainstage company, and its runs were reduced from three weeks to two.

The quality of Playhouse productions in the seventies is disputed. Peter Hay wrote in 1977; 'Theatre used to be more exciting in our city than it is now .... Ten years ago there were fewer productions, but they caused a stir across the country. And, in the opinion of this critic, the quality was much higher.' ²² On the other hand, Bob Allen was writing in December 1974 that Newton 'has definitely raised the production standards of the company.'²³ I disagree totally with Hay - standards were lower in the sixties, and only Rita Joe could be said to cause a stir, mainly because it appeared at a moment of national guilt feelings about Indians. Newton achieved a consistently high level of productions, taking in acting, direction and Cameron Porteous's sets. When Newton moved to the Shaw Festival in 1979, Roger Hodgman succeeded him.

The Playhouse, despite the personalities of Newton and Hodgman, appears Establishment and monolithic in 1980, continuing because the Canada Council provides substantial subsidy. The Playhouse appears still to lack sufficient support from Vancouver city or from the province, and not to have the kind of loyalty and commitment that the Arts has, or such comparable institutions as the Symphony and Art Gallery in Vancouver.²⁴

Bill Millerd became Artistic Director of the Arts Theatre in 1972, directing nearly all the plays himself in the earlier years. Soon he had a huge success in a co-production with David Y. H. Lui, of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Millerd recalls 'That was quite an epic production, running for seven months, with those wonderful performers - Ann Mortifee, Ruth Nicol, Pat Rose and Leon Bibb - it was amazing, really. Forty thousand people poured into the Arts Club Theatre on Seymour Street, so many of them discovering the theatre for the very first time.' ²⁵ Operations became year-round, with six or seven shows a year instead of four. Runs of almost every play extended to two months or more, with Same Time, Next Year, Blithe Spirit, Private Lives and Side by Side by Sondheim running much longer. Season ticket holders increased steadily to nearly 7,000, rivalling the Playhouse, and attendance rose from 46,000 in 1975-76 to 70,000 in 1977-78. Millerd found what he called a 'middle audience,' who found the Playhouse too formal and large-scale, and who were not much interested in experiments.

Millerd has always been reluctant to make policy statements about the Arts and his view of theatre. He says: 'I haven't tried to make a direct "this is what I think of theatre" statement in my direction.' However, 'I have always tried to present a mosaic, because that is what our audiences like.' When Millerd talks about the Arts' success, his explanations are as vague as this: 'I maintain that theatre is a live thing that should touch you. That's when it truly works. I think much of our success has been due to the fact that we have managed genuinely to touch our audiences with our work.' In 1976 he looked back on the great progress made by the Arts in four years: 'There was a time a little while ago when just getting a production mounted seemed the epitome of achievement. You felt you should get 5,000 gold stars and be sent to heaven immediately, just for having put on a play. Now, that's not the point. We know how to mount plays. Now it's time to get on with it and go way beyond that.' ²⁶ Millerd has expanded the Arts essentially on his own, bringing together his taste in plays with a sure instinct for what will draw audiences.

Millerd's flair for pleasing the public began with Sleuth, Absurd Person Singular and the like. With the growth of season ticket sales, he was able to introduce safely some rather more adventurous fare, the more accessible classics, like A Midsummer Night's Dream and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and an annual Canadian play. These were Creeps, Battering Ram, You're Gonna be alright, Jamie Boy, Broken Pieces, Bonjour la Bonjour, On the Job, Les Canadiens and Gossip.

Though the introduction of fixed seating had increased the capacity of the Arts to 220, this was insufficient. When the run-down industrial district of Granville Island was being re-developed, Millerd secured funding to convert a warehouse into a comfortable 450-seat theatre. In preparation for the move, Millert put Arts' productions into the Playhouse and Presentation House in North Vancouver, partly to gain experience in operating a larger empire. The New Arts, or Arts II, opened in the fall of 1979 with The Incredible Adventures of Cardinal Tosca, by Alden Nowlan and Walter Learning. The Arts first première followed, Ken Mitchell's ambitious The Great Cultural Revolution, and soon after Michel Tremblay's The Impromptu of Outremont, at the same time as its Montreal and Toronto productions. The old Arts continued with such small-cast pieces as John Murrell's Memoir and Sheldon Rosen's Ned and Jack, For the summer of 1980 it was converted for cabaret performance, returning to its regular stage late in the year. The Arts, through careful selection of plays in the seventies, attracted and then kept bigger and bigger audiences, greatly enlarging the city's theatregoing public.

