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6 GROWING PAINS

Soon after the elegant opening at the National Arts Centre, novelist Mordecai Richler quipped in Time magazine, “We now have our own Yankee Stadium but no Babe Ruth!” The reviewers thought otherwise, however, and, as the new season of performances unfolded, they were generally well received. All considered, Time concluded, there was no doubt that “the new showcase … has immeasurably improved the choices of entertainment for Ottawa residents.”¹ Fastest off the mark and most enthusiastically received was the NAC’s orchestra.

The first notes to float out across the floodlights to the audience were a drum-roll played by the twenty-three-year-old tympanist, Ian Bernard. He had come almost directly from his final exam at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique into the new orchestra. At the very first concert, before the rest of the ensemble joined in, he led with the opening bars of Haydn’s “Drumroll” Symphony No. 103. The work would rapidly become one of the orchestra’s “party pieces.” The rest of the first night’s program set the model of what the new orchestra planned to present. The evening’s soloist, Ronald Turini, played Schumann’s only piano concerto, and there were excerpts from Wagner and Prokofiev. Then came a new piece, “Divertissement/Diversion for Orchestra,” commissioned by the NAC from Canadian composer Murray Adaskin. While reviewers gave the Canadian work a lukewarm reception, there were several parts for solo work that allowed the individual musicians to show off their talents. Above all it spelled out clearly the commitment that the new orchestra intended to have to Canadian music.

Within a month the orchestra had made its first tour, giving concerts in four Quebec towns as far away as Val d’Or and Rouyn, at the request of the Quebec government. In February it gave its first out-of-town concert in Ontario, playing in Deep River, as well as making its first foray into the United States, playing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. At the same time, the orchestra signed its first recording contract—a three-year deal with RCA (Canada) for distribution by the record company in the United States, and elsewhere around the world by the CBC’s International Service.

Back in Ottawa, the players attended to their other duties, visiting schools throughout the region with weekly demonstrations, playing in the pit for two opera performances by the visiting Canadian Opera Company, and presenting the first of a series of six chamber recitals. With this musical introduction, the NAC embarked on a golden time in its artistic life. Everyone believed that this new orchestral venture was different from any other enterprise in Canadian arts. The youthful musicians—their average age was twenty-six—were quickly dubbed the “Ottawa Youth Orchestra.”² They needed their energy as they worked furiously from week to week to learn new repertoire. Despite the earlier machinations from Toronto and Montreal to prevent the creation of the new ensemble, critics in the Montreal and Toronto papers now applauded “Ottawa’s arrival on the orchestral map” and “yet another orchestra of distinction in Canada.”³ Only when orchestra manger Ken Murphy turned up with Evelyn Greenberg at an early meeting of the fledgling Canadian Orchestra Association and offered the other delegates a copy of the NACO’s first recording were they brought face to face with how much privilege this orchestra enjoyed compared to others in the country. There was some envy that the new band had progressed so far, so fast, when other long-established orchestras had to work so much harder for similar success.

Dance played its part in that first season with appearances by all three established Canadian companies: the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, and the National Ballet of Canada. The Toronto company presented the first of what would become an annual tradition—a Christmas presentation of The Nutcracker. In modern dance, the Groupe de la Place Royale and the Toronto Dance Theatre both appeared, and dance performances generally attracted a respectably sized audience. The Canadian Opera Company presented two operas, Rigoletto and Die Fledermaus, and announced itself so pleased with the magnificent new Opera hall and the new NAC orchestra in the pit that it could not wait to come back again. Houses running at 90 percent capacity confirmed Ottawa’s keen interest in opera as well.

But could the city maintain this level of audience support? In addition to all the in-house programming by the National Arts Centre, the old ties with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra remained. During the first summer festival, this orchestra had given five popular concerts in the new facility, and, in the first regular season, it was brought back for six more concerts. The local impresarios who had kept the classical music scene alive in Ottawa were still trying to do business. Tremblay Concerts, which had been a mainstay on the Ottawa scene, brought the Santa Cecilia, Moscow, and Cleveland orchestras to the Opera hall as well as the Toronto Symphony. The Concert Society of Ottawa brought its own music series, which had historically appeared in the auditoria of local high schools, to the new Theatre. This embarrassment of riches proved problematic for both the schedules and the pocket-books of Ottawa music lovers. The city, used to eight or nine orchestral concerts annually, was suddenly faced with thirty-five such events.

