Canadian
theatre 
Jane Baldwin CASP Interview:
Jane Baldwin, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from Tufts University is a member of The Boston Conservatory faculty, where she teaches Acting, Dramatic Literature, and Humanities. She is the author of Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor. She has edited a reissue of Saint-Denis works, entitled Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style and Other Writings, published by Routledge Press in 2008. Her articles (in English and French) on acting, training, and production analysis have appeared in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Topics, Theatre Notebook, and L’Annuaire théâtral, among other publications. She is presently writing a biography entitled A National Drama: Jean Gascon and the Development of Canadian Theatre, which is being published by Southern Illinois University Press. Her work on Québécois theatre is widely recognized and CASP interviewed her as she was preparing forfurther research on Québécois and Canadian theatre great Jean Gascon. In 2005 Baldwin received the Heather McCallum Award—a grant from the Association for Canadian Theatre Research—to fund research for her book on the career of the 20th century Canadian theater director and actor Jean Gascon. The book will be the first to document Gascon’s professional life.
Q: How does an American theatre scholar become interested in a Canadian theatre artist of relatively limited international stature? Why Jean Gascon?
JB: I became interested in Jean Gascon when I was researching my previous book, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor. The research brought me to Canada, since Saint-Denis was a key figure in the development of Canadian professional theatre through his work with the Dominion Drama Festival and the formation of the National Theatre School. Gascon’s role as the School’s first Director General aroused my curiosity about other aspects of his professional life. Like Saint-Denis’, Gascon’s career crossed linguistic and cultural borders. The more I learned about Gascon, the more his singular career fascinated me, and the more surprised I became that no one had documented it. So I decided to write a much needed and well-deserved book.
Q: What has been most surprising about your research into Gascon’s career?
JB: As I say above, that the achievements of such a remarkable man and artist could be let fall from history.
Q: In the program notes for his 1962 production of Richard II at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Gascon asks the question “pourquoi Shakespeare?” Do you have a sense of what role Shakespeare played in Gascon’s career?
JB: It was obviously a very important role, given Gascon’s long, if sometimes intermittent association with the Stratford Festival (1956-1988), the height of which was his seven-year tenure as Artistic Director. However, like most Québécois of his era (1921-1988), Gascon had had little contact with Shakespeare’s plays growing up. The fact that he would feel it necessary to explain “why Shakespeare?” in the Richard II program illustrates the comparative lack of importance of Shakespeare in Quebec culture even in the early 1960s. Gascon’s own first exposure was playing Brutus in a student production of Julius Caesar at the Collège Sainte-Marie. His second was his appearance in as Feste in the famed Alfred Pellan 1946 Le soir des rois (Twelfth Night). However, it was not until 1956 when he and his company, the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, went to Stratford to play the French court in Michael Langham’s production of Henry V that his interest and curiosity were thoroughly piqued. The Festival Stage opened new possibilities for him in directing Shakespeare. Three years later, Langham invited him to direct Othello in English at Stratford. The second Shakespearean play he directed was the Richard II that you refer to in your previous question and the only one he ever mounted in French. Within a few years he was ensconced as Stratford’s first native-born artistic director, an extraordinary tribute to the talent of this Francophone theatre practitioner.
Q: Few figures in theatre move so easily between cultures and languages as did Gascon. As well as acting and directing in both English and French Canadian theatre, Gascon helped found Théâtre du Nouveau Monde and the National Theatre School, and was Artistic Director at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, the Stratford Festival and the National Arts Centre. What was it about Gascon’s training, personality or style that allowed him to move so easily between Canada’s two solitudes?
JB: His adventurousness of spirit, openness as a human being, love of the arts, and belief in their universality made it natural for him to reach out. At the same time, moving between those “two solitudes” was not always easy for him; cultural and political circumstances could and did create complications.
Q: Are there elements from Gascon’s French theatre training (both in Québec and in France) that became distinctive in his English Canadian work (at the Stratford Festival, for example)?
JB: This is a question that I am still thinking about as I research and write my book, so I will only respond in part. Certainly, he infused a lot of his Stratford work with his own bravura style. He changed the repertoire of the Festival, adding modern works, a few of which were Québécois, and he brought in a number of Québécois artists.
Q: Gascon took the helm at the Stratford Festival relatively early in his career, and at a pivotal point in the Festival’s history (Gascon becoming the first Canadian Artistic Director). How did this happen?
JB: Another question that requires a long explanation to do it justice. The brief version follows. With the rise of Canadian nationalism, it became almost incumbent upon the powers-that-be to engage a Canadian Artistic Director. Although it might seem strange to engage a Francophone director in this position, the departing Artistic Director Michel Langham believed in Gascon’s talent. Gascon had proved himself at Stratford as a director and performer; he had successfully developed and run Montréal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde for fifteen years; he had become a national figure through the TNM’s tours, his work at Stratford, and as a founder and first Director-General of the National Theatre School of Canada.
Q: As such an exemplary, unique figure do you think that Gascon has something to teach Canadians about questions of national identity as mediated by theatre?
JB: Yes, I do, but it will take a book to elucidate it.
Interview conducted by Daniel Fischlin
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