Many fringe and alternative companies were seen during the seventies. This life-cycle is typical: some young, energetic people come together with an enthusiastic leader and stage a show. They are soon struggling for money, space and audience, and gradually are discouraged. So the group disintegrates, the performers leave for a bigger city, freelancing or abandoning work in the theatre. Some groups expire for lack of a function, or because their purpose is fulfilled, but for most, death is premature.

The term 'alternative' covers several kinds of theatre. West Coast Actors used experienced performers in well-known plays, but looked like an alternative for five years, until they found a home of their own. Some alternatives are would-be commercial ventures, such as Actors' Contemporary Theatre, mentioned earlier, and Rhapsody in 1979. There are young companies with conservative programming: Janus offered Butterflies are Free and The Only Game in Town in 1978 and 1980. There are groups which rarely perform publicly, notably Mallie Boman's Actors' Workshop, 1972-80. Most truly alternative are the experimenters, most consistently Tamahnous.

LIP and OFY brought many groups to brief existence in 1972 and 1973, as well as assisting Tamahnous and Savage God. While these grants showed a most enlightened recognition that actors were very much among the unemployed, and had special needs, there were also problems. Groups were evaluated on the excellence of their application, rather than on their work. In the early months of 1972, though, all kinds of new companies came on the scene. Troupe staged four Canadian plays, Jackie Crossland's Rinse Cycle, Doug Bankson's Lenore, Never More, John Lazarus's Babel Rap and Herschel Hardin's Esker Mike and his wife Agiluk. The grandly-named Vancouver Repertory Theatre offered Obaldia sketches and the modern Noh plays of Yukio Mishima. The Goodwill Store did improvisations from spectator's suggestions. Steady-State Doomsday went expensively for multi-media - films, slides, lights, dancers - in a single show at the Arts, claiming 'to meaningfully integrate a number of different media and techniques so that they reinforce each other.'

Only Citystage, founded by Ray Michal, continues from a beginning with a LIP grant. Michal alone went for a building, leasing a fondly-remembered doughnut store 16 feet wide and seating 75, opposite the Stock Exchange on Howe Street. One-act plays went on at 12:15 and 1:15 daily, with a new bill every two weeks. Michal chose scripts that were both worthwhile and entertaining, among them Slawomir Mrozek's Enchanted Night, David Cregan's Transcending, Pinter's The Lover, Jean Anouilh's Cecile and Joe Orton's The Good and Faithful Servant. Because the work was good and visible, and because of Michal's persistence, subsidies were eventually found. The original theatre, however, was demolished and Citystage eventually acquired, in 1976, a new 150-seat theatre on Thurlow, which was far enough from Howe for the original lunch-hour audience to be lost. Citystage came to present mainly full-length plays in the evening. Two plays by Richard Ouzounian, British Properties and The City Show, were popular farces, but Citystage had trouble in maintaining a distinct identity, risking becoming a mini-Arts without season-ticket holders.²⁷

LIP- and OFY-funded groups stressed acting, rather than the texts performed, demonstrating just what was possible on quite small amounts of money. Most of them looked first to Canadian work. They showed the unimportance of stages and facilities for many kinds of theatre. The groups of 1972 and 1973 showed that forming a group was easy whereas sustaining it was very hard.²⁸

The pattern from 1974 onwards ceased to be that of a few months of concentrated work and became again a matter of irregular and occasional appearances. Touchstone, made up of U.B.C. graduates first headed by Gordon McCall, formed in October 1975 ²⁹ and a black group, Sepia Players, formed in May 1976, continue when funding can be found.

Three new groups performing for children were set up, doing much of their work in schools and thus attracting little publicity. Jabberwocky in 1975-76 chose the familiar, with Cinderella, Dick Whittington, Rapunzel and Snow White. Elizabeth Ball's Carousel, formed in December 1974 with a $30,000 LIP grant, had a surer and lighter touch, with sketches entitled Strings'n'Things, the legend The Ice Wolf and a fine version of James Thurber's Thirteen Clocks.³⁰ Dennis Foon's Green Thumb, formed in 1975, had the clearest identity, with original scripts by Foon (The Windigo, Raft Baby, Heracles, La Malice) and by John Carroll (The Nose Returns, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Kid). The launching of an Annual Festival of Theatre for Young People, bringing in many companies from across Canada and from overseas, in June 1978 gave impetus to this new quality and energy in performing for the young.

