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Suppose I had been in England in the fifties. Yes, there was Terence Rattigan and Christopher Fry. But they were continuing a tradition that had become stale. It took the angry working-class writers and the Theatre of the Absurd to kick-start the British theatre. Suppose I had been in the United States in the early sixties. I could have seen a lot of stale musicals and the odd play by Edward Albee. Or in Canada during either of these periods I would see little but representations from other countries. In cultural terms Canada was still a colony. Lip service was paid to plays by Lister Sinclair, John Gray, or Mavor Moore, but we didn’t really believe we could create serious art in our own country.
    I didn’t see original productions of Glass Menagerie , Streetcar Named Desire , or Death of a Salesman, but living in Ontario, I was aware of these theatrical events. And we all saw the film of Streetcar when it came out. We wondered how an actor like Marlon Brando could get away with mumbling all his lines or why Arthur Miller chose to tell the salesman story backwards. But the energy and life of this time was palpable. I did see the original production of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth with Paul Newman and Geraldine Page. And the original production of West Side Story . It’s funny how vital and original that musical seemed at the time and how cliché and stiff it seems to me now.
    I visited London in 1957, returned there for theatre school in 1961, and remained in Britain until 1965. I didn’t realize what a historic time this was for the British theatre. I assumed British theatre was always like this. Look Back in Anger opened in 1956 and was still running in 1957. The play may be flawed, but it was a dynamo and its effect on the theatre world electric. I was present as the audience split over The Caretaker ; half fell asleep and half were riveted. We regularly trekked out to Stratford East to see Joan Littlewood’s work. We puzzled over Waiting for Godot and my moribund tear ducts came alive again at A Man for All Seasons . It wasn’t just the writers who were giants. The older generation of actors was still going — Michael Redgrave, Laurence Olivier, and Alec Guiness — but a whole new generation was making an impact: David Warner, Albert Finney, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, and Ian Holm. And then the directors: Peter Hall, Tony Richardson, Michael Elliott, John Dexter. What a time to be a young Canadian director in Britain.
    While Canada in the late sixties and early seventies couldn’t boast a single writer to match the Brits, it was still an exciting time to be in Ontario and Quebec. Money was pouring into the arts through the Canada Council and a variety of other funding sources. The young baby boomers were stretching their limbs and starting theatre companies. New works were coming from mature writers Ryga, Reaney, and Cook, and younger writers George Walker, Judith Thompson, and Sharon Pollock were getting performed and seen. And the collective began, led by Paul Thompson at Theatre Passe Muraille. Theatres were springing up: Tarragon, Factory, Free in Toronto, Centaur in Montreal, regional theatres across the country, and my theatre, Festival Lennoxville in Quebec.
    Yet the promise of all three great eras, America in the fifties, Britain in the sixties, and Canada in the seventies, seems never to have been fulfilled. Why? Certainly the money in film and television lured much of the talent away from the theatre. Will Robert Bolt be remembered more for the stage play, A Man for All Seasons , or for the film, Lawrence of Arabia ? Yet all great theatre eras seem to be shortlived. Elizabethan theatre had paled long before the Puritans closed the theatres. Restoration drama. Then what? Almost another hundred years before Sheridan and Goldsmith and then little until Ibsen another hundred years later. What can I say? For the first part of my creative life at least, I lived in interesting times.

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