thoughts on shakespeare: Profile of Tom Patterson
The Stratford Festival
the national post

Tom Patterson jump-started the history of theatre in this country, even though he had no such thing in mind. It's tempting to say that this is a very Canadian state of affairs, but in fact it's the way things seem to work all over. In 1951, Patterson was a trade-magazine journalist who saw his hometown of Stratford, Ont., in economic decline. Its major industry -- steam train repair -- had closed down, a victim of technological progress. Patterson decided that one thing that might replace it was tourism, and that Stratford's greatest asset in this regard was its name. After all, the town wasn't just Stratford; it was Stratford on a River Avon, with swans. It cried out for a Shakespeare festival.

Patterson's initial idea was to present a single Shakespeare play, alfresco, in a bandshell down by the water. That it came to more than that was due to the coincidence of Patterson's dream with that of Tyrone Guthrie. Guthrie, the leading Shakespearean director of the mid-20th century, had long felt that the plays needed to break free from proscenium stages and onto platforms that had the freedom, though not necessarily the exact dimensions, of the Elizabethan theatre. He had been experimenting in Britain and elsewhere with makeshift open stages; now he made a purpose-built platform the condition of his coming to Canada as first director of the Stratford Festival. And so that it might be big enough to call itself a festival, he insisted on a program of two plays.

Patterson went to Guthrie because he couldn't get Laurence Olivier. He had sold some remarkably far-sighted city fathers on his idea, and they had funded a trip to New York where Olivier was then working. Patterson failed to meet him but he had proved, not least to himself, that he was prepared to go to the top.

He phoned Guthrie at his home in Ireland, and found himself talking to the one man both bold and humble enough to hop on a plane and check out the mad ambition of some amateur he had never met. By the end of his trip it was agreed between them that Stratford would have its festival with Guthrie directing. It opened in 1953. Two years from inception to completion is astonishingly quick progress.

Guthrie brought with him a designer, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, some technicians and four actors, including two stars, Alec Guinness and Irene Worth. Everyone else involved was Canadian. It was a big company and a good one; two of its members, William Hutt and William Needles, will be in this year's Stratford company. Most of them had been working mainly as amateurs or in radio. There was, at that point, hardly any English-speaking professional theatre in Canada.

Moiseiwitsch's new stage, surrounded by a circus tent for its first four years and by a concrete structure thereafter, was to influence theatre architecture all over the world. Meanwhile the company itself inspired the formation of other companies, other festivals, other regional centres, across Canada. It eventually led to the birth of new Canadian playwriting.

Of course, the influence wasn't always acknowledged. In many quarters it was actually resented. But even the opposition took shape within the theatrical world that Stratford built. And everyone present at that first night in 1953, knew they were in at the birth of something more than a single theatre.

One of those bitten was Patterson himself. For publicity purposes Guthrie fostered a myth that Patterson had been inspired by his visits to European classical theatres while on wartime military service. In fact he had barely visited a theatre and had never seen or read a Shakespeare play. It seems that like some other pioneers (Lilian Baylis, for example, the Edwardian philanthropist who created London's Old Vic, and who was Guthrie's own mentor) he fell in love with the theatre only after starting one of his own.

At the end of the Festival's first season he was already planning a new touring venture, the Canadian Players, which he ran with one of the imported British actors, Douglas Campbell (who is still here). He went on to found or consult with other Canadian theatre projects, and he remained part of the Stratford organization itself until 1969. His initial position was general manager. He was popular with the company, though more seasoned administrators seem to have regarded him with a mixture of affection and exasperation.

Relations with the festival were sometimes strained after his departure, but all fences were mended in later years. He was a welcomed figure on both formal and informal Stratford occasions, and the festival's Third Stage was re-named after him. Stratford's debt to him is incalculable, but so are those of the Canadian theatre and of Canada itself.