At the November 1969 meeting, the board resolved that a Program Committee would henceforth review all requests for rentals of the halls by local impresarios in all areas, in the interests of providing “a balanced artistic program” to the public.⁴ The idea was to prevent “the clashes and crushes” which had occurred with competing events during the opening season, but the effect was to lead to the demise of the local impresarios who had sustained the city for so long. The NAC was taking a practical approach to the control of programming in its halls to ensure its own well-being as a priority. The policy applied to all programming areas from music to variety, and it would create tensions between local interests and those of the NAC that continued through the years.

On the English theatre side, things proceeded smoothly, with the Stratford Company presenting its well-travelled productions of Hamlet and The Alchemist, and the rest of the season filled out by other visiting companies, including the Shaw Festival, which brought a well-reviewed production of The Guardsman. Stratford’s participation, although well compensated, was provided reluctantly, as its management continued to resist becoming the NAC’s resident company on any but its own terms. The relationship between the two theatres would not endure. As Haber remarked later, “In my time we never got around to producing theatre at the NAC, except offstage.”⁵ The real drama in this first season, however, was in the resident French company. Le Théâtre Capricorne had started its regular season with a production of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s La Visite de la Vieille Dame, which opened to critical success on September 29 in the Theatre. But from the outset the performers, mostly actors imported from Montreal, had clashed with artistic director Jean-Guy Sabourin and, by mid-October, they were in open rebellion, refusing to work further with him. It was clear that these artists, schooled in the Montreal theatres of Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde and Le Rideau Vert, were not interested in the sociological theories of the theatrical art-form which Sabourin and his associate theatre administrator, Benoit de Margerie, were trying to impose on their work, and they had little respect for Sabourin’s methods.

The NAC was already being criticized by the Canada Council for the large size of its French theatre budget. Southam countered that he needed professionals, and that meant bringing actors from Montreal. Besides, he said, Le Théâtre Capricorne was “the only French-speaking professional theatre company outside Quebec.”⁶ Southam met individually with the French company members and thought he had worked out a compromise, but the strife continued. Pelletier was made informally aware of the problems through contacts in the Quebec theatre community. In an effort to solve the difficulties and save the French theatre season, the board authorized the vice-chair, actor Paul Hébert, to set up a special committee of French-speaking trustees—Hébert, Madeleine Gobeil, and Andrée Paradis—to work out a plan. While the actors fundamentally did not agree with Sabourin’s approach, the fact that most of them had been shipped in from Montreal aggravated matters. Ottawa was still a social desert at this time with virtually no good restaurants and no place to go at night after performances. This lack of Québécois conviviality, along with Sabourin’s requirement that the performers do community work as well as the mainstage plays, had ensured revolt among his players.

By the February 1970 meetings, the board felt compelled to terminate Sabourin as the artistic director.⁷ Sabourin gave the trustees a spirited defence of his ideas and even appealed directly to Minister Pelletier to intervene on his behalf, but his tenure at the Arts Centre was effectively over. By May, the board instructed Southam to negotiate a settlement with him. The original idea of a permanent French theatre company was temporarily cancelled, with what was left of Le Théâtre Capricorne to play an impresario role in the coming season.

It was back to the drawing board on how best to present French theatre. Southam again consulted Jean Gascon and other leading figures in French theatre, including the renowned French director Jean-Louis Barrault, who was booked to appear at the Arts Centre. Along with the criticism over the budget for French theatre, Southam also had to contend with controversy over a tour by Les Jeunes Comédiens, a group of young players associated with the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, which was travelling the country under the auspices of the National Arts Centre. It was a rocky start to the NAC’s efforts.

Behind the debacle in the French theatre lay a fundamental conflict between two strands of thought vis-à-vis the development of the arts, both internationally and now in Canada. In Europe, as in America, there was a move to “democratize” the arts. In Britain, the self-styled “liberal elites” of Maynard Keynes and his colleagues had moved to revamp Covent Garden and create the British Arts Council and other cultural organizations to serve the public as a whole, not just a select few. This group aimed to make its own tastes available to a wider public.

