MEMORIAL CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF RONALD BRYDEN

by Ann Saddlemyer

Wednesday 19 Jan 2005 Massey College 5 - 8 pm

One day in 1976 an elegant and courteous gentleman, not yet bearing the rumpled casual rotundity of later decades, appeared in the Drama Centre offices. We had corresponded for over a year in preparation for this meeting, ever since I heard that Ronald Bryden might be ready to move on from his role as celebrated dramaturge to the Royal Shakespeare Company. But this was our first meeting, and he marked it by delivering out of his pocket a small piece of slate from W.B.Yeats’s tower in the west of Ireland. Of course I was charmed – but only later did I realize how typical a gesture that was of the man and the critic: Ron not only did his preliminary research, he invested it with well-tempered humanity and a sensitive awareness of the other person.

He himself has partially explained this in the story of his upbringing: an exile from one colonial society (Trinidad) to another (boarding school and college in Canada) to a Britain in the process of discovering its own outsiderness in a newly minted world of alternative cultures. No wonder E. M. Forster – whom he met in Cambridge and who, he suspected, had eased his way onto London’s literary scene -- was an early and abiding passion.

Now he had returned to Canada, albeit first only as a Visiting Professor – and it is typical of him that once he had made up his mind to stay, he acted upon Kenneth Tynan’s argument that “it is a critic’s duty not only to assess what he sees, but also to complain of what he does not see”. So before settling in, he packed his family into a car and drove across the continent, to see not only what was there, but what was not. This country would once again be his stage.

How fortunate we were! not only the students of the Drama Centre and his alma mater Trinity College, but also the audiences and companies of the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, as well as countless other Boards. For he brought with him a passion for what theatre should be (not, as he once described it, “that eternally middle-aged sleeping beauty, the English theatre”, but “a place where something -- a new experience -- should happen to you” which would provide “sheer stuff - information, gossip, glimpses of other lives instead of our own souls.”) He never let us forget, as he wrote in his introduction to Shaw and His Contemporaries, that “Plays are highly individual transactions between playwrights and their times, whose meaning is created jointly by the text, the text’s theatrical interpreters, and the minds of the audiences who come to see it.” . As critic, teacher and colleague Ron Bryden not only honoured that transaction, he persuaded us to experience it, using an armoury of wit, insight, impressive knowledge of theatrical and social history, sympathy, and confident certainty.

And he knew so much, storing away nuggets of fact from a wide-ranging reading of letters and literature, biography and social history, used later to illuminate an argument with a graceful insouciant aside. He also admired scholarship, but only the kind that never lost sight of the play as theatre. In a few sentences – sometimes only an inimitable phrase dropped sideways into conversation or essay-- we glimpsed his own carefully concealed understanding of text, stage and audience.

One of his secrets, I always felt, was the enthusiasm with which he himself kept learning. I recall an excited e-mail he sent me a year or so ago: “I can't resist,” he wrote, “telling the most delightful intellectual discovery I've made. I'm writing a program note for Jackie Maxwell on The Three Sisters, and decided to build it round Chekhov's remark to Gorky that he had in mind a provincial town like Perm, in the Urals. Set out to discover what I could about Perm, and drew a blank - nothing in the encyclopedias, nothing in any history book, so took my children's advice and turned to the Internet....I now know more about Perm than anyone in Canada not actually born there. It's touching, if you think of it as the Sisters' town, to learn that Diaghilev went to school there in the 1880s, and that during the war valuable artists were moved there from the siege of Leningrad. So Ulanova taught dancing at the local ballet school and Khatchatchurian wrote his 'Gayne' ballet suite there. So Vershinin was right: in a hundred years there would be many people like the Prozorovs!”

As a colleague, too, he was inspirational, not only for the uniquely phrased summation he could provide of a play, a person, situation or event, but also for that excitement of discovery that never left him and he imparted to his students. This was one of the reasons he took up directing, to explore and learn something new from the text in performance. Michael Sidnell recalls the intense excitement with which he explained to Michael the set design of The Tempest, which he was directing next door in the Ignatieff Theatre, with its magic diagram on the stage floor –Ron was clearly and unashamedly prepared to accept the reality of John Dee’s magic. It was under Michael’s direction that Ron ventured on the Hart House stage (perhaps for the only time) in The Changeling; few will forget his resonant Robert Morley-ish voice boldly uttering, “This is hell, nor are we out of it: it circumscribes us here.”

Ron encouraged me to return to the stage too, albeit in a small way. I learned much from playing his Gertrude in Hamlet and Miss Prism in his own four-act adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest with its experimental Noh-like setting. Years later when composing his programme essay for the Shaw Festival’s production of the play he teasingly recalled our Wilde collaboration (and doubtless an early libretto, What, No Crumpets! which he and Keith Macmillan produced while at Trinity): “You’ll be pleased to know that I’m anointing Prism the pivotal character in the plot, as central as the Old Shepherd in Oedipus Rex, and comparing her recognition of the handbag to his recognition of the scars on Oedipus’ ankles”.

For 16 years Ron was central to the growth and development of the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama as teacher and – for an unprecedented two terms – its Director. Standing vulnerable at the helm of that marvellous mélange of students, theatres, wide range of colleagues, and multiple responsibilities is never easy, frequently burdensome. Yet none of us during that time will ever forget what we learned from his interest in and compassion for others, his generosity and willingness to put the student before administrative or personal concerns, his wily manipulation of limited resources (and their administrators), his stylish wit and impressive knowledge. Ron steered an extraordinary number of candidates through to their final PhDs; he was equally, unjudgmentally, sympathetic to others who moved on to non-academic careers, loyal and proud always of their achievements too; he will be remembered by so many as “one of the luminaries that lit up the sky”, “one of the great inspirations of my life”. For me, he remains that wise, dear friend with whom I could escape to our favourite Japanese restaurant when the university world became just too much for both of us, attended plays, discussed our writing projects, and – in more recent years on those treasured drives to and from Niagara-on-the Lake – the great subjects of Life and Society.

He will always be with me, and for that I am profoundly, humbly grateful.