BIO

After graduating from McGill with a BA in 1970, Mr Sprung paid his rent as a drama critic for the Montreal Star while also working as a member of IATSE, the stage hands' union. In the Fall of 1970, Mr. Sprung embarked on what he calls his "wandering apprenticeship years” in Europe. After a season in Berlin as an Assistant Director at the Schiller Theater (in German), in 1971, Mr. Sprung traveled to England and spent four formative years founding and running the Half Moon Theatre, a left-wing community theatre in the East End of London. Under his leadership, the converted former synagogue quickly became a highly respected contributor to the London theatre scene. Five decades later, the Half Moon continues to thrive as one of the most important, high-profile, and best-subsidized Theatre In Education/Community Theatres in all of England. His repertoire mixed new work by local writers with innovative productions of the classics. The artistic, critical, and box office success of the Half Moon was extraordinary. His production of Will Wat, a play about Wat Tyler and the 1381 Peasants’ Uprising, which he conceived, helped write, and directed, was hailed by John Mortimer in the London Observer, as “one of the best things in my term as a critic.” The Half Moon was soon listed in the tourist guides as the “hot”, not-to-be-missed alternative theatre. Audience members would arrive at the theatre straight off the supersonic Concorde plane from New York, with copies of the on-board, “What to see and do in London” magazine that listed the Half Moon as the place to see theatre.

(For details on the Half Moon period, see articles, reviews in: Director/Theatre/Half Moon See also the video (https://www.stagesofhalfmoon.org.uk/personnel/guy-sprung/)

A career in British theatre was beckoning, but then, in a London cinema, he saw Mordecai Richler’s film, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The adaption of the iconic Montréal novel made him so homesick he got on a plane and returned to Québec. 

The next six years were spent as a freelance director working out of Montreal. For the Centaur Theatre, he conceived and directed plays like Les Canadiens and The Leonard Cohen Show. He also struck up an important working relationship with playwright David Fennario. Nothing To Lose played at the Centaur (twice) and ran in Toronto and toured Ontario. It was a time when Québec theatre was having a huge impact on theatre in the rest of Canada. Mr. Sprung’s production of Fennario’s, Balconville (1979) remains one of the seminal plays of Québec. It branded the Centaur Theatre as a genuine Montréal establishment. Remounted numerous times, his production toured Canada and then the British Isles. When Guy Lafleur, Larry Robinson, and the entire Montreal Canadiens hockey team attended a Saturday matinée of Balconville at Theatre Maisonneuve in Place des Arts in 1980, Mr. Sprung witnessed his two obsessions, the Habs and theatre, come together. 

During this period, Mr. Sprung was also dramaturging and directing plays, such as the national tour of Paper Wheat, out of Saskatchewan; two world premières of plays by W.O. Mitchell in Calgary; the premieres of Sharon Pollock’s play, Doc, in Calgary; and Ann Chislet’s Quiet in the Land in Blyth, Ontario. The two latter plays both went on to win Governor General Awards for drama.

(For details of this period see: Director/Theatre/ Freelance 1976-82 )

By 1982, his freelance work was receiving such public and critical acclaim that he was head-hunted to run the Toronto Free Theatre. Seven highly creative, exhausting, but extremely successful years followed. Activity and box office at The Free soared. With productions such as Brecht’s In The Jungle of the Cities, Trafford Tanzi, and RH Thompson starring as Hamlet, TFT pretty much set the standard for quality, exciting theatre in Toronto. During this period, true to his fundamental belief that theatre should reach a large popular audience, (“Theatre for the People”) in 1983, Mr. Sprung also founded the outdoor Dream In High Park venue for outdoor Shakespeare. Every summer, to this day, more than 50,000 Torontonians experience high quality, low cost Shakespeare, al fresco. During this period, he also found time to direct award-winning productions at the Stratford Festival, such as Brien Friel’s Translations, and he was named an Associate Director of the Festival. In 1987-88, he was, for one season, also the interim Artistic Director of the Vancouver Playhouse. Overseeing a brief renaissance of the, then, moribund company, and deliberately holding the fort until Larry Lillo, the director he manouvered to take over the company longer term, was available to take the job.

Driven by a belief that Canadian theatre could play an important part in the search for an identity of Canada itself, Mr Sprung devoted huge amounts of his time and organizational skills to founding a national theatre company that would showcase and celebrate the best of