Q&A: An artistic director on 40 years of French theatre in Vancouver

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When the nominations for the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards were announced earlier this spring, félicitations were in order for Théâtre la Seizième. Vancouver's professional French-language theatre company received 16 nominations – eight in the large-theatre category for À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou; and eight in the category of theatre for young audiences for Selfie. (It's quite an achievement when you consider that Vancouver's largest theatre company, the Arts Club, received 19 nominations).

So whatever happens when the winners are announced on Monday night, it has been a remarkable year for the company, which also marked its 40th season in 2014-15.

Craig Holzschuh, the company's artistic and managing director, is among the nominees. He is up for best director for À toi, pour toujours (which is also nominated for outstanding production).

We reached Mr. Holzschuh, a Franco-Ontarian originally from Sudbury, on holiday in Europe earlier this week.

How did a French theatre company get started in Vancouver?

The name of the company is Théâtre la Seizième, so it means the 16th. There was an amateur company before, but in 1974, a few years after that amateur company had folded, 15 women decided they wanted to produce Les Belles-soeurs by Michel Tremblay. They were looking for someone to direct, and when they found that, he became the 16th.

Where do you find your audiences?

British Columbia actually has the third-highest rate of francophones outside of Quebec – so it's Ontario, New Brunswick, British Columbia. So there are a lot of people – a wave of people learning it at school, a wave of Québécois immigrants. In British Columbia, there's about 310,000 people who speak French as either a first language or understand French. And Seizième has also done a lot of work with surtitles to encourage non-French-speaking people to come.

You get audiences that do not speak French?

It's tough to 100 per cent calculate because of the online sales, but our guess is anything between 10 to 20 per cent are non-French speaking people, who are using the surtitles exclusively.

And what about cast and crew? Is it difficult to source French-speaking talent?

There's some spectacular [French]-speaking actors in Vancouver. Studio 58 has been a pretty good draw for francophone students; there's been some UBC grads, some [National Theatre School] grads who have moved to Vancouver. As for crew – they can be bilingual; can be English only. [Jessie-nominated designer] Drew Facey is unilingual anglophone, but as long as he has the script in English, he's able to do his magic for us.

This is an extraordinary year for Théâtre la Seizième for Jessie nominations. What was the reaction when you found out?

There was kind of the great joke of getting 16 nominations for Théâtre la Seizième; we really quite enjoyed that. It's our 40th anniversary, so the joke was we were aiming for 40 nominations, but we were happy to stop at 16. We've always been extremely proud and thankful to work with the artists we work with, and we've never had any doubts about their qualities. And I think the community has continued to open its arms to us. I think, 20, 25 years ago, we had kind of allowed ourselves to be on the edges of the community; we've done a lot of work to be a whole part of Vancouver's theatre scene.

Has the French aspect of the company limited the kind of productions you have been able to put on?

I've been with the company since 1999, and what I've loved about the company is its mandate – and that's to produce theatre in French. I've got a wide, wide berth to make selections. We do Tremblay, Molière, we can do [Robert] Lepage. There's so much leeway that I think actually the francophone aspect is quite liberating. I can see a show and as long as there's a French language aspect to it, I don't have to really concern myself: is it 20th century Canadian, is it Shakespeare, is it this, is it that? Where other companies have a little bit more restrictiveness in their mandate, I have this huge playing field.

I'd like to ask you about these two productions that have received all these nominations, beginning with the Tremblay play À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou.

What we liked about it was that the first production we did at Seizième was by Tremblay. And this being our 40th anniversary, we were looking for something that we could kind of echo. Professional theatre being what it was, doing Les Belles-soeurs with 15 women was not going to fly, so we've been looking at À toi pour toujours for a long time, and I said, here it is, this is where it goes. We were sold out 12 performances. It's the highest number of people we've ever drawn to Studio 16.

Selfie was written by local playwright/actor Christine Quintana. Did she write it in English?

Yes. I directed Christine at UBC, and I always thought she was a really exceptional artist, so I said, we want to commission you for a show for teenagers. She took two years to come up with Selfie, we had it translated and the production toured [to schools] throughout the province.

What would you say to an anglophone theatre-goer like myself who has assumed I couldn't go to your shows because my French isn't good enough?

I think two things: The work you're going to see at Seizième is work you can't see elsewhere in town. And I think it's strange that people don't hesitate to go see a show in German or Italian or whatever at the PuSh Festival, yet there is still this reticence about, 'Oh, my French isn't good enough to go [to Seizième].' Well, I don't think that can be an excuse any more. The surtitles are there, all the publicity exists in English and I think that people have shown that they [can] experience things in a language that might not be their own and gain something very valuable from it. I think PuSh has taught us that; I think opera taught us that for hundreds of years.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

The Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards will be presented on Monday night in at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver.