Village Squire, 1978-07, Page 28PROFILE
Peter Colley's
writing his own
success story
Many people dream about being a
writer. There's something magic in the
word. But few are those who have the
courage to try it, fewer still who have the
skills and very few, in Canada at least, who
can make a living doing it.
Londoner Peter Colley then will be the
envy of many a would-be writer.
Playwrights who can call themselves
successful, not only in terms of critical
comment but in the hard economic realities
of life are a rare breed indeed in Canada.
Yet for the past four or five years Peter
Colley has devoted himself almost full time
to writing and he still looks hale and hearty
despite it. Lean he is, but hardly emaciated
from starvation.
He's currently very busy having just had
one play open at the Blyth Summer
Festival and with another celebrating the
centenary of the University of Western
Ontario due to go into rehearsal in
September.
Not bad for a man who came to Canada
to teach geography.
Peter is originally from England with a
background in the theatre. His grandpar-
ents were impresarios in the music hall
business buying and selling theatres but
generally owning about three. One of the
theatres was a very old one and Peter has
the only copy in existence of a script of a
play performed there in 1777. Later, when
the music halls waned, the grandparents
turned the theatres into cinemas.
Though there is a direct link between his
past and his present, the theatrical side of
his family wasn't really a great influence,
he says. His parents were military, not
theatrical people and they had a greater
influence than his grandparents. Still, he
was appearing in Gilbert and Sullivan
operettas from a young age, in the back
row of the chorus he jokes because he
couldn't sing. He appeared in about one
a year, until he was 18.
He lived in an old fashioned British
boarding house filled with all kinds of
fantastic characters. In fact he says, he's
written a play about it but he's never
shown it to a soul. While at the boarding
house he travelled regularly to London to
see shows and visited the Oxford
Playhouse.
He was fascinated with sports and
devoted much of his time to that during his
teenage years but when he got to
university sports were no longer where the
action was. The best parties, he was told,
PG. 26. VILLAGE SQUIRE/JULY 1978.
Playwright Peter Colley.
were with the theatre crowd. Why the
women ran around naked at those parties.
That's why, he jokes, he decided to
audition for a play. He got the part. He
later discovered that the parties weren't
filled with naked ladies but they were
certainly more interesting than rugby
parties so he continued to act.
While in university he got involved in
comedy revues and began writing comedy
sketches for the revues. Eventually. he
says, he wrote a complete revue although it
was little more than pornography he says
now. In a "fit of artistic integrity" he
decided to write a real play and the result
was "The Saga of Regin" which was "a
fatuous tale about spirits". The play was
produced by a small professional theatre in
England and opened in the fall and closed
in December. By January, he was in
Canada.
Now, it wasn't that he was thrown out of
England because of the play, it was that he
decided he wanted to come to Canada
ostensibly to study for his masters degree
at the University of Western Ontario and
pay his way by teaching geography. What
he really intended all the time, he says
now, was to write but the only way he could
get landed immigrant status was as a
teacher because there was a shortage at
the time.
For the first two years nearly everything
he did in theatre was as an actor, which
took away from his being able to
concentrate on writing. He did 12 shows in
his first year in addition to teaching which
left little time to sit down with his pen (he
writes his scripts in longhand).
His first play in Canada was really a long
sketch, -he says, which was performed at
the Minitheatre of Theatre London under
the aegis of Heinar Pillar, the theatre's
artistic director at the time. There was no
real director for the show as Peter who also
A CHRISTMAS
COUNTRY FAIR
DISPLAY AND SALE
OF LOCAL ARTS,
CRAFTS & COUNTRY BAKING
Wednesday, October 18 and
Saturday. October 21, 1978.
Saltford Valley Hall '/4 mile N.
of Goderich in Colborne
Township
Special Features: Mona Mulhern,
artist of Goderich; Alfred Dale,
quadraplegic artist of Seaforth;
Robert Stoddart, silversmith of
Goderich, Joan Pope, Goderich--
"Gollywog" dools, Neil McKee,
Benmiller--bird feeders.
Stiickland
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