Garnering rave reviews, the Soulpepper Theatre Company is reviving the classics and adding a new dimension to Toronto’s cultural life

by Robert Cushman

The police officer asked her the usual question: did she know at what speed she had been going? He then asked to see her ownership papers. She explained, still more fearfully, that she didn’t have any – that this was a rental car, a company car.

"And what company would that be?" asked the police officer.

"Soulpepper," she said.

The officer straightened up. One would like to think that he slapped his thigh. "Soulpepper?" he said. "But they’re fantastic. They do Beckett, they do Chekhov...." And he waved her on without a stain on her character.

"Toronto’s finest appreciate Toronto’s finest," chuckled Albert Schultz, Soulpepper’s artistic director and guiding spirit, when he heard the story.

The glory has been earned. Soulpepper began operations, quite spectacularly, in 1998 with a season of two plays at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. One was a fairly familiar classic, Molière’s The Misanthrope. The other – decidedly unfamiliar, at least outside its native Germany – was the 18th-century Don Carlos, a marvellous, but unwieldy, historical drama by Friedrich von Schiller. Both were well received, but it was the Schiller work that really caught the lightning; it was the first to open, and it placed Soulpepper, at one stroke, among the elite theatre organizations in Canada. Both plays were directed by Robin Phillips, whose work at the Stratford Festival of Canada and elsewhere had long established him as the country’s premier classical director. There was a natural tendency among critics to write of Soulpepper as if it were his company. In fact, he had been one of its inspirations but had nothing to do with its founding. The company was the cooperative venture of a dozen mostly youngish actors, and Phillips was their employee. One thing he made clear before accepting the job was that he would not return for the second season. He would start them off, but after that they would have to make it without him.

What the community – defined here as the Toronto theatre audience – seemed to be lacking was regular exposure to high-quality productions of the classics. It also happened to be what the actors themselves were lacking.

The 12 had all begun their careers with classical aspirations. In 1987 and 1988 several of them, including Schultz himself, had been members of the Young Company that Phillips, now a freelance director, had run at Stratford as a training ground for Canada’s next generation of Shakespearean stars. Schultz and Coyne met in this company, playing, of all providential things, Romeo and Juliet. Palk was a member of this group, as were two more of Soulpepper’s future founders, Stuart Hughes and William Webster. They had all contemplated moving into the main Stratford company, but, as things turned out, none of them did (the Young Company itself has been disbanded). Instead, they became successful Toronto-based jobbing actors; Schultz achieved TV stardom in Street Legal. But the experience with Phillips left its mark and bred in them a continuing desire to appear on stage, regularly, in substantial plays, and to do it as a group.

Meanwhile, another group of actors had been undergoing a similar formative experience. From 1984 to 1994, Patricia Hamilton – a redoubtable actress who this year is playing grande dame roles at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. – ran a small Toronto company called Masterclass Theatre, a sort of postgraduate experience for seasoned actors, who performed mainly neglected European classics under international directors. One of the company’s first productions featured another of the future 12, Martha Burns. (She too is married to a prominent actor, though it rather spoils the symmetry that he has nothing to do with Soulpepper; he’s Paul Gross, star of the TV series Due South and this year’s Hamlet at Stratford.) But the Masterclass production that everybody still talks about is Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Coyne was in this; so were Diego Matamoros and Robyn Stevan, and – another name for the list – Michael Hanrahan. The director was the Hungarian who was to be Soulpepper’s second guru: the man with the hired car, László Marton.

Those keeping score may have noted that we are still two apostles short of a dozen. The pair remaining are Diana Leblanc, who is also now highly regarded as a director (in recent years she has been responsible at Stratford for a superlative production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, a very fine version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and a controversial – read, much-vilified – Macbeth), and Ted Dykstra, one of the two creator-performers of Two Pianos, Four Hands, a show that has kept him so busy that up to this year he was the one Soulpepper founding member never to have acted or directed for the company.

The first season’s budget was $700,000. It was raised bit by bit. Most of the founding members invested some of their own savings, and there were small grants from a few organizations, including the Ontario and Toronto arts councils ($13,500 between the two of them). Personal appeals from the actors to acquaintances raised $120,000. And when Harbourfront’s manager of performing arts, Don Shipley, learned of the involvement of the legendary Robin Phillips, he made the du Maurier Theatre Centre available. The Habourfront connection has remained, and this year’s Soulpepper production of The Mill on the Floss (based on the George Eliot novel of the same name) first appeared as part of the biennial world stage festival at Harbourfront, for which Shipley served as artistic director.

