The Road to Bard: The thrills and challenges of launching Vancouver's Shakespeare festival

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When you are a co-op, you do everything. One of the actors, Scott Bellis, helped at the bar. He’s always been brilliant like that. Actors don’t generally like to get out of the dressing room and be with the public before the show or during intermission—they just want to do their work backstage and onstage — but he did, and he was great. The bar made no money at all, so I drank heavily to sponsor it!

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My mother advised me, in writing this, to remember just how hard it was, how incredibly difficult it was for me and for everyone involved to bring Bard together. As for me, I think I only started feeling my own deep exhaustion once we’d established a bit of a groove with the production. I remember my first night on guard duty, thoughtfully pacing the stage before those 250 empty seats, a higher and higher percentage of which were occupied with every performance. In fact, we’d had just about a full house that night. Then, and only then — out of sober respect for my dear father — did I allow myself the thought, the memory of the words of Douglas so very long ago: “You are going to do something!” Well, it seemed perhaps we had.

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And how complex, how joyous, how frustrating, how wonderfully and terribly challenging it all had been. I jumped down and walked slowly up the aisle. Outside, I secured the flap. All was quiet as I patrolled the site, working my way around to the backstage area, where I’d parked our VW Vanagon. I was pretty satisfied there were no thieves about, so I climbed in and closed the door with a clunk. God, I was tired. At any rate, I instantly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. In fact, I didn’t wake until the camper had grown uncomfortably warm in the morning sun. No matter: nothing had been stolen. …

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“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune” — so says my friend William Shakespeare. And he has been a friend. I find in these words the very beauties of life, of love, of living.

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Even in my early schoolboy days, there was something in Shakespeare’s words that beguiled me, that reverberated in my heart and soul, that gave me a direction. The stories were massive, sometimes deeply complex, but rich and bottomless.

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Harold Bloom, a Shakespearean academic, in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, starts this way: “There is the Bible, there is Shakespeare and then there is everybody else.”

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The books of my youth were books of poetry. In these poems lay my grail, my feelings, my desires, all wrapped up in divine words. I wanted to share them with anyone who would listen. I knew what I wanted to do very early in my life. I wanted to be an actor.

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My mentor in this endeavour emerged as Douglas Campbell, a great pioneer of Canadian theatre. How fortunate I was to make his acquaintance! A true aficionado of Shakespeare, he hired me as a young actor. He inspired me to come to Canada to expand my horizons and participate in the wonders of this unique and marvellous land.

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Mentors are so important — indeed, Douglas’s mentor was Sir Tyrone Guthrie, the first artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario. How I would have loved to have met and worked with him! Guthrie came out of the theatre in the UK with the likes of Laurence Olivier, Dame Sybil Thorndike and Alec Guinness. My good companions at Bard on the Beach and I are the direct recipients, the legatees of these legendary forces in the theatre. They are not dead; they are alive and well in us.

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Guthrie once said, “I knew nothing lasts forever, particularly the ephemeral theatre. Such is the transitory and fluid nature of existence. Indeed, no enterprise has ever fulfilled or can ever fulfil its purpose completely. The most you can hope for is to take a respectable shot at an unobtainable goal and to succeed partially and intermittently.”