The Technical Work of a Little Theatre

Almost Altogether Machinery

The Technical Work of a Little Theatre written by Alan Freed Coventry

Canadian Forum Literary Competitions/1921-01

From The Canadian Forum, January 1921, p. 108

In the fall of 1913 a small group of men in Toronto, graduates and undergraduates of the University, founded the Players Club as an organization in which those with a bent for dramatic art could find an outlet for their activities. The Club's object was to produce in the autumn of each year a play of general interest but one not ordinarily performed on the professional stage, the cast being, of course, entirely amateur.

It started its career with Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. The stage was extemporized in a college dining hall, the scenery was conventionalized draperies, the current lighting was taken from any available socket. The curtain was, in fact, the only piece of equipment that was designed ab initio for its function.

In 1914 a second production was made, this time in aid of the Red Cross. The bill comprised Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Galsworthy's The Pigeon. The same hall did duty as theatre and the stage was prepared in the same way. Since, however, the two plays called for very different lighting the technical staff — for most of the time a single member of the Club elected to that end — had perforce to become more ingenious. In addition to the inevitable footlights, he arranged border-lights and made shift to imitate a grate-fire and some spotlights. These he worked with an incredibly primitive home-made switch-board from a small recess in the "wings" and in his spare time he managed the curtain and "off-stage" effects; indeed he over-managed them, for in the stress of his composite responsibility he signalled the arrival of midnight by thirteen resonant strokes on a bell.

After this the Players Club became dormant until 1919. In this year Hart House was completed and within its walls included a theatre. This marked for the Players Club the beginning of a new phase of its existence in which the organization evolved quite suddenly from a club for acting only into one in which acting shared the honours more or less equally with the practice of stage-craft.

The theatre for which the Club assumed responsibility is definitely a "little theatre" — it seats under five hundred — but its technical equipment yields place to none. Hence it was at once clear that the old "one-man" days were gone and that a properly balanced technical staff had become a first necessity.

A junior member of the staff, with experience of the Club's early productions as his only stock-in-trade, was appointed technical manager, with the responsibility of finding and organizing an undergraduate stage crew for the 1919-20 season. This comprised the Club's six productions, each played four times, and a number, at this time uncertain, of performances by other dramatic organizations in the University. There were, in the event, five such additional productions. The material to be handled by the crew included an unusually complete equipment of stage machinery and it was intended that the organization should follow the conventional triple division with Carpenter's, Property Master's and Electrician's crews.

Now, with the exception of the electrical work there is nothing in all this having direct connection with any course in the Calendar of the University; the work of floor-man or fly-man, the technique of stage noises, these are not the subject of academic instruction; they lie, indeed, outside the ambit of all ordinary pursuits or learning.

Be the cause what it may, undergraduates came forward so willingly that all doubt as to the formation of a technical crew was soon past, and this in spite of the technical manager's very definite statement of the responsibilities they were undertaking. Briefly, the understanding was that since the Club played each production four times, the crew for any production would have to work at least six successive nights; further that, once chosen, the personnel of the crew could not be changed without impairing the efficiency of its work, and that, consequently, if any man after undertaking to help with a production failed to keep his appointment without really adequate cause, he would be assumed to have lost his interest in the Club and would not be asked again for his help. On these terms a list was prepared of men from almost all Faculties and Colleges in the University.

The men from the Faculty of Applied Science naturally gravitated into the electrician's "gang" and the senior among them was provisionally appointed Master Electrician. They at once found themselves among familiar objects but faced with new problems in the application of their knowledge. It is one thing to know the theory of the rheostat in the laboratory; it is quite another to apply that knowledge to half a dozen separate rheostats (for the switchboard of the theatre is nothing else) so as to combine several groups of differently coloured lamps into the smooth sum total of light that the audience sees. They, however, soon found their feet and became a smoothly working unit in the organization.