Schultz likes to point out that he failed math at school; he’s managed, however, to emerge as a whiz at economics. Soulpepper’s first season was budgeted to break even with a 34-percent-of-capacity audience – a modest goal, on the face of it, especially in the small du Maurier theatre. In fact, the company ended up playing to a crowd that represented 75 percent of capacity; members may have secretly suspected that Soulpepper would be an artistic success, but didn’t anticipate making money as well. They had received astounding – and astounded – reviews from the critics. Don Carlos, a play that is generally not attempted even by the big classical companies in Britain, was a production of such rigour, passion and concentration that it took your breath away. The Misanthrope was less of a triumph: jokey and updated, with an imposed cynical ending, it felt a little as if Phillips had directed it with his left hand, spending his main energies on Don Carlos. But the two shows made a formidable duo. They also made civic history; not only was a Toronto company performing the classics, it was performing in the summer. This was heresy; theatre in Toronto tends to close down in the summer, apart from the odd touring musical or open-air Shakespeare production. If you want to see anything substantial, you have to become a tourist and visit Stratford or Niagara-on-the-Lake. To emerge from the theatre and find yourself down by the lake on a warm evening with a good show under your belt was to feel that part of the city’s hidden potential had been realized. Suddenly, the place seemed more civilized.

Harbourfront remains Soulpepper’s artistic home, but the company has also begun to branch out. It began its second year, 1999, under the banner of Ed and David Mirvish at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, another play whose reputation far exceeds its visibility. (This, amazingly, was its first professional production in Toronto.) The play inaugurated a season that the company loosely called "20th-century classics." It included another American play, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and Endgame, the work of the naturalized French playwright Samuel Beckett. There was also The Play’s the Thing by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, and – making the 20th-century part of the label really loose – Chekhov’s first play, an unwieldy and untitled tragicomedy only discovered after his death and now named Platonov after its central character.

Both these last plays were directed – and, in fact, suggested to the company – by László Marton, who was to prove an inspiration equal to Phillips. Daniel Brooks, from Toronto’s alternative theatre scene, staged Endgame, while – a new and significant step in the company's development – the two remaining plays were directed by members of Soulpepper’s core acting team: Joseph Ziegler was responsible for Our Town and Diana Leblanc for Streetcar.

The second season was, if anything, more successful than the first. All five of the productions went down well with the public and critics, and two in particular received almost unanimous acclaim: Endgame, which was tight and classically controlled, and Platonov, which was contrastingly romantic and loose-limbed. The latter’s text, which would play uncut for seven hours, had been trimmed and reshaped by the director and Coyne, but it still overflowed with life; it was Chekhov uncorseted.

The season, even more than the first, was an actors’ triumph; Schultz, Palk, Coyne, Stevan and Hughes all excelled. But the actor who overtopped them all was Diego Matamoros. Appearing in four of the five plays, he ended up with two separate Dora Award nominations for best male performance of the year – running against himself, so to speak. He began the season with a role in Our Town, played the lead in The Play’s the Thing and the colead in Endgame, and did a juicy supporting turn in Platonov (his role in Endgame captured the Dora). One reviewer (this one) wondered in print whether Matamoros might not be the best actor in Canada. (Note the negative slipped in there; critics are cautious.) Long known as an actor’s actor, Matamoros burst through as an unendingly versatile player with extraordinary powers of relaxation and indelible sharpness of outline. "Casting Diego in all those roles was entirely planned," says Schultz, whose own appearances were confined to the lead in Platonov and an Our Town cameo. "We wanted him to be recognized as a major actor." Matamoros says that he found the experience thrilling – and would never do it again.

Administratively, Soulpepper has never been a 12-person cooperative. That may once have been the dream, but in practice it was unwieldy, and some members of the group were always off doing other things, and anyway, Schultz soon emerged as the driving force. He’s the one who’s usually in the office. During 1999 he was billed as artistic director, with Leblanc, Matamoros and Palk listed immediately beneath him as coartistic directors. Now there has been a further reshuffle: Schultz still in charge, Matamoros as deputy. In addition, Schultz is billed as coproducer, the other coproducer being an experienced, though still young, theatre administrator, Diane Quinn.

