John Gray writes about doing a Paul Thompson collective in the early
days:
“Rehearsals tended to go on for months, and took place in shabby,
often unheated buildings. I remember demoralized, exhausted, terrified
actors in their winter coats improvising scene after scene, speech after
speech, frantically groping for a story, a theme, any handhold at all,
while Thompson performed the role of cheerleader, group psychologist and
ideologist, firmly believing in the creative power of anarchy, resolutely
refusing to come to conclusions until the last possible moment. Months
of waltzing on the edge of the abyss can unhinge anyone, and at times it
was sheer bedlam. Finally the show was thrown together in a blind panic
a few days before opening. On opening night there were scene lists taped
to the back of scenery and, even as the house lights dimmed, pairs of perspiring
actors could be seen gathering in corners, frantically working on bits
of dialogue that they would be performing before a paying audience in a
matter of moments.”
“I don’t think there was a single actor who didn’t finish a production
swearing never, never to work with Thompson again, but they always did.
As soon as they went on to other things, actors discovered just how uncreative
and suffocating the Canadian theatrical scene can be. Compared not to God,
but to the competition, Thompson became a shining knight of vision and
integrity, and in fact his excruciating process developed an exceptionally
creative generation...”
Paul Thompson -- director, writer, mentor, instigator, maker of
myths, sometimes a pain-in-the-neck. As soon as you think you’ve got him
figured out, he goes somewhere else entirely. More than anything, Paul’s
contribution to Canadian theatre is marked by a restless urge to do something
else with theatre, to reach new audiences, or to show them another way
of looking at things -- especially at themselves.
In the old days, he made Theatre Passe Muraille an institution
of national influence. International influence. The icon was The Farm Show
(and you know all about The Farm Show). The collective creation was not
an invention of Paul’s, but he’s the one who took it to the people: the
acting people, the farm people, the Toronto people. He developed a kind
of second-person technique: he would get his actors to learn all about
you -- you farmers, you miners, you people staying up late watching dirty
movies on TV -- and they would make a play about you. And then they’d show
it to you, and say (in effect): “What do you think of this? Have we got
this right? Is this who you are?” And if you said yes, it is, then Paul
would take it to another audience and show them, and make them know that
you are part of the same humanity (often a Canadian humanity). The theatre
can have no higher aspiration.
Since passing Passe Muraille on to other hands in 1982, he’s
taken his very Canadian ideas abroad, to England with 7:84; to Argentina.
He’s taken them to the National Theatre School, when practically the only
time he wasn’t teaching there was when he was Director-General. He’s taken
them to several universities in Ontario and beyond, with teaching gigs.
He took them across Canada with his “Winter Olympics Show”, concocting
a cockamamie tour to accompany the Olympic flame across the country. And
lately he has taken them to the Blyth Festival, to a rural community like
the one Paul grew up in, and a company that was founded in the 1970s (like
several other theatre companies) with the direct inspiration and advice
of Paul Thompson.
But let’s not talk about the old days, let’s talk about what
he’s done for us lately. At Blyth:
-- Booze Days in a Dry County, a collective about prohibition there
in the 1950s. (I didn’t even know they had prohibition in the 1950s!)
-- Death of the Hired Man, not the Robert Frost poem, but a collective
about changes in technology that have changed a way of life (-- and probably
not for the better)
-- The Outdoor Donnellys, an extravaganza that sold out last year before
it opened, and opens again next week. (The audience trucked to various
one-act events staged by various groups, highlighting parts of the Donnelly
story, before being all brought together for an evening show)
Accused once of being anti-writer, Paul replied that he wasn’t
-- that playwrights could help as much as anyone else could! But think
of the number of Canadian plays that wouldn’t exist if Paul had not taken
them on as -- what did John Gray say? -- “cheerleader, group psychologist
and ideologist”. Not just his collectives like Doukhobors, The Farm Show,
1837, Them Donnellys, and I Love You Baby Blue. But plays by playwrights,
like Maggie and Pierre, Jessica, The Duchess, He Won’t Come In from the
Barn; and other plays directly inspired by Paul’s methods and obsessions,
like Paper Wheat, Les Canadiens, and many others. A little hit for the
Stratford Festival called Elizabeth Rex., with a real playwright, Timothy
Findlay. And his work with native theatre groups that maybe we don’t know
so well, plays like Generic Warriors by Ben Cardinal, No-Name Indians by
Alanis King, and Manitoulin Incident, a collective that tells the history
of Manitoulin Island with native voices and from a native perspective.
Then there’s a few actors and directors given their first professional
opportunities by Thompson. It’s hard to say whether David Fox would have
become the icon that he is, if he hadn’t called Passe Muraille one day
in 1972 looking for Martin Kinch, and been recruited instead to go to Clinton
for $35 a week, all found. You might say the same thing about Miles Potter,
Layne Coleman, James Roy, Linda Griffiths; oh, and Mary Walsh, Andy Jones
and his sister Cathy who came to Toronto with a group called Codco, and
Paul put them on stage. A couple of Paul’s early collectives had as their
musical director a young pianist, from Nova Scotia via Vancouver, named
John Gray. With another Passe Muraille vet named Eric Peterson he wrote
-- improvised really, “jammed” like a Thompson collective -- a little piece
called Billy Bishop Goes to War. In his introduction John Gray writes:
“One choice we made: Billy Bishop would take its narrative form
from a phenomenon I noticed while playing the barn circuit of Southwestern
Ontario. [A footnote: Paul literally invented this circuit.] Playing on
stages where you had to kick the cowpies aside while crossing the boards,
I noticed that Canadians don’t much like listening in on other people’s
conversations. They think it’s impolite. This plays havoc with the basic
convention of theatre itself, so what do you do? Well, you drop the fourth
wall and you simply talk to the audience. They tend to relax because they
are in an arena whose aesthetics they understand: the arena of the storyteller.”
Above all, that is how we must think of Paul Thompson -- as a master storyteller,
showing us that we have the stories in us, around us, in our history, in
our neighbours. What we must do is to listen to one another, to participate,
to be engaged. We can all be storytellers like him, if we want to be, and
we must want to be. It is our shared humanity.
Here’s Paul Thompson.