First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival

Diane Derksen was an editor with the Ontario Ministry of Education and a lecturer in English literature at the University of Toronto.

There have been more than a dozen books written exclusively about the Stratford Festival, beginning with Renown at Stratford (first published in 1953) in which the founding director, Tyrone Guthrie, described his involvement with the Festival from the moment at which he received a telephone call at his home in Ireland, in July 1952, from Tom Patterson of Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Now, almost 35 years later, Tom Patterson himself, the “founder of the festival, “narrates the events that led up to opening night, July 13, 1953.

Patterson begins by introducing us to Stratford, his own roots in the community, and the origins of his youthful idea of a Shakespearian festival — to save a CN town from economic disaster. He then brings us quickly to the 1950s when he began his crusade to realize that dream, and the bulk of the book takes us from those initial forays through the unflagging efforts of devoted enthusiasts between the summer of 1952 and the Festival opening a year later. Patterson repeatedly acknowledges the tremendous contribution of Guthrie during that period, but he is equally generous in his recognition of the heroic parts played by Canadian theatre people and by local residents. Anecdotes involving theatrical personalities and Stratford natives abound as financial crises and thunderstorms threaten to sabotage the dream. The final chapter of the book describes the founding of the Canadian Players, and an epilogue attempts to assess the significance of the Festival to Stratford, to Canada, to theatre, and to Patterson himself.

What stands out in this account is the naiveté of Patterson, who lacked any real background in the world of professional theatre, and the absolute faith he had in his idea. The resentment toward him after the fact is perhaps the flip side of such an ambitious coin. The narrative is, so to speak, an “apologia pro vita sua. “ It is also a small-town story whose vital force becomes the combination of local enthusiasm and the magnanimity of “foreign” professionals — an important chronicle not only in the annals of Canadian theatre history but in the record of Ontario’s social history. But why no index?