Artistically, the company has reached out far beyond its original membership. Despite all that intermarriage, and despite a few suspicious mutterings from the theatre profession at large, Soulpepper does not function as an incestuous group, sharing the juiciest roles in the world repertoire exclusively among its own members. Their regular enlistment of Phillips, Marton and Brooks confirms that, unlike some other actor-centred companies, Soulpepper’s members are not afraid to hire strong outside directors with individual styles and visions. They also hire strong outside actors; in fact, they have employed the best in Canada. Brent Carver, well known for his Tony Award-winning role on Broadway in Kiss of the Spiderwoman, and this year as a wonderful Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof at Stratford, played the title role (a sort of twisted Hamlet) in Don Carlos, while the veteran actor Peter Donat was nominated for a Dora for his superlative performance as Philip II of Spain in the same play. (Palk was also nominated for her role, Elizabeth of Valois, in Don Carlos, as was Michael Simpson for his role as the Grand Inquisitor.) "We got respect," says Schultz diplomatically, "from the day we opened, but there’d been some snickering before that."

The 1999 season brought more fine guest performances – Peter Donaldson in Our Town and Fiona Reid and Kristen Thomson in Streetcar, for example. Reid says that the Soulpepper support system – especially her fellow actors Palk and Coyne, who weren’t even in the production – made playing Blanche DuBois particularly rewarding.

The two extremes in terms of casting have perhaps been Platonov, cast almost entirely from the company core and suggested by Marton as a play about middle-aged idealists at the crossroads, very much like the actors themselves, and The Mill on the Floss, in which only two of the actors had any previous Soulpepper credits. The major development of the 2000 season has been the launching of a fully fledged young company, like the one at Stratford that formed and inspired Schultz and the others a dozen years ago. The young company is performing Twelfth Night, which is an integral part of the company’s season. Some of the young company actors, all of whom are in their twenties, have already had extensive professional experience; a couple have just emerged from theatre school. Obviously they aren’t playing all the parts in the play themselves; more seasoned actors will play the "mature" roles.

Schultz thinks the finest of the four King Lears played during his career by the great William Hutt is the one he played as a guest artist with the Stratford Young Company (Schultz himself was Edgar), and he hopes for similar results from this new combination of young and seasoned actors. He also hopes that these young actors will be the Soulpepper of tomorrow.

The training of young actors (and directors) is something that Soulpepper has taken very seriously since its inception; there have been master classes and training company productions (unadvertised but open to the public). Matamoros, a natural teacher, is head of training.

Martha Burns is head of youth outreach, a program that demonstrates an equal commitment to the training of young audiences; though, refreshingly, the aim has been to encourage children to come with their families rather than with their schools. Soulpepper has, piquantly, the "Bring your parents to the theatre" scheme – a $25 student ticket lets in both a student and a parent. But, Schultz stresses, "the kid has to make the call." There is also the VIP Youth Come Free program, which provides free access to Soulpepper productions for young people who otherwise would not have the opportunity to see a play. The company works with several youth organizations in the city. The kids come in groups and are introduced to the play by a peer and accompanied to the performance by a member of the arts community, who answers any questions they might have. "Soulpepper has made a firm commitment to the audiences of the future with its innovative programs that introduce young people to classical theatre," says Barbara Hejduk, president of the Imperial Oil Charitable Foundation, which this year contributed $10,000 to support the VIP Youth Come Free program. "The program we’re supporting is more than just giving kids a free ticket to a show. It’s a rich, meaningful educational experience and fits right in with this company’s emphasis on young people and education."

It seems not impossible that Soulpepper might one day have its own full-time conservatory. It has also been suggested that it would be logical for the company to have its own theatre eventually, rather than nest in other people’s. Schultz and Matamoros have both expressed enthusiasm for this idea, which would change the company from a seasonal guerrilla to a permanent part of the Toronto theatre landscape.

Whatever happens, no one could accuse Soulpepper of lacking energy, on or off the stage. It has given us plays that Toronto does not usually see, done with a verve and humanity we rarely experience. Perhaps it is, indeed, Toronto’s finest.

Photography by Corey Mihailiuk and courtesy of Soulpepper