McNicoll - The opening act: Canadian theatre history, 1945-1953

THE BEGINNINGS OF CANADIAN

THEATRES RENAISSANCE

[Canadians] have never been without theatre

and its my contention that the theatre is a natural

expression of society.... Wherever you set people

down, some theatrical expression will emerge.

HERBERT WHITTAKER

Just as homegrown professional theatre in Canada did not spring fully formed from the Stratford Festival, the early post-war flurry of professional theatre activity was not the first seen in Canada. Most of the earlier theatre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, was amateur and sporadic. That, in turn, was preceded by decades of amateur theatre brought from Europe, thought at first to have begun with a production of Le Thtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France on November 14, 1606, in Port Royal (once the capital of Acadia and now a small community in the western part of Nova Scotia). It has been recently discovered, however, that there was an even earlier European theatrical event, in 1583, when explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert had a small group of entertainers on his ship perform during anchorage in St. Johns, Newfoundland.

Of course, for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of the European amateur theatres, there had been what is sometimes referred to as paratheatre among North Americas indigenous peoples. These were performances, often spiritual, involving rituals and dancing enacted in elaborate costumes and frequently using sophisticated stage effects.

For traditional European-style theatre, one can look to the mid-eighteenth century, which saw a good deal of garrison theatre, a term used to describe the theatrical activities of the British and French army and navy personnel stationed in the territory that would become Canada. While residents of the early colonies were not involved in these productions, they were beneficiaries of the theatres built by soldiers for their own performances. For example, in Halifax the soldiers built the New Grand Theatre, which opened in 1789 with a production of Shakespeares Merchant of Venice.

The first professional theatre group to play in Canada was The American Company of Comedians in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1768. By the 1780s, amateur theatres had begun to spring up in Newfoundland, followed quickly by companies in other colonies. These performances usually took place in town halls or taverns, typically with all-male casts. Often the biggest obstacle theatres faced at the time came from the church, both Protestant and Catholic, which still often compared theatres to brothels.

By the mid-nineteenth century, most Canadian towns had a stage, but few had real theatre buildings. The stage usually consisted of a raised platform at the end of a long room in the town hall. Some cities, however, had buildings resembling real theatres and they began bringing in professional companies, the majority from Britain. Canadian-born actor Graves Simcoe Lee was a member of one such company, and he wrote what is said to be the first play by a Canadian seen on a Toronto stage.