Early Days -The Road to Theatre

“The  artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.”

Novalis, (May 2, 1772 – March 25, 1801), a poet, author, and philosopher of early German Romanticism. 

Until my mid-teens, I assumed I would follow my father into the Canadian Army. A war veteran with an old-school belief in discipline, honour and service to your country. He believed too, that a Father must provide a role model for his son.  He was always conscious of the figure he was “acting” for his offsprung. I remember him bringing me, a mere six-year-old impressionable lad, to the regimental field day of the Third Battalion of the Canadian Guards at Valcartier, QC. He, the Commanding Officer, with his son at his side, reviewing the soldiers under his command as they competed in the events of the day. Jungian imprinting at work? I was even named “Guy” out of respect to General Guy Simonds, the Commanding Officer of the First Canadian Infantry Devision during the 1943 allied invasion of Sicily during which my father won a Military Cross for his bravery. I once suggested to my father he named me “Guy” as a way to suck up to his “Boss”. Which he denied vehemently. But naming your son after your Commanding Officer was an accepted tradition. (My younger sister’s middle name is “Patricia” after the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry, my father’s first regiment.)

A disproportionate number of Army brats ended up in Canadian theatre. Why? The Sprung family was bumped from Ottawa where I was born, to Germany to Quebec City to Ottawa then Paris and Stockholm and back to Ottawa, all before I was fourteen. Does the lack of a rooted home doom us to a life of identity-searching? My mother infused her German/European culture and sensibility into our family lives. Given this influence, and that my first year of school was in Québec City, and that my Father’s ancestors were Dutch-American Empire Loyalists (Sprungh) who first immigrated to New Carlisle QC after the American Revolution, it is no surprise that Montreal became my creative home base. 

When we moved to Ottawa in 1961, after three years in Europe, it was mid-term, I was ahead in certain subjects, Physics and German, and I was given special permission to take some classes ahead of my age cohort. My mother arranged this at a meeting with the Glebe Principal, who, clearly besotted, gave her anything she asked for. This meant I completed 4 Grade 13 classes while still in Grade 12, and ended up graduating with 16 Ontario Grade 13, Secondary School subject certificates. (Likely a provincial record then and still now. --At the time you needed only 8 to qualify for university.) During high school, as far as I was concerned, Theatre was for sissies.  But Luba Goy, of Royal Canadian Air Farce fame, went to my high school same time as I did. She was very active in the drama club, she is no sissie. I have a distinct memory of Luba performing in Edna St Vincent Millay’s play, Aria da Capo in our school auditorium. Why would I remember that? Something was imprinting?

Dear Patrick

Towards the end of high school, after a brief stint as head of the Army Historical Section, my father retired from the Forces and was preparing for a late-life career-switch to academe by living in India and studying Sanskrit and early Asian Philosophy. Mervyn Sprung had an unusual concordance of will power and drive that enabled him, at the age of 23 to learn enough German in three years to write a Phd in philosophy in Berlin, and then, at the age of 53 to learn Sanskrit and become an internationally recognized translator of early Buddhist texts.

I had joined the Reserves, the Governor General Foot Guards, (the “GGFG’s”) as a summer job, and enjoyed it, but my hankering for a life in the military slowly waned.  I have wrestled with the question of my Father’s influence on my fate in the fictional autobiographical short story, Fathers and Sons; in the 2022 article in the online magazine, Montreal Serai, In the Beginning was the Loghouse; in On Father’s Day a Review of Dad, a column I wrote in 1995 for the Montreal Gazette; and also in the  January 2000 Lives Lived column I wrote for the Globe and Mail.  Having started reading books on the history of ancient Ur, Babylon and Egypt and the exploits of Heinrich Schliemann, I enrolled at McGill (Fall 1965) thinking/dreaming I would end up as the first contemporary Western archeologist to get permission to dig in China.

My McGill professors were so bored with what they were teaching, their boredom infected me. I took what today would be called a “gap year”, hitched around Europe ending up (Fall 1966) in Freiburg, southern West Germany, and enrolled in the university to study German literature. When I saw a poster in the student cafeteria announcing a casting call for actors, not knowing a soul, I plucked up my courage and auditioned in German for the university theatre group. I had barely seen any theatre, (was there any in Canada at the time?), never done any theatre, never even had any interest in theatre. I was merely, so I thought, auditioning to meet fellow students. (Yes, women my age too.) It was an open audition with, as I remember, roughly 40 students vying to act in the next production. We all sat in a small studio theatre and one by one were invited up on the stage to read a poem. After some 39 wanna-be’s had auditioned, a long afternoon, the gentleman organizing the audition asked if there was anyone else in the room who wanted to be heard. Scared shitless, but tapping into an unconscious vein of drama sap I had no idea was in me I, somehow, raised my hand. Handed a book of Brecht poems, I was asked to read Errinerung a die Maria A. (There it is, -my first encounter with Bertolt Brecht. Bizarre/Fate?) Imagine my surprise, a week later, to get a phone call: “The actor we had cast dropped out. Are you interested in being part of our production?” The play was The Automobile Graveyard by Fernando Arrabal, cutting edge (for its time), “Theatre of the Absurd”. Not that I had any idea what that was. Where did I get the idea I could act? -It just never occurred to me that I couldn’t. And yes, I did meet a woman, a fellow actor, the brilliant, highly literate, intimidatingly intelligent, Marianne Markgraff. Where is she today? After a moderately successful run in Freiburg, we were chosen as the West German representative for the 1967 international student drama festival in Zagreb in (then) Yugoslavia. 

Marianne and I drove from Freiburg in her green, beat-up VW bug that, with a dead battery, had to be push-started to get going. Ideally we would try and park overnight on a down hill incline to ease the morning’s start. Made for some fun, late-night post Kneipe (bar) pushing exploits through the main streets of Yugoslavian towns and villages. The plays/productions I saw at that Zagreb festival, performed by university drama groups from all across Europe, were astonishing… I had no idea theatre could be so enthralling. The Sorbonne University’s Rabelais adaptation still features in my memory today, over 50 years later, fresh as this morning’s coffee. The Russians brought the latest in Stalinist Romance: Boy meets Girl, Girl meets Tractor, all three fall in love. Manchester University did a trimmed version of Hamlet with a playground balance-beam as the conceptual central prop. (Imagine: “To be or not to be…” on a balance beam slowly undulating up and down!) The host Yugoslavians did their translation of Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden’s fanciful anti-war play, Ars Longa Vita Brevis. My imagination was ravished. That festival was the bell clapper that set my internal creative overtones resonating. I returned to Montreal and McGill for the Fall of 1967, a theatre hook set deep in my guts.

Above two photos taken early morning of July 1, 1967. This is the Bertholdsbrunnen, the statue in the centre of Freiburg commemorating Duke Berthold, the medieval founder of the city.  Look closely you will see the maple leaf on the lance. The sash draped over the horses snout proclaims the founder of Freiburg to be a member of Canada’s “Centennial Knights of the Round Table”. In the dead of night, as a “canadien errant” student at the university, I carried a ladder through the streets of Freiburg and invested Herr Duke Berthold with his adornments as my contribution to Canada’s 100th birthday. Typical student prank. By midday the police had divested the founder of Freiburg of his Canadian Centennial regalia.