A similar idea for taking art to the masses was germinating in France, but the French approach was more proactively socialist. There the thrust was to create grassroots, populist maisons de culture to pursue the goal of cultural democratization. These organizations cast the artist as a social activist whose job it was to work together with the populace to produce art. The old-line classic companies such as the Comédie Française would continue to be the state-run exemplars of traditional French culture much as they had always been, but, at the level of the populace, there was a desire to make art of and by the people.

The tension and differences between these two philosophical threads would have a significant impact on the future growth of the arts in Canada. The National Arts Centre, like Canada’s other cultural organizations such as the Canada Council and the CBC, had been cast in the mould of their British forerunners, with the overall idea of excellence as a key component of their work. But the seeds of these French-grown ideas, exemplified at the Arts Centre by Sabourin, would inform at the deepest level Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier’s approach to culture, and, through him, they would have a huge impact on the development of the arts in Canada in the coming years.

Chris Young, the editor of the Ottawa Citizen, identified the problem early in the first season of the NAC when he wrote, “There is a lingering sense … that the public is not really welcome at the Centre.”⁸ The performances were fine, but there was something about the place, an elitism, that put people off. Pelletier agreed with this perception and was quoted in the press as saying that “magnificent art centres sometimes seem to serve the elite … poorer people might be afraid to enter, fearing that they would be out of their element or be laughed at.”⁹

The course was set for a fundamental rift between Director General Southam’s vision for the Arts Centre and Minister Pelletier’s approach. Southam did not seem to take much notice of Pelletier’s remarks. He had ensured that the spanking new restaurant was stocked with the finest wines, and he delighted in entertaining his elegant friends there. Much later he acknowledged that he did not get along with Pelletier, who, he said, “thought I was elitist—and I was.”¹⁰ But this word did not carry the same sense of class for Southam that it did for Pelletier. Southam’s idea of elitism, he declared, was “not people who thought they were the best but people who wanted the best,” and his idea of the national importance of the NAC was straightforward. He believed firmly in the “centres of excellence” approach and thought that the composition of the Arts Centre should “reflect the Canadian reality with the appropriate proportion of French and English content”: “if we could make it work here,” he said, “it was working for the country.”¹¹ Although he was aware of the growing problems in Quebec, particularly through his close friendships with Quebec artists such as Jean Gascon and Jean-Louis Roux, he paid little attention to the new approach to the arts and culture stirring in Canada which Pelletier was initiating.

Pelletier had come to Ottawa with several ideas in mind, but key among them were two: he wanted greater access to the arts for ordinary people and, paradoxically, he believed in more centralized control of the cultural organizations at his disposal to achieve his “decentralization and democratization” policy. In Quebec, Pelletier and his colleagues had seen the independence at the French-language CBC co-opted by a growing separatist movement, and they were leery of having these institutions beyond the control of the government. The free-wheeling, “arm’s-length” independence enjoyed by the dedicated but powerful individuals who ran the cultural agencies was about to be subjected to growing pressure for control at the political level, all in pursuit of the new government’s national goals.

Meanwhile, tensions within the Board of Trustees at the Arts Centre were coming to a head over issues of money. These concerns would lead to a vigorous shakedown in operations, but not before board chairman Lawrence Freiman and Hamilton Southam had come to a final show-down. During the October 1969 meetings, a major explosion between the two men became so intense that Southam walked out and sat reflecting for a while in the Theatre over whether he should resign. He didn’t, but soon after, Freiman, already suffering from ill-health, gave up his post. At the core of the problem were two men who both loved their city, the arts, and the Arts Centre, but were as different “as chalk and cheese.”¹² At the heart of their incompatibility were their different views of the world: Southam, the privileged elitist, who was used to the best and accustomed to getting it, seemingly without effort; and Freiman, the bedrock businessman, who knew the dangers of financial imprudence and sought sound business practices in operations. Freiman’s resignation lanced a boil, but the real problems remained. Most immediate was the fact that the government was still offering $300,000 less than anticipated for the 1970–71 season (a $2.5 million subsidy, not the requested $2.8 million). Before this particular rumpus settled down, the chief financial officer, Robert Montpetit, had also resigned in protest. Southam and his deputy, Bruce Corder, vowed before the board that they would mend their ways and take steps to improve their operations.

