How London Little Theatre Changed My Life: 1967-1969
In the fall of 1967, I found myself in a grade 11 class called “Enriched English,” a designation reminiscent of chemically-enhanced bread. The principal of Oakridge Secondary School in London, Ontario had shunted me into the course out of desperation mixed with pity: I had been so mercilessly bullied in the regular program that he needed to find somewhere to park me, like a junkyard jalopy with no warranty. Besides, my father was threatening to sue him if no protective measures were taken to stem the relentless hazing.
So one early September morning, I stumbled into a classroom unlike any other. The teacher, Art Fidler, had a youthful look, as many of our instructors did in that era, when adolescent baby boomers were streaming into the high school like hopped-up minnows, and institutions of higher learning were seeking fresh pedagogical recruits to stem the tide. (Of course, we students always found our teachers to be relative oldsters, or at least of indeterminate age.) This offbeat pedagogue, a Fidler come down from the roof, began his first class by urging us to challenge authority; to venture beyond the established curriculum; and to seek fresh experiences in realms where we had previously feared to tread.
Specifically, he exhorted us to attend unconventional plays and “restricted” movies, even providing tips on how to get past the guardians of morality that controlled access to the city’s fortress cinemas. So it was that in my last years of high school I slithered into local movie theatres to savour “The Graduate,” “A Man and a Woman,” and later “Goodbye Columbus,” all of them rated R (18 and over), even though these works may seem tame and perhaps even wooden to us today.
Art also insisted that we students take out a subscription to London Little Theatre, so as to attend plays that caused scandal and uproar in a homogenous community that in those days girded itself in a tightly buckled chastity belt.
The most striking example of untethered bedlam, which we students witnessed at the behest of Art, occurred during a production of the play Marat/ Sade (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade). The play was – and often still is – tagged as a work of “utter filth and depravity,” but is also considered a masterpiece of innovative theatrical technique in many circles.
At any rate, the explicit exploration of sexuality in the production offended a large number of London Little Theatre subscribers, who began pouring to the exits in droves, looking for all the world like a flood of molten lava, shouting heated imprecations toward the stage and becoming another theatrical dimension of what was already a play within a play about what constitutes “madness.”
Marat/Sade prompts audience walkouts at RSC | Anthony Neilson | The Guardian
Through his paeans of praise for all things theatrical, Art turned me into a thespian for life.
The students in Art’s Enriched English course were a collection of erstwhile misfits. So many of them were witty, rebellious, cynical, and brilliant. No longer did I have to pretend that I was a moderately stupid guy so as to avoid hazing. I was no longer a Clark Kent without a phone booth!
Meanwhile my bellicose dad was fighting a rearguard battle against anyone whom he considered a “snooty egghead” and sneered at what he would ironically call “modern art masterpieces.” My mother, who had intellectual pretensions of her own, made the mistake of dragging him to London Little Theatre for a performance of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, a contemporary play full of anachronisms, including an endless parade of prehistoric creatures. After enduring this thespian ordeal, Dad held forth for days about how idiotic and horrendous the experience had been, complete with remorseless salvos against my mother and her uppity aspirations.
The Skin of Our Teeth — Thornton Wilder
Dad was a Philistine of the first order who made the Biblical Goliath seem like an effete, pointy-headed highbrow.
My father’s opprobrium not withstanding, my experiences with London Little Theatre during those heady days of the late 1960s paved the way to my future in the theatre, as a performer, a director, and a theatre arts teacher.
“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”
Thornton Wilder
This little sketch is based on a couple of earlier works, including the tribute to Art Fidler below:
Art for our sake – Robert McBryde
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
