Mavor's torch still burns
December 29, 2006
RICK SALUTIN
Mavor Moore, who died last week at 87, was the sole person I've
known who could confidently leave just his first name on a message.
Moses Znaimer may do it, but there are other Moseses. There
was only one Mavor, literally.
As Jesus (since this is the season) “went about doing
good,” Mavor went about creating Canadian cultural institutions.
I realize he is hardly known among artists below a certain age,
and there have been relatively few tributes, but that's the
nature of our country and our times.
Right after the Second World War, he created a Toronto theatre
troupe, the New Play Society, when there weren't even any theatres.
They performed in the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum.
He was CBC-TV's first producer in the 1950s. He opened the St.
Lawrence Centre for the Arts and the Charlottetown
Festival. He wrote plays, musicals, opera, reviewed plays, taught
university.
He was too old to apply for grants — granting bodies didn't
exist when he began — but young enough to be the first
artist to head the Canada Council. He had a lifelong impish
quality, a twinkle, the retention of the child, that marks a
well-lived life, in the sense of, till the end, truly vital.
That doesn't mean childish. Around artists, he often seemed
like the grown-up. He once played the chief inquisitor in a
TV script I wrote about the secret royal commission that probed
the Gouzenko spy scandal in 1946. He knew that sector of the
Canadian ?lite: cold, smug and condescending.
He testified for me as a character witness when I was on trial
for misbehaviour during a strike. Sitting in the box, cut off
at chest level, he looked like a bust of Socrates, whom he'd
played on TV in Witness to Yesterday. The Crown made the error
of cross-examining him, asking if it was true I'd written a
TV film on how workers are exploited and are entitled to fight
back forcefully. “Yes,” intoned Mavor. “Writers
have been doing that since the Greeks and I doubt they'll stop
any time soon.”
He always circled back to theatre. When he left it for the CBC
in the early '50s, he was scolded by Nathan Cohen, our best
theatre critic. But he returned to start the St. Lawrence Centre
in 1968. He was at the founding meeting of the Canadian playwrights'
union in 1977 and became its first president. It was a grungy
organization that he didn't really need at that point but it
mattered to him.
It's interesting how most obits have omitted that credit. There
is something shabby and not quite respectable about Canadian
theatre, in the sense of writing and producing our own plays.
Other areas in the arts here fare better: publishing, music,
even theatre based on reputable foreign playwrights.
Last week, two days after Mavor's death, I went to see actor-writer
Tony Nardi in an unusual theatre piece called Two Letters. The
part I saw was a furious, literate rant presented as a letter
to two Toronto reviewers who stupidly mauled a commedia dell'arte
classic that had been mangled by its director, leaving the actors
and audience as the lone innocents, and victims.
It went on for two and a half hours with a short break, just
Tony Nardi reading passionately off his computer, rarely even
glancing up. When the text got a bit florid, the performance
held you, and vice versa. Speaking as someone who gets depressed
at merely learning there will be an intermission, I gladly stuck
it out, plus the audience discussion afterward.
About 35 people were there yet it had, and this sounds pompous,
the feel of something important, far more than a movie, concert
or game with many thousands present. I think that's because
people go to such an event not to be entertained but to be engaged
(which can also be entertaining).
Theatre needs its audience as they need it. No play is ever
done before an empty hall, unlike film. It addresses them as
agents, not passive receptors, in the form in which human beings
act historically, i.e. as a group. You never know the effect
of such a thing, because it ripples outward, perhaps forever,
like Mavor Moore's life and work.
“To you from failing hands we throw the torch,”
as it says on the wall of the Montreal Canadiens' dressing room.
Originally published in The Globe and Mail, Rick Salutin's
column usually appears every Friday.
