Theatre

Recent:

Matters Domestic by Barbara Ellison at The Vancouver International Fringe Festival in 2009. The show was well received and reviewed and was one of the few Fringe shows selected for holdover.

Background:

For much of my working life, directing for the theatre was what I did. I fell into it almost accidentally when a fellow student at University of Toronto asked me to work with him on the play he was directing. I had been acting since I was a child and he thought my experience would be helpful. Well, after a time, for whatever reason, he dropped out of the project and I carried on. The production was very successful and I went on to direct many more university productions.

Another opening appeared when my cousins stopped operating the summer theatre in Ontario that they had run for years. Again, prodded by a fellow student, Karl Jaffary, we took over the company and operated and expanded it for the next four years. I directed many of the productions which included now famous actors such as Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs, Donald Sutherland, Ted Follows, Dawn Greenhalgh, Timothy Findley, and Nancy Kerr.

The Canada Council helped me go London to study at LAMDA after which I thought I would see if anyone in England would hire a young director from Canada. I wrote forty letters, had ten replies, four interviews and One Job. Off I went to Chesterfield as Associate Director. There I worked again with Donald Sutherland and Jackie Burroughs. From there I went to Dundee and spent a year as Artistic Director of the Dundee Repertory Theatre where I directed at least a dozen productions.

A year or two of free lance directing, based in London, directing many productions at Colchester Repertory Theatre, lead me to The National Theatre of Great Britain as an assistant director, working with Lawrence Olivier, Maggie Smith, and Albert Finney among others.

My Canadian credentials were tested when The National Theatre School of Canada invited me to return to Canada as Assistant Artistic Director. Torn, particularly since Finney had asked me to assist him when he directed his first film, I made the jump and returned to Canada. A year later I took over as Artistic Director of the English Acting Section. By this time I was all of 28.

Centennial Theatre, Bishops' University, 1972

After five years at NTS and more free lance directing at regional theatres in Canada, I went to Bishops' University in Quebec where we started the first major theatre festival in Canada devoted to Canadian plays, Festival Lennoxville. Six years there and then I was off to the CBC in Toronto as a radio drama producer.

Somehow my directing career, while it never stopped, blended into my teaching career, and finally, for several years my acting career - where I had started as a child - took over.

But directing for the theatre is still the love of my life. Just ask me!