Village Squire, 1977-02, Page 31THEATRE
Janet Amos is one of the most talented members of the Theatre Passe Murallle troupe. In a
scene from The West Show she shows how with few sets or props, the actors tell their story.
Theatre Passe
Muraille
almost as much
Western Ontario
as Toronto
Probably no theatre group in Canada
has been so much in the limelight over the
years as Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille.
The group, whose Latin name means
theatre transcending walls, has been at the
same time controversial and beloved,
conservative and radical, subtle and
insensitive.
It was a group born in controversy.It
couldn't have had a much more
controversial birthplace than Toronto's
Rochdale College, regarded as a den of
iniquity by Toronto's middleclass. The
college eventually became a modern slum,
filled with drug users and radical
politicians. The image of the place was not
helped any by the first Theatre Passe
Muraille project back in the late sixties: a
play called Futz which dealt with the story
of a farmer and his lover affair with a pig.
The theatre toned down a good deal
however when it came under the
direction of Paul Thompson. The son of a
Listowel area veterinarian, Thompson had
studied at University of Western Ontario,
taken a master degree at University of
Torcnto and studied theatre in France
under Roger Plachon who operated a
theatre in the working class suburb of
Lyons. Thompson's ambition when he
returned to Canada was to take theatre to a
whole new audience than was traditional in
Canada. Instead of the middle-class
dress -up -and -go -to -the -theatre crowd, he
wanted a theatre about and for the working
class.
In the years since then, Theatre Passe
Muraille has been almost as at home in
western Ontario as it has been in Toronto.
It was here that the first real breakthrough
came for the• theatre. In the summer of
1972 Paul Thompson arranged through a
friend to get the use of an old farmhouse in
the Clinton area near Holmesville. His
actors came up and lived in the house
during the summer and began piecing'
together the story of the farmers of the
area known simply as The Farm Show.
The work followed the pattern which was
to become the trademark of the theatre
group. The actors went out and talked to
the farmers, their wives and children, they
VILLAGE SQUIRE/FEBRUARY 1977, 33