On November 14, 1969, François Mercier, a brilliant and politically well-connected litigation lawyer from Montreal, was named to succeed Freiman as chair. Both Southam and Corder put a good face on what had occurred by arranging to call in the government’s Bureau of Management Services to help put their house in order. Among their difficulties were the arrangements for catering, which had been contracted to the food management firm Gabriel Management Ltd. and which were not going well. One of the reasons was confusion over who controlled the liquor licence for the NAC, particularly after Gabriel issued huge invoices to the centre after the opening ceremonies. The board eventually decided to take the food service in-house, but not before trustee Dr. Arnold Walter registered caustically in the minutes of the November meeting that he deplored the fact that the pending deficit of over $100,000 was being caused by non-artistic matters. Parking revenues and other potential commercial revenue streams were still struggling to get up to speed, but the main cause of the deficit was the food service. In one of his first acts, Mercier intervened with Gabriel’s lawyer to minimize the costs of disengagement to the Arts Centre.

By the end of the year, both board and management had put a bright face on the problems. Just the normal growing pains of any new organization, they said.

Another blow was in the offing. Shortly after the opening concert, music director Jean-Marie Beaudet was felled by a severe stroke. After all the brilliant work he had done to help create the new orchestra, he was able to attend only one more concert and could not resume his duties at the Arts Centre. He finally resigned formally from the NAC on February 1, 1971, and died a little over a month later. Orchestra manager Ken Murphy, who was deeply devoted to Beaudet, carried much of the load during the first months of his absence, working to the point of exhaustion, but once it was clear that Beaudet would not return, the burning question became who should succeed him. Beaudet, with his huge knowledge of music, had played a key role in programming for the first season, and his departure left a serious gap.

Bernardi, although an expert in opera, had limited experience with the symphonic repertoire, and he was now being severely stretched by the constant demands of building an orchestra, learning new repertoire, and programming the multifaceted concert season, replete with all its guest conductors and soloists. With no other obvious candidate in view, Southam finally gave Bernardi the job of music director in February 1971, though with promised support. Bernardi chose Hugh Davidson, a former CBC music producer now living in London and working with the BBC, to join the NAC in the new post of music administrator. His prime role was to assist the maestro with programming, and he arrived at the centre in mid-June. Davidson had an immense knowledge of symphonic and most other kinds of classical music, including some training in opera. His appointment would turn out to be a godsend—for a time.

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. Although suggesting later that he had been “fascinated by the horror of it all,”¹⁸ he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown and, before opening night, suddenly fled from Ottawa with his lover for a Caribbean island. The cast, by now regressed to something akin to the survivors in Lord of the Flies, were at each other’s throat and, sure enough, opening night was an unmitigated disaster. The reviews were dismal, and the show played to audiences of fifty or less in the three-hundred-seat Studio before it finally petered out after a couple of weeks.

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.

Jean Gascon in the 1978 production of August Strindberg’s The Father, directed by Donald Davis.Photo © Murray Mosher Photography.

Both Roberts and Charlesworth had a strong commitment to developing audiences and reaching out to serve the “national” side of the NAC public, particularly in regard to young audiences. Although the Arts Centre was a long way from touring its own plays, the idea of the Hexagon/L’Hexagone was born at the start of the second season in 1972. Modelled on the Theatre Hour Company, a young people’s company in Toronto with which Charlesworth was associated, the plan was to take the NAC’s resources out to the public beyond Ottawa by sending a troupe of young actors on tour to schools. Travelling in a brightly coloured bus, these enthusiastic bands of troubadours, one in each language, would present excerpts, mostly from Canadian plays, in high schools wherever they could go. In the first season, more than 37,000 students saw their work, and it would only get better over the next few years. With this emphasis on youth, the project was warmly endorsed by the board, and Ottawa-based students were not ignored. Roberts set up a Student Young Company for those lucky enough to live close enough to see the NAC’s regular plays. This group took selected local students a step further, behind the scenes, giving them workshops and apprenticeships in theatre craft.

The H/H Project, before it was ultimately cancelled for financial reasons in the early eighties, achieved a level of success with student audiences which, until now, had been rare in Canada. The French version, which outlived the English, at its zenith toured its company of young French-speaking actors all the way from Victoria, British Columbia, to the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the Atlantic coast. To Herbiet as well as Southam and the board, it showed that “this place could do a lot!”

In less than two seasons, Roberts had laid down a solid foundation. By the 1972– 73 season, ten plays in each official language were scheduled, and eight of them were the NAC’s own productions. Roberts’s recipe for this putative “National Theatre in Canada” included presenting plays from the classic repertoire, supporting new Canadian playwrights, employing the best available Canadian talent, and using the laboratory setting of the Studio for experimentation and encouraging the work of new writers. By the 1973–74 seasons the effort was producing astonishing results: attendance figures for English theatre hit 94 percent, and an astounding 91 percent for French theatre. Within the organization, Roberts insisted that the civil-servant-minded culture also respect the fact that they now had a more or less permanent group of people rehearsing or working on the premises. She railed when there was no toilet paper in the bathrooms on Sundays simply because the building’s cleaners were used to working five days a week. And she disabused the financial department that they could wait thirty days to pay the performers, explaining that actors were used to getting their money every Friday. She demanded respect for the theatre operation.

Herbiet’s task in the French theatre was particularly tricky and depended on his careful selection of “a balanced cocktail of works.”²⁶ He was interested in programming avant-garde European writers such as Ionesco and Brecht along with “the classics with a new take” and, of course, the new exciting Quebec theatre that was emerging. But the francophone community from which he had to draw his main audience was different from the fervent and increasingly nationalistic public in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec. The local audience in Ottawa came largely from the well-educated ranks of Ottawa’s and Hull’s sedate bourgeoisie. They were interested in French theatre and delighted to have it readily available, but they were conservative and traditional in their tastes. When Michel Tremblay’s first great success, Les Belles Soeurs, opened in Montreal to huge acclaim, Herbiet received a petition from the local community asking him not to present that kind of work in Ottawa. Only after Tremblay’s work had been translated and successfully presented in English-speaking Toronto did he feel able to schedule such plays regularly into the French-language season.

Herbiet’s own productions brought the Arts Centre some of its greatest credit and success, among them ingenious versions of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck and a bilingual Dream Play by August Strindberg. These productions were unique, using marionettes rather than actors on stage and created by the German-born master puppeteer Felix Mirbt, whom Herbiet had befriended at Stratford. The two artists collaborated on the scripts, with Herbiet doing the adaptations and writing. Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Canada, and Dream Play would later tour to Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, the Edinburgh Festival, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe under the NAC banner. Southam and the board put a lot of stock in the success of Herbiet’s work, and described it in the 1971–72 Annual Report as “the cornerstone of our commitment to the ideals of bi-lingualism and bi-culturalism.”

As the Theatre Department moved gradually forward, a well-grounded basis was laid and operations moved closer to the resident companies that Southam had hoped for from the start. By 1973, Timothy Findley became the first occupant of a playwright-in-residence program, working closely with the company and learning about stagecraft. The following season his new play, Can You See Me Yet?, would be produced by the Arts Centre. In 1974 a mini-tour of John Hirsch’s production of The Dybbuk was sparked by the NAC’s invitation to bring it to Ottawa, and in 1975 John Coulter’s 1950s work Riel was mounted with the astonishing Quebec actor Albert Millaire playing the lead. In the same season, Millaire crossed over to direct a Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde production of the Federico García Lorca play La Maison de Bernarda Alba for the French theatre season. Roberts gave work to many individuals who would go on to have strong roles elsewhere in Canadian theatre. In 1972 she brought the English Shakespearean actor John Neville to the Arts Centre to play in the Restoration comedy The Rivals, and as Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This fortuitous casting would lead to Neville’s being hired later as artistic director at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre. He went on to become an influential figure in the Canadian theatre world.

The partnership of the puppeteer Felix Mirbt (left) and Jean Herbiet, in rehearsals of Woyzeck, produced some of the most exciting and successful early theatre at the NAC. Photo © Fernand R. LeClair.

Within a few years, “a remarkable level of cooperation” had been achieved between the two theatre groups at the NAC, “each working from its own inheritance.”²⁷ Roberts acknowledged that they had managed to establish a solid “resident production.” Some of the players even felt secure enough to buy real estate in Ottawa—including the actor Edward Atienza, one of whose best roles to date had been to play a speechless dog in a production of Findley’s Can You See Me Yet? There was still no permanent resident company, however, and Roberts and others now began to push hard for it.

Left to right: designer Robert Prévost, Jean Gascon, Jean Roberts, and composer Gabriel Charpentier in rehearsal for the 1975 Riel. Photo © Robert D. Ragsdale/NAC.