After Citystage, there was one major addition to local theatre, West Coast Actors, formed in the Summer of 1974. This was a group of the city's leading actors coming together to present the plays with which they themselves wanted to be involved. Micki Maunsell, the first President, recalled how the cast of Blithe Spirit at the Arts in 1973 'thought how nice it was to work together with people for so long. We respected each other's work and thought it was a shame that we couldn't stay together. The next step was to look at prospects of establishing an actors' company.' Robert Graham, the Vice-President, explained: 'We all have opportunities to expand our horizons. There aren't enough directors with vision, imagination and a willingness to take gambles, and I think that's where the development of theatre lies.' ³¹ West Coast Actors began excellently with such plays as The Seagull and David Storey's In Celebration. Three or four plays were presented each year, in various locations. Edward Bond's The Sea and Brecht's Arturo Ui were outstanding, and also The Merchant of Venice, with Anthony Holland as Shylock, which C.B.C. television showed in the province. Difficulties in working as a kind of fluid collective developed, and Kathryn Shaw became Artistic Director. West Coast Actors in 1979 became co-owners of the new 250-seat Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island, like the New Arts, a conversion from a warehouse. The Waterfront is shared with the New Play Centre and Carousel.

The many new groups of 1972-73 created an acute shortage of performance space. In the period to 1972, only the Playhouse (expensive, and rarely rented to outsiders) and the Arts existed in the centre of Vancouver, with awkwardly large multi-purpose structures situated in Burnaby and North Vancouver. Many of the new groups used the Art Gallery, which had no theatre facilities, but did have a welcoming Director in Tony Emery, and a distinctive warm, open-minded audience. Several groups squeezed in succession into the Arts. Others found only makeshift solutions: Genesis (1972-74) at the James Cowan in Burnaby; Troupe (1972-74) at first in an old church known as Intermedia Hall at First and Semlin; and Theatre One (of Montreal, 1973) in the Knights of Pythias Hall on Eighth Street in East Vancouver. Savage God, meanwhile, by appearing all over the place, including a hollow tree in Stanley Park for Happy Days, was showing the unimportance of bricks-and-mortar for good theatre.

Nevertheless, a return to building, or, more precisely, to conversion of existing buildings, followed. Another disused church became the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, under Chris Wootten's energetic direction, in August 1973. This was fully booked from the start and established itself as the chief location for homeless groups. In the late seventies the Centre began to initiate most of its programmes. The David Y.H. Lui Theatre (later Spratt's Ark, and now a concert hall named the Laundromat) opened in the spring of 1976 in the city centre, and no less than six have followed: Citystage's bigger theatre in 1976; Presentation House in North Vancouver in 1977; Robson Square Theatre, part of the courthouse complex, at the end of 1978; and in 1979 Kits House, a small theatre in Kitsilano begun by Janus, and the New Arts and Waterfront a hundred metres apart on Granville Island. The old Carnegie Library, converted as a community centre, has also been used for plays. The number of seats available virtually doubled in two years. Christopher Dafoe has rightly wondered in the Sun about the consequences of so many comfortable theatres: 'Some of the most interesting evenings of theatre I've experienced in Vancouver have come my way while I was sitting on the hard floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery or in some dirty studio or loft. These are lush days in comparison. In those days, the emphasis was on the play and the actor. Today a bit too much emphasis is being placed on the venue and the amenities.' ³² Currently, five theatres appear able to operate virtually year-round, plus the Playhouse for most of the year. Whether there is money, audiences and talent to fill the others remains to be seen.

A number of topics neglected here would appear in a comprehensive study. Five critics have been quoted in the course of the above survey: two others for the daily newspapers and three for C.B.C. radio have not been mentioned. Their role in shaping a view of theatre is considerable. Second, the visitors. The use of foreign directors at the Playhouse has been noted, and their continuing influence might be sought. Vancouver has been visited by such groups as Passe Muraille, Codco, the Mummers, NDWT with The Donnellys, the Performance Group and the Manhattan Project. Third, funding. Over these seventeen years civic and provincial funding has grown less suspicious and gradually more generous. Business has recently become a significant provider, the role of the individual donor has declined, and the show wholly dependent on box-office a great rarity. Fourth, actors. The acting community of the sixties was in danger of being limited and unchanging, with people leaving Vancouver after gaining experience. Fifth, the C.B.C. Radio and occasionally television have often been important for actors and playwrights, for both money and experience.

