I grew up in the theatre but not traditional theatre. I grew up in Passe Muraille, TWP and the Blyth Festival, the alternative theatre, the theatre of new Canadian work. My parents were the upstarts. I grew up with The Death of the Donnellys, The Farm Show, 1837, and Richard the Third Time. All these were collectives, and some entirely improvised. While I love going to Stratford, one of my earliest memories was seeing Brian Bedford in Richard II, the coach race from Lucan to London in Death of the Donellys was way more exciting for a boy of nine. Watching Layne Coleman as Will Donnelly, my mum and Miles Potter pretend to be horses and the other actors twirling staffs to mimic the coach wheels, it was fantastic storytelling. I got to do a few collectives in my career and one of them was Whale at YPT. It was a largely improvised script based on a play that was written about a news story of two Grey whales being trapped in the ice flow in the North.
Usually, I’m not nervous rehearsing a play but Whale made me nervous. The thing about doing established plays is that they are just that, tried, tested and true. There is inherent faith that the play works, it’s been done before. With new work, you need to make that leap of faith. We had NO idea if Whale would work. As we approached the tech week of rehearsals I thought, “This is a mish-mash. There’s nothing holding it together.” We would draw the arc of the story on a white board in the rehearsal hall trying to make sense of it, taping up bits of the story to try and find something we all thought would tell an interesting yarn. We were rewriting the dialogue right up to tech week. Then, during my lunch hour on our first tech day, I remember hanging by my hands from the lighting grid 50 feet above the stage floor, looking down, not wanting to let go and let the harness carry my weight, when our stunt coordinator, John Stead, slowly, gently pried my fingers off the bars saying, “Just let go, brother. Just let go.” So, I did.
Did it work? We did three productions of Whale. The first year we mounted the show we won a Dora for best production. The second, we mounted for a week in order to take it to St Louis to shop it around to houses in the US. The third time was a remount for the YPT 1995 season that finished in Washington DC at the Kennedy Centre.
Yeah, it worked and what a memory.
Christopher Royal