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at Your Cottage?
    or A History of Canadian Theatre, Part Two
    Not only did the Straw Hat Players of the late forties rehearse in our basement before the season started, they hung about our cottage after the season opened. E.J. Davis, Murray and Donald’s father, used to invite the company to his cottage on Sundays. As the only road into St. Elmo stopped at our cottage, they had to park their cars at our place and trek through the woods to get there. Somehow it seemed they spent more time at our cottage than his. Perhaps our house was more relaxed and the alcohol more free-flowing.
    And so began a tradition of theatre people hanging out at our cottage, a tradition that continued even after Murray and Donald transferred their energies in the early fifties from summer stock to their newly formed theatre in Toronto, The Crest. After the Stratford Festival opened in 1953, other noted artists visited, William Hutt for instance, Frances Hyland, and the Stratford designer, Tanya Moiseiwitsch.
    Of course, as well as hanging out on the fringes of this social life, I went to see all the plays. Theatre was magic for me then. On the way home after a performance Ashe and I would sit in the back seat of the car, astonished that my parents in the front would criticize the production we had just seen. What was there to complain about? It was all wonderful!
    And the actors were wonderful also. A highlight of each summer was the annual corn roast held on our swimming rock in August. We would pick corn at a local farm, build a fire on the rock, and cook the corn in a huge pot. The whole Straw Hat company would be there and some of their friends. But sometimes a young kid gets in the way. After one of these shindigs, the actors stayed and stayed on into the night. There came talk of a midnight swim. Sounds great, I thought — I can even lend cousin Murray a bathing suit. How was I to know it was supposed to be a nude swim? All these naked actors and Murray and me in bathing suits.
    What did I absorb about theatre by being around all this activity? We helped the producer with the poster run. We heard Eric House say he couldn’t stay with Straw Hat because Stratford offered him so much money. Even though we also heard Donald say he had raised salaries, to thirty dollars a week I believe. I met the directors they brought over from Britain: John Blatchley, Pierre Levebre, and Peter Potter.
    I have a vivid memory of waiting for Nathan Cohen’s radio review of the opening of the second season at Stratford. All the critics had raved about the first season and we were primed to hear even greater enthusiasm for the second. We gathered around the radio at the cottage in anticipation — people did that in the days before television. Cohen’s review began like this, “There are two stars still shining at Stratford. . . .” The first was the design of the theatre. The second may have been Shakespeare. He went on to slam pretty well everything else. Even though I had no direct involvement with Stratford, I feel shell-shocked to this day.
    Meantime, the tradition of my acting in one play a summer with the Straw Hat Players continued, the final two being A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by the British director and teacher John Blatchley, and Ten Nights in a Barroom , a melodrama directed by Robertson Davies. The first rehearsal of Dream revealed a number of changes that were happening in the theatre at the time. Blatchley began with what seemed to a boy of fourteen to be an endless talk about Shakespeare and the play, its themes and place in Shakespeare’s development. Directors did not normally talk about the play in summer stock; they got on with it. Of course, now I would love to be able to go back and hear his talk. Conflicting approaches to the work emerged during the first read of the play. While some of the actors continued with the old-school method of acting full out at every opportunity, others, George McCowan in particular, read in a flat