The carpenters and property-men had not even the advantage of theoretical knowledge; they were in a new world and had to learn their geography de novo, and this, too, under very adverse conditions. The first performance in the theatre was due on November 28th and the essential equipment was not completely installed until the day before. The bill, Dunsany's The Queen's Enemies and The Farce of Pierre Patelin^(sic!) [p. 109] by the anonymous master, involved three complete changes of set. The artists were at work on the scenery, and rehearsals were being held in the less confused intervals of preparation; the stage crew, in consequence, actually faced their first night without having had a complete rehearsal of the scene-plot, though all the scenery had been approximately in place at least once. The changes were, however, all made in less than ten minutes, though all hands confessed after the first performance that it had been a "hectic evening." Such untoward conditions naturally did not interfere with preparations for any subsequent production and the technical crew were able to get their bearings.

Productions by other dramatic organizations have been already mentioned. The Players Club is bound by its constitution to give all the help it can to make such performances successful, while at the same time it ensures that the equipment of the theatre receives proper treatment. This equipment is, indeed, so complete as to leave the newcomer bewildered and unable to achieve the best results. The governing body of the Club has passed a bye-law to ensure that the technical manager or his responsible representative shall be in charge at all performances at the theatre.

The causes of this complexity are in the main two, and they are distinct one from another. In the first place, since the theatre is below the quadrangle of Hart House, structural considerations forbid the usual loft and all scenery has to be carried by hand to packs in the wings. Secondly the lighting equipment is unusually complete and includes a very big switchboard with a great variety of connections; indeed a professional electrician, who was working with a visiting company at a special performance, declined to work the board in favour of one of the Club's amateurs.

Under these conditions the technical manager was more than glad to find that the experienced members of the crew were just as keen to make the technical settings for visiting clubs successful as those for their own season. True, the visitors, with one exception, did not play as often as the regular productions, but the labour of organizing the scenery and hooking up the lights was no less in one case than in the other, so that the only saving of time was in the smaller number of performances.

Scene painting was not regularly undertaken by the manager's crew, since any but the most mechanical parts of the art call for training which they did not possess. They were, indeed, relieved of all responsibility by the friendliness of well-known artists: Lawren Harris, for instance, designed the sets for Patelin and Hastings's The New Sin; A. Y.Jackson imagined an Egyptian dungeon for The Queen's Enemies and a house of cosmopolitan design for The Alchemist; Arthur Lismer designed a Cyclopean version of the walls of Troy for The Trojan Women; while J. E. H. MacDonald painted an astonishingly beautiful stained-glass window for The Chester Mysteries. A further interest of this window lies in the method of its manufacture, for the technique employed had not up to that time been considered useful on large areas, while the diameter of the window was eight feet. The result was wholly successful.

Neither were the larger jobs of carpentering carried out by the crew. They would have made too great an inroad on their time and were therefore given to the Club's handyman. Small alterations of scenery and adjustments found necessary during the production of any play were undertaken as a matter of course.

On a number of occasions, too, the crews went outside their regular routine and lent a very effective hand in the preparation of properties, and in such work the distinction between Carpenter's and Property Master's men broke down. Where a man could be useful, there he turned his attention and it was in this spirit that the season's work was carried on. At one show a member of the Club might be a floor-man, at the next handling properties, perhaps in yet a third acting. There is no cast-iron organization ruling a man's fate from the moment he first works with the Club; rather he is expected to learn all he can about the technical work of a theatre, and then, if he likes, to specialize.

It is too soon yet to say that the final organization has been evolved, though certainly the foundation has been laid on the tradition that work, and work alone, justifies membership in the Club.

The theatre made large demands on the leisure of those who helped it loyally, but at the end of the season examination results did not seem to indicate that dramatic pursuits were incompatible with academic success. The technical manager may fairly claim that in the first year of the Club's reincarnation he is guiltless of the non-success of any student, a point which the Club considers of the highest importance. The theatre in this case must be a recreation only, even if it is the home of an attempt to produce in the best possible style a varied programme of plays, and even if many of its good friends are not directly connected with the University.

Let us conclude: what amateurs have done once can be done by amateurs again. For the technical crew to make a success of their share in a season's productions calls for hard work and continuous work, but the results are visible and immediate. In any university there are undergraduates who will feel the attraction of a recreation which calls not necessarily for the great development of particular abilities, but for an all-round adaptability, and a skill in meeting the unexpected contingencies of the moment, where there is, in fact, an element of responsibility to their fellow-craftsmen and the Club. The task is not easy, but its interest is abiding

A. F. Coventry.