Village Squire, 1979-11, Page 9announced as the winner of the award and got up and made an
acceptance speech in which he donated the $5000 first prize to
The Mummers, a struggling Newfoundland theatrical group. It
was then discovered that there had been a mistake and that the
prize was really to have gone to Reaney so the award was taken
away from Salutin and given to Reaney.
A playwright with his national prominence would in many
countries in the world be able to live comfortably from his
creative work but not, of course in Canada. His teaching at the
UWO provides the bulk of the family income. He could, he says,
have made a living from writing in perhaps the last eight years if
he didn't have a family to support and by doing radio and
television might be able to earn a good living. "But I don't know
what you'd look like by the end of it all. I certainly couldn't have
researched the Donnelly story on that kind of schedule."
Teaching and writing on the side isn't exactly a hardship for
James Reaney. He loves teaching and he works with his students
in theatre workshops and so on and claims he's. got many of his
best ideas from his students. Sometimes, he says, when he sees
artistic directors of theatre that he considers utter dolts he is sure
he could do better and is tempted to turn to theatre full time but
when he remembers you have to do things like deal with boards
he has second thoughts. He has ideas for a theatre he says. He's
not too interested in directing plays by other people but he could
probably "do quite an interesting Shakespeare." He's learned a
lot he says from working in workshops with people in preparing
plays, learned some things that others apparently haven't when
he sees their work on stage without a real sense of stage
movement. If he hasn't yet got around to running his own
theatre, he has seen his students attain that goal. In the 1960's
there were three young men at UWO, Martin Kinch, Keith
Turnbull and Paul Thompson who went on to be among the
leaders of the theatre revolution in Toronto. Kinch was artistic
director of Toronto Free Theatre, Turnbull of NDWT and
Thompson of the Theatre Passe Muraille which has returned to
southwestern Ontario for the many of its subjects since then
including the Donnelly legend.
Reaney's interest in poetry and theatre has combined in his
work for the stage. His plays reflect the influence of the Greek
tragic theatre which he attributes to the fact that T.S. Eliot was
the main influence in college at the time he went and Eliot felt
that Greek theatre was the ultimate model for an artist to aim at.
So he says the object was to write plays in verse, thinking that
people would just love them but of course people didn't care
about the pains the writer went to to make ordinary
conversation conform to verse form. Now he feels the verse play
has had it.
Still he says, he was quite unconscious of letting go of the aim
of verse plays. He wanted to do best for his audience and he
wanted to do what was himself and so his plays became filled
with a lot of metaphors and symbolism and rituals. Actually, he
thinks he's really writing film scripts but instead of camera
movements you have mime and stage properties. But dealing
with people who really know how to do them, he says, you can
get effects on stage that you can't even get on film.
Economics is changing theatre and the 12 person casts of
many of Reaney's plays, once. quite economical only five years
ago are now too expensive for many theatres. After King Whistle
he plans to work with casts of five or four characters and shorter
plays to see what he can do there.
What he's been working on so far, he says, is sort of a program
of southwestern Ontario plays making use of the big stories from
the past. As well as the Donnellys there has been Baldoon and
Wacousta which all fit into the big stories of the province. So too
does The Dismissal which was the first student strike in the
province (which he wrote for the University of Toronto) and so
does King Whistle which was a very famous labour strike.
This brings to an end the plays he's likely to do about the
region, he says. There are no more stories he wants to tackle at
present from southwestern Ontario.
His next project is a mime play he's working on with Theatre
For the Festive Season
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November 1979, Village Squire 7