The Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company has announced a final curtain call for Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov and all other classical playwrights.
The 42-year-old regional theatre company, the largest in Western Canada, announced a dramatic change in mandate yesterday. As of next season, the Playhouse will only produce contemporary plays written after 1950.
"This is an evolution, not a revolution," the Playhouse's artistic director, Glynis Leyshon, explained before yesterday's press conference at the Vancouver Playhouse International Wine Festival.
Since its inception in 1962 as Vancouver's first professional company, the Playhouse has maintained a traditional regional theatre mandate that allowed for a mixed repertoire of both classical and contemporary works.
"For our 40th anniversary two years ago, we started thinking about our future and looking hard at the kind of theatre that connects to our audience and the community. The pieces that have really resonated have been contemporary works," Leyshon added, pointing to the success of such recent productions as Wit, Proof, The Drawer Boy, 2 Pianos 4 Hands and The Overcoat. "There are already several theatres here that serve a general mandate."
Bill Millerd, artistic director of Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre, agrees. "There's definitely a place for this in the Vancouver theatre ecology," he said, adding that the post-Second World War era still offers more choices for programming than any other period in dramatic history.
"Maybe Glynis rightly felt that the times do change and the concept of traditional regional theatre is outmoded," he said. "She's brave to make that move and I look forward to her programming."
While the Arts Club offers its own broad-based season on two stages, its fare is generally populist in nature and comprises many musicals. Vancouver does have Bard on the Beach, a summer Shakespearian festival. But the city has no equivalent of Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company, which is dedicated to producing obscure early classics, or of Niagara-on-the-Lake's Shaw Festival.
The Playhouse is Vancouver's only large, year-round, non-profit company. If it doesn't offer serious classical works, who will?
"That's a very good question," Leyshon replied. It won't be her. In future, she explained, the Playhouse will only present modern translations of the classics. As evidence, she pointed to next season's main-stage lineup, which includes Charlotte Jones's Humble Boy, a comedic British retelling of Hamlet. In association with Theatre la Seizieme, Vancouver's French-language professional company, the Playhouse has also commissioned, for some time down the road, a new version of The Tempest from the distinguished Canadian playwright John Murrell.
Although the Playhouse's new mandate shouldn't harm its subscription base -- Vancouver audiences tend to stay away in droves from all theatre, period -- Leyshon insisted she's not just bowling for box-office dollars. "The cultural diversity of our audience is something we're really looking at," she said, explaining how she would like to some day remount a longer main-stage run of Asylum of the Universe, a co-production with NeWorld, a multicultural theatre company.
As part of its new mandate, the Playhouse plans to continue its leadership role in helping independent companies and artists develop new Canadian works. There are, however, no new national or local works premiering on the company's main stage next year. The glaring omission, Leyshon said, only happened because a new work by Vancouver's Kathleen Oliver wasn't quite ready.
Leyshon pointed to other areas, including stellar Canadian casting, where the new mandate will help the company shine. Next Februrary, for example, Brent Carver returns to his native Vancouver to star in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. "It's hugely significant that Brent is coming back to work on this project," she said. "Working with people like Brent -- the very best actors in our community -- that really is the hallmark of our aspirations."
CORRECTION
The Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company's main stage season runs from October to April. The Edmonton Citadel is the largest regional theatre in Western Canada. Incorrect information appeared in the Globe Review on March 20.
Alexandra Gill