Finally, some broader reflections prompted by preparing this study. The theatre historian is probably most interested in the way events in Vancouver have parallels elsewhere in Canada. Is there, for example, any other city where a second company rivals the 'regional theatre' as closely as the Arts rivals the Playhouse? Another angle for the historian might be productions. In these seventeen years Vancouver has seen the four Chekhovs, four Strindbergs and seven Shaws. It has seen all the major Pinter and all Stoppard except Jumpers, and in Shakespeare has had All's Well but not Troilus and Cressida, The Tempest but not The Winter's Tale -and so on. What I might term a cultural historian could usefully compare the role and development of the Opera, Symphony and Art Gallery with the Playhouse: all four have had conflicts between the Board and the Artistic Director during the last two decades. There are questions for social historians. What, for instance, is the role of immigrants, both in displaying the initiative to create demand, and in providing a growing audience? While the stock attitude is to deplore dependence on foreigners, have they perhaps achieved something which native Canadians somehow could not? And what is the role of growing leisure and affluence in finding increasing audiences?

There are issues for policy-makers, too. The growth in quantity and quality of the theatre seems directly to follow an increase in funding, but the continued funding of people rather than the capital costs of a new building. Have promising fledgling groups disappeared because funding has been less flexible than that of the Arts Council in Britain? Less directly, the development of university and college drama departments has produced more people clamouring for a chance to act, to write and to direct.

To return at last to the title, the early sixties to the late seventies show change from a handful of productions, often short runs, semi-professional, in unsuitable buildings and almost never Canadian scripts, to large numbers of productions (up to ten simultaneously), often of a high standard, and sometimes Canadian plays. Change may be seen in quantity, in quality, in Canadian content and in the growth of audiences.

