Going into the second season, the orchestra was booming. Subscriptions had almost doubled for Year Two to 95 percent and 81 percent, respectively, for each of the two main concert series, and visiting orchestras, including the Montreal Symphony and the Winnipeg Symphony, had been programmed into the series and obtained good audiences. The NACO had played in the pit for visits by the big three ballet companies as well as the Canadian Opera Company. A growing chamber music series quickly became so successful that it had to be moved out of the intimate Salon and into the much larger Theatre. In addition, the orchestra’s outreach program into the schools and its matinee concerts for children were already a roaring success. All this, plus radio and television broadcasts, and tours and appearances out of Ottawa, were putting the orchestra on the map. Still, there was space in the musicians’ contract for more services, and Bernardi and Southam determined that they would fill it up with operas as they devised their plans for the new Summer Festival.
Mario Bernardi was the new orchestra’s gifted and hard-driving leader. Photo © NAC.
Theatre remained a different story. The revised plan for the 1970–71 season called for two series in the Theatre of six plays each, one French and the other English, showcasing major and regional theatres from across the country. The Théâtre du Nouveau Monde and the Stratford and Shaw Festivals would make their requisite appearances, but others such as Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre Theatre Company would also bring shows. This outreach by the Arts Centre would be a great asset for these theatre troupes, most of which had little money to tour. The NAC would foot the bill when they came to the capital, and, if they managed to fit in other appearances along the way, so much the better. In short, the Arts Centre would have a significant role as a catalyst in getting theatre companies out of their own hometowns to be seen elsewhere, especially in Ottawa. In the first two years of its existence, the NAC brought an incredible array of artists to Ottawa as it strove to show Canadians the services and the exposure it could provide.
The resourceful and sharp-eyed David Haber believed implicitly in the importance of the NAC’s national role. Acknowledging that “you couldn’t tour a building,”13 he constantly toured himself, looking for plays and productions that he could bring into Ottawa. In Calgary he spotted one entertaining work that would have a seminal effect on all sorts of theatre activity at the NAC, but not necessarily because of what it put on the stage. The show was Theatre Calgary’s musical production You Two Stay Here, the Rest Come with Me, written and directed by Christopher Newton, who later became artistic director of the Shaw Festival. It starred Sandy Crawley, an actor soon to have a large impact on the national theatrical scene, ultimately as a leading light in the actors’ union. The show’s producer was Richard Dennison, the company’s founding administrator and production director who had also worked at Expo. Haber negotiated with him to bring the show to Ottawa in late spring 1970, just after the regular theatre season had ended. Dennison, whose whole family was bilingual, jumped at the chance to come back east. Although the show was a lively and entertaining commentary on the history of Calgary, seemingly tailor-made to inform and entertain audiences elsewhere, it did badly at the Ottawa box office because of its late scheduling. NAC officials concluded that, in future, similar excellent productions must be presented within the subscription series.
Despite the debacles with the first season of theatre in both languages and the decision to turn the main series into a showcase for other companies, Southam had not given up on the idea of having the Arts Centre produce its own theatre. While the main Theatre would be booked with established plays and visiting theatre companies, the Studio, “with its wonderful experimental space,”14 was available. Before long, Southam and his team made another effort to try resident work. They called it the Studio Project.
Southam was clear about what he wanted: to put two separate companies in the Studio and let them take turns mounting productions in Canada’s two official languages. He hired two artistic directors for this venture. On the French side he chose the Belgian-born Jean Herbiet, a professor of fine arts at Université d’Ottawa with excellent local connections and an intelligent knowledge of French-language theatre. A small man in stature, quiet and shrewd, he had a poetic nature but knew how to keep his counsel and work within the system. His admiration for Hamilton Southam was boundless—“a gentleman scholar, civilized with classic and good taste,”15 all the things that an educated European would admire. On the English side, Southam chose Michael Bawtree, a theatre director who had once worked at Stratford and, more recently, had been at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Southam felt he had the right artistic people in these two men, but he needed someone to look after the two companies. Haber recommended his new bilingual friend, the twenty-five-year-old Richard Dennison. After a quick interview, Southam hired him to be the administrator of the Studio Project—an experience Dennison would later describe as “the worst administrative experience of my entire life.”16
Southam instructed the team to put together a season of three or four plays in each language and bring in the best acting talent available in the country. On the
English side it proved relatively easy to attract good performers, and Bawtree had no trouble recruiting such outstanding actors as Jackie Burroughs, Neil Munro, Blair Brown, Richard Donat, and others. Herbiet had much more difficulty finding actors. Although he used as much local talent as he could, he once again had to hire in from Montreal because there was so little other work for francophone actors in Ottawa. Nevertheless, the results on the French side proved to be more supportive of the overall vision for the National Arts Centre.
Jean Herbiet, the quiet-spoken but brilliant guide who helped realize French theatre at the NAC. Photo © NAC.
While Herbiet set about in a relatively conservative manner to produce his requisite series of plays, building his series on themes of “Love,” Woman,” and other basic concepts, Bawtree decided to take literally Southam’s suggestions that he wanted original work and that the Studio was an “experimental space.” His own history was decidedly experimental. He had served as dramaturge at the Stratford Festival and been a close friend there of director Michael Langham. He had travelled in South America with the aid of a Canada Council grant and had worked there “with a subversive group who saw theatre as a political tool.”17 He was firmly attracted to the anarchist point of view, tended to believe that people were “warped by hierarchical tendencies,” and had pursued these ideas in the Drama Department at Simon Fraser University, which was known during this period as the “Berkeley of the North.” Once again, Southam was about to get more than he bargained for.
Bawtree decided to do a collective work, How Many People Went to the Island, What Happened, and Who Came Back. The production started with “a four-page binder of research on the Spanish-American Civil War, largely put together by Bawtree’s personal partner. The text contained not a word of dialogue, but the production did have an expansive eight-to-twelve weeks in which to rehearse. “They needed it,” laughed Dennison later, “because they had nothing to work with.” The actors sat down with Bawtree and collectively began to “interact,” with Bawtree resolutely refusing to take charge or direct. “The first two weeks were very exciting,” he would recall. For the overall production, however, matters rapidly spiralled downward into chaos, with the troupe split between those who enjoyed the unstructured improvisation and others who demanded a script, some direction, and even a designer for the play.
As the opening drew closer, some of the actors still thought it was great, while others became desperate with the anxiety of appearing before an audience without knowing what they were going to do. While Bawtree held to his principle that “people should not want to be told what to do,” Dennison went personally to Southam to warn him that a catastrophe lay ahead. In the end, the pressure wore even Bawtree down.