Читать книгу Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History - D.A. Hadfield - Страница 21

By its thirtieth anniversary season, the Shaw Festival had already established a reputation as one of the great centres for Canadian theatrical culture. Government funding exceeded $1 million, placing it, along with the Stratford Festival and Canadian Stage Company, among the top three publicly funded theatres. This is theatre at its most “legitimate.” However in 1991, with most of North America in the shadow of economic recession, and box office receipts, which still represented just over 70% of budget, steadily declining, even this most lauded and publicly funded theatre company was in desperate financial straits. Numerous interviews with Newton during the 1989–1992 seasons feature the artistic director’s sense of fiscal responsibility in choosing his programming, but despite his efforts, the deficit continued to accumulate. Programming an Ibsen classic is a strategic move, a relatively safe—although perhaps somewhat “dull”—choice within the Festival’s mandate,⁵ likely to generate respectable box office sales. Adding direction by Judith Thompson to the equation, hot on the heels of her recent success with Lion, is another well-calculated choice, likely to attract a large audience contingent from the “serious” Toronto theatregoers who would already recognize Thompson’s talent and capabilities—or at least her name—and would lend a more current appeal to the possibly stale Ibsen tradition. The house programme essay by Urjo Kareda, artistic director of Tarragon Theatre—where Thompson was writer-in-residence in 1991—reinforces the link between this production and a particular sector of the Toronto alternate theatre scene.

Targeting this audience is no doubt also related to the specific venue where the production of Hedda Gabler took place. The Court House was the original stage when the Festival began in 1962; since the construction of the grander Festival Theatre in 1973, the Court House has become the most intimate of the three Festival venues, the setting for slightly more daring acts of theatre. Advertising material published by the Shaw Festival repeatedly emphasizes the paradoxical nature of this venue—experimental theatre contained within the heart of history and tradition.⁶ Somewhat like the Tarragon’s mainspace, which has taken up a similar position as the most mainstream of Toronto’s alternate theatres, the Court House offers audiences a chance to join an intellectual class of theatregoers while offering the reassurance that nothing too shocking or untoward will take place. Theatre audiences who loved Judith Thompson at Tarragon would probably be most comfortable—physically, financially, and ideologically—at the Court House. Implicitly, the Shaw Festival would also likely be more comfortable with Judith Thompson directing at the Court House. While Thompson was not the first woman to direct at the Shaw Festival—during the 1989 season, longtime Festival ensemble member Marti Maraden directed Shaw’s Getting Married; for the 1990 season, Newton invited Glynis Leyshon, director of Sally Clark’s award-winning Moo, to direct Mrs Warren’s Profession; and in 1991 Thompson was joined on the directorial staff by Leyshon and Susan Cox—women would have to wait until 1992 before they appeared as directors on the main Festival Theatre stage. (That season, Susan Cox directed Charley’s Aunt by Brandon Thomas, a late-nineteenth-century romantic farce with a female impersonator as its central character.) A woman could direct at the Court House, because it is a place where even the Shaw can take risks. There is, however, apparently a difference between being mainstream on the margin and the margin of the mainstream. Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Shaw Festival are, after all, still tourist attractions. A show report filed by Charlotte Green on 17 August indicates she had incorporated an automatic five-minute hold on the curtain in an effort to accommodate latecomers, but they continued to experience problems with large late calls. Festival brochures carried warnings about chronic traffic problems—and certainly traffic problems would have hampered even Toronto-area audiences eager for a new Judith Thompson production—but it is reasonable to assume that a significant percentage of latecomers were as interested in a nice meal or a casual stroll through the quaint old town as in a challenging theatrical experience. This assumption is supported by the Festival’s Marketing Communication Plan, which indicates the primary target audiences to be age thirty-five and above, well-educated, mid-upper income or affluent, professionals or retired, and arts enthusiasts: in short, intellectual enough to appreciate “great art” and wealthy enough to appreciate the social and ideological finesse of “great theatre.”⁷