Setting the Stage: Montreal Theatre 1920-1949 (review)

Reviewed by: Setting the Stage: Montreal Theatre 1920–1949 Denis Salter (bio) Herbert Whittaker. Setting the Stage: Montreal Theatre 1920–1949. Edited by Jonathan Rittenhouse McGill-Queen’s University Press 1999. xvii, 298. $44.95 In this charming, chatty, highly anecdotal, and effervescent memoir, Herbert Whittaker chronicles in extraordinary detail his experiences in the Montreal theatre, from the moment of being stage-struck when his parents took him as a child to London during the First World War until his move from Montreal to Toronto in 1949, where he became the leading theatre critic of the Globe and Mail. As a young man, and indeed throughout his career, Whittaker has been a keen student of Montreal theatre history. His book is full of retrospective glances at the great performers who came to [End Page 489] the city in the nineteenth century, including Charles Dickens, Henry Irving, and, above all others, Sarah Bernhardt. Since the Montreal of his youth was regarded as one of the more important sites on the touring circuit, and since New York was nearby, he regularly saw some of the great performers of his own time: Lilian Gish, Sir John Martin-Harvey, Kenneth Wicksteed, George Arliss, Robert Bruce Mantell, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Ethel Barrymore, Cissie Loftus, Bransby Williams, and the incomparable Canadian actress, Beatrice Lillie. (He includes a delightful caricature he did of her which captures her androgynous appeal to the letter.) Whittaker first became a stage designer in the spring of 1933 when he prepared the costumes and the lighting plot for the Everyman Players' production of Everyman. He continued designing for this company for several years, slowly learning the discipline of his craft by concentrating his attention on some of the masterpieces of dramatic literature including Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Shaw's Saint Joan, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. He also designed now and then for his friend and colleague Charles Rittenhouse, who produced an impressive repertoire of Shakespearean plays at the West Hill High School in the 1930s. Whittaker eventually became involved, as so many of our fledgling and experienced artists did, with the Dominion Drama Festival, first at the regional, and then at the national level, learning a good deal from the distinguished foreign adjudicators who evaluated the productions and gave out the prizes. From working as a designer, it was a natural step to the heady role of director: his initial challenge was Pushkin's Festival in Time of Plague for the Sixteen-Thirty Club, which he not only directed but also designed and which he entered in the Dominion Drama Festival in 1938. Whittaker was eventually faced with an all too familiar dilemma: how could he make a living in the Canadian theatre as a designer and director? Would he have to go abroad as so many other Canadians had done before him? His solution was somewhat novel: in 1945, after serving part-time since 1937 in various capacities to prove his worth, he became the theatre critic for the Montreal Gazette. He sometimes found himself writing about productions in which he himself was involved! In 1945 he had the rare opportunity to design both the costumes and the setting for Much Ado about Nothing, produced by Charles Rittenhouse and directed by Bobbie Beatty under the auspices of the Shakespeare Society of Montreal and presented in Moyse Hall at McGill University. This gave him an opportunity that he had longed for: to prove, under the influence of William Poel, 'that Shakespeare's plays move most naturally and easily when one follows the floor plan of the Globe Theatre.' He also designed Romeo and Juliet for the Shakespeare Society: again, Charles Rittenhouse was the director, as he had been almost ten years earlier at West Hill High School, and again Whittaker continued his experiment with Poel-inspired ideas. The production is also noteworthy in theatre history as the first one [End Page 490] in which Christopher Plummer as Paris had ever played a Shakespearean role. (Plummer has written a gracious foreword to the book.) By the time Whittaker left Montreal, he had designed and/or directed nearly eighty different productions - this is an extraordinary record by any standard. Much as...

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