The Neptune Story: Twenty-Five Years in the Life of a Leading Canadian Theatre

Terrence Paris is Public Services Librarian at Mount St. Vincent
University in Halifax.

Actors and politicians appreciate the power inherent in words, and those
occasions when language can be used to good effect. The opposing sides
in the futile discussions about a proposed Halifax waterfront arts
complex unsheathed weapons peculiar to their trades. John Neville, the
Neptune Theatre’s director, dismissed Fisher Hudson, the Minister of
Culture, as “so lightweight he looks like he’s walking on the
moon.” Hudson’s cabinet colleague, Edmund Morris, ridiculed Neville
as “a pompous prig with a gold earring,” with a further reference to
“velveteen bloomers,” while Neville’s barb at the “pipsqueak
politician” called attention to Morris’s diminutive stature.

Perkyns is too polite to enliven his prose with the vituperative
rhetoric of wounded egos. His sober, factual account of 25 seasons in
the life of Neptune Theatre’s main stage and second stage emphasizes
the triumphs, as befits an anniversary celebration. Neptune has managed
to survive, if not prosper, within a conservative community, the
exigencies of an 86 percent box office, chronic fiscal malnourishment,
and unusual and inadequate workshop facilities (including rehearsals in
the storage room of a spice warehouse, which to Bruce Blakemore was
“wonderful—like working in a cinnamon roll”).

The complete cast lists provided for each production ensure that
Perkyns’s book will have enduring reference value for anyone
interested in Canada’s regional theatre.

The photographs have been carefully selected to suggest the imagination
required to create sets and costumes for a small stage and a tight
budget. Few who saw it will forget the jute clothing designed by Peter
Blais for John Wood’s 1977 production of King Lear. For a more lively,
waspish, and partisan telling of the Neptune Story, “the good and bad
times, the happy, sad and angry times” (Bernard Behrens), we must
await the memoirs of the principals—Neville, Wood, Leon Major, David
Renton, et al.