Bawtree’s next production, Pericles, with original music to be written by the Quebec composer Gabriel Charpentier, was cancelled, and Haber raced around to find a substitute, booking in a light-hearted and innocuous show, The Evanescent Review, to plug the hole in the schedule. Years later, Bawtree had nothing but praise for the manner in which Southam had tolerated his behaviour. He had been treated kindly by the director general, who had even invited him out to his cottage at the Rideau Lakes. Although he saw the NAC leader as “an establishment man,” he also found him extremely “open and unjudgmental.”
In truth, Southam had not been able to bring himself to deliver the coup de grâce to Bawtree. Instead, he arranged for Herbiet to deliver the news to Bawtree that he was fired, and for Dennison to wind up the English theatre company.
Southam was not prepared to give up on theatre at the NAC, however, and he now hired Richard Dennison to move over and become his assistant while they tried again. The idea this time was “to get some proper scripts and do the damn thing and present them to the public.”19 In short, get back to basics, even though “these cutting-edge collective creations” were being successfully produced elsewhere, such as director Paul Thompson’s Farm Show that played in a country barn as well as at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille.20 A lot of innovative work was going on elsewhere at this time in Canada, especially in English-language theatre, but so far none of it had been translatable into home-grown work at the NAC. Despite the tumultuous theatre experiences to date, Southam persisted. The decision, put forward and accepted by the board, was “to create a Theatre Department parallel to the Music Department and to charge it in future seasons with full responsibility for both English and French theatre productions.”21
Fortunately, Southam had in mind someone who would be the right person to ensure that this objective would be met. Jean Roberts was a soft-spoken but clearheaded Scot who had come to Canada from a job as stage manager with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England to do her own theatre productions. A consultant to the NAC’s early Theatre Advisory Committee, she had gone on to join the Canada Council as its theatre officer, recommending and administering theatre grants across the country. Both Canada Council chair Jean Boucher and Southam had maintained offices for a time in the same building and had got to know her as they rode up and down in the elevator together. Roberts had already decided to give up bureaucracy and was packing her bags to leave Ottawa and return to directing theatre when she received a call from Southam just before Christmas. He asked if they could get together first thing in the new year. She agreed.
Jean Roberts, the first director of theatre, who finally put theatre on the rails at the NAC. Photo © Murray Mosher Photography.
When they met, Southam immediately offered her the job of running theatre at the Arts Centre. Before accepting, she consulted theatrical friends, including playwright Timothy Findley and his companion Bill Whitehead. After her English experience, she wasn’t frightened by the size of the job, and both men urged her to take it on. When she got back to Southam, she indicated that she would accept, but under certain conditions. She wanted overall control of the theatre in both languages—programming, marketing, and budgets. Like Haber and her soon-to-be boss Southam, she believed that, “if the French/English thing was to work anywhere in Canada, it would be at the National Arts Centre.”22 Southam concurred and, fortunately, Herbiet was content to go along with the arrangement, becoming associate director of theatre. Roberts later remarked that she had once contemplated writing up job definitions for all her departmental staff, but she came to realize that the French side of things had an entirely different set of problems from those that the anglophones faced. In Herbiet she had the right colleague.
Roberts believed that Southam had hired her because, after her experience at the Canada Council, she would understand the bureaucratic processes with which the NAC had to deal. She did, but she also had a vision of what the NAC could do to develop theatre in Canada. Sometimes her views tripped over Southam’s notions of the grand things he would like to see at the centre. Roberts had direct contacts with important English theatre figures such as Laurence Olivier, for example, and Southam liked the idea of inviting him to the NAC, although he thought he should do the asking. Roberts felt the big money that would require should be directed to Canadian theatre. In the end, Olivier was not booked.
In one instance, however, Southam’s propensity for occasionally having his own way did affect what played at the Arts Centre. Herbiet and he had visited the Comédie Française in Paris, where Herbiet targeted a brilliant French production of Richard III that Paul Duke, then the head of the Comédie, wanted to tour in Canada. For Southam, however, the great French company meant great French works, and that meant Molière—and it was Molière’s plays, at his behest, that were indeed booked to come to the NAC.
Overall, however, Southam was proving to be a “terrific leader” who, by and large, didn’t interfere.23 He had a clear vision, and he didn’t lose his nerve when mistakes occurred. His best solutions happened when he finally landed on the right people for a job, gave them the tools and the money, and got out of their way. This policy had worked in music with Beaudet and Bernardi, and now was the time for theatre. In Jean Roberts and her associate Jean Herbiet, he had finally found the winning combination. Although Herbiet now had to report to Roberts rather than directly to Southam, he trusted her and believed her to be “fair.”24 In their respective domains, they would both build theatre at the National Arts Centre which would contribute significantly to the growth of the theatrical art form, in both languages, in Canada.
Roberts brought to the job an excellent bird’s-eye view of the overall theatre scene in Canada gained through her time at the Canada Council. Now she set out to improve that world. Among other things, she began to build the theatre crafts at the Arts Centre, including set-building and costume workshops. Visiting companies would also be able to make good use of these facilities when they came to town. At the same time, she introduced real stage work for the competent stage crews who were slowly building their skills and earning a reputation as some of the best in the business.
At long last, theatre at the National Arts Centre began to proceed in a more orderly manner. The main venue for the work shifted back to the Theatre, although smaller pieces, and especially experimental work, continued to be produced in the Studio. The next six years would see the vision that Roberts wanted for theatre all over Canada developed at the NAC: the production of plays by Canadians, and steady work for the best Canadian talent. Her first season in 1971–72 sent a strong signal about her intentions. She knew that the regional theatres in Canada would think her situation “a bit rich,” and she thought it essential for the NAC to be accepted by these theatres across the country. Entitling her first season “Theatre from Coast to Coast,” she provided the funds to bring in “a judicious mix of invited theatre companies.”25 The bare outlines of an embryonic NAC theatre company also began to appear in productions such as James Reaney’s Colours in the Dark, directed by Roberts’s friend and companion Marigold Charlesworth, and Tango by Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek, jointly directed by Roberts and Charlesworth. The play was hailed by the Toronto Star’s demanding theatre critic Urjo Kareda as “Ottawa’s pride.” He also ruminated on how this work could be toured and seen elsewhere—an idea which resonated close to home at the Arts Centre. The Ottawa public was equally enthusiastic, and Roberts felt proud that her work “provided a kind of correspondence with the public.” Certainly the new productions pulled in full and enthusiastic houses.