CHANGE IN VANCOUVER THEATRE, 1963-80

Malcolm Page

1 This paper was first given, in shorter form, at the conference of the Association for Canadian Theatre History/Association d'Histoire du théâtre au Canada, Montreal, May 1980.
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2 a) I have not attempted to footnote every fact in this paper. Sources include the two Vancouver daily newspapers, the Sun and the Province, the alternative weekly, Georgia Straight (now the Vancouver Free Press), programmes and press releases from the theatres, Canada Council Annual Reports, The Stage in Canada and Canadian Theatre Review Yearbooks.
b) For the situation immediately preceding my starting-date of 1963, See PETER HAWORTH, 'Theatre in Vancouver,' Tamarack Review, No 25 (Autumn 1962), pp 18-25, and DAVID GARDNER's articles for the Canadian Annual Review: 1961, pp 384-386; 1962, pp 386-387.
c) I have in preparation a calendar of Vancouver theatre for the period since 1963. This task is surprisingly difficult, as, especially in the first half of the period, small-scale groups and productions were rarely advertised or reviewed in the daily newspapers. The Canadian Theatre Review Yearbooks provide basic information since their first publication, for 1974, but have omissions.
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3 'The Playhouse Interviews Michael Johnston,' The Newsheet (Playhouse), 2.2, February 1975, pp 2-3
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4 RICHARDS, 'Opening Show at Playhouse Unworthy of any Company,' Vancouver Sun, 3 October 1963, p 32
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5 See, for example, 'Editorial: The Play's the Thing,' Vancouver Sun, 17 September 1966, p 4
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6 'Opinion: the White Knight in a Black Comedy,' Province, Leisure section, 11 April 1969, p 3
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7 See ALLAN FOTHERINGHAM, untitled column, Vancouver Sun, 8 March 1972, p 39
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8 BARBER, 'Growth Must Be Shown,' Province, Leisure section, 6 October 1972, p 3
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9 Canadian plays were rare elsewhere. Those staged included early works by BEVERLEY SIMONS (The Elephant and the Jewish Question, Little Theatre, 1968), LEONARD ANGEL (The Ballad of Etienne Brule, U.B.C. Studio, February 1968; How the Greeks dealt with their Military and Industrial Complex in 546 B.C., Simon Fraser University, February 1969) and ROD LANGLEY (The Veterans, Arts, February 1969).
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10 For accounts of Holiday, See JACK RICHARDS, 'Joy Reigns Suprerne,' Vancouver Sun, Leisure section, 16 September 1966, p 3; SUSAN MERTENS, 'How Holiday Grew,' Vancouver Sun, Leisure section, 6 September 1974, pp 4-5; MARGARET RUSHTON, 'Holiday's 21 Magical Years,' The Newsheet (Playhouse), 2.2, February 1975, p 3; and JOYCE DOOLITTLE and ZINA BARNIEH, A Mirror of our Dreams (Vancouver, 1979), pp 69-73.
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11 MAX WYMAN and SUSAN MERTENS, 'The Powerful,' Vancouver, January 1979, p 26
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12 See RICHARD KENT WILCOX, 'Environments,' Canadian Theatre Review, No. 6, Spring 1975, pp 28-31, and MALCOLM PAGE, 'Vancouver,' Canadian Theatre Review, No. 4, Fall 1974, pp 133-135
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13 WYMAN, 'Why take after poor, defenceless Metro?,' Vancouver Sun, 29 January 1977, p 37
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14 ALLEN, 'Unearthed Melodrama Deserves Reburial,' Province, 12 May 1978, p 16
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15 One other amateur activity is worth noting. Amateur musical groups were responsible for forming Theatre in the Park in 1969, performing a musical (and later two musicals) each summer outdoors in Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park. The more ambitious and professional Theatre under the Stars-TUTS-had ended, bankrupt, in 1963.
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16 See MALCOLM PAGE, 'Vancouver's The Beard,' Canadian Theatre Review, No. 13, Winter 1977, pp 20-23
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17 See JULIANI, 'Savage Space,' Canadian Theatre Review, No. 6, Spring 1975, pp 50-55, and DON RUBIN, 'John Juliani's Savage God: an Experiment in Canadian Theatre,' Theatre Quarterly, No. 20, December 1975-February 1976, pp 151-163. I am preparing a documentary report on Savage God in Vancouver.
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18 See CHRISTINA MARLOW, 'Vancouver's Vibrant New Play Centre,' Scene Changes, January-February 1979, pp 13-15
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19 Useful sources are MAX WYMAN, 'Total Theatre,' Vancouver Sun, Leisure section, 19 March 1976, pp 6-7, and PAUL CLEMENTS, 'Tamahnous Independent and Vigorous,' Georgia Straight, 17-23 March 1976. I am preparing a separate study of Tamahnous.
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20 Quoted by CHRISTOPHER DAFOE, 'New Times Coming for Playhouse,' Vancouver Sun, Leisure section, 19 April 1973, p 4
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21 Interview with BOB ALLEN, Playhouse Criticism "Criminal," Province, 12 September 1974, p 49
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22 HAY, 'A Pan for All Seasons,' Toronto Theatre Review, 2:1, October 1977, p3
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23 ALLEN, 'Captives of the Two-faced Drummer,' Vancouver Magazine, December 1974
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24 For a fuller account of this period at the Playhouse, see MALCOLM PAGE, 'There Goes Newton, Here Comes Newton,' Canadian Theatre Review, No 24, Fall 1979, pp 69-73.
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25 MILLERD, 'A Personal Recollection,' Arts Club Theatre, Playboard, Special Issue, 1979, p 6. This booklet briefly covers the history of the Arts Theatre from the beginning to the opening of the Granville Island Theatre.
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26 These quotations come from the two most important interviews with Millerd: BOB ALLEN, 'Arts Club wants to "touch" audiences,' Province, 16 July 1976, p 21, and MAX WYMAN, 'Millerd: the man in the middle of the theatre for the middle man,' Vancouver Sun, 23 June 1976.
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27 For the early years at Citystage, see MALCOLM PAGE, 'Lunchtime Theatre,' Canadian Theatre Review, No 13, Winter 1977, pp 117-119.
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28 For more on the LIP and OFY financed groups, see MALCOLM PAGE, 'Canada,' Plays and Players, 20, December 1972, pp 62-63.
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29 For Touchstone, see IAN MORTON, 'New hope for Van theatres,' Ubyssey (University of British Columbia), 14 January 1977, pp PF3, PF9 (which also discusses Janus), and MAX WYMAN, 'Lifting Masks on Touchstone,' Vancouver Sun, 28 March 1977, p 35
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30 For Carousel, see SUSAN MERTENS, 'Carousel Created to turn out childrens' theatre,' Vancouver Sun, 21 December 1974, and MAX WYMAN, 'Elizabeth Ball lives happily ever after,' Vancouver Sun, 19 December 1975, p 21
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31 Both quoted by BOB ALLEN, 'Actors form their own company,' Province, 17 August 1974, p 12
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32 DAFOE, 'Has essential theatre suffocated in soft seats?,' Vancouver Sun, 12 June 1980, p B11
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