Art and Politics. Sarah Jennings
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.
Music, theatre, and dance were not the only items on Southam’s vast agenda as the National Arts Centre moved into the early 1970s. He also negotiated with the Board of Trustees on the centre’s financial affairs, kept up a stream of communications through memorandums and meetings with an assortment of government officials, and smoothed the way with the politicians by judicious appearances before the Parliamentary Standing Committee. Above all he turned again to one of his central interests—the Summer Festival—part two of the government’s original approval for the Arts Centre.
The initial attempt at a festival had been slated for the summer of 1970, but had been stopped by the board in late August 1969 for lack of funds. That first plan had been hugely ambitious. The Festival would begin on July 1, Dominion Day, as it was then called, and run for a month in Ottawa. It was to have a wide range of attractions, some of which would be run by other government departments, such as the folkloric festivities on Parliament Hill to be presented by amateur ethnic dance and singing groups from around the country. Others, including a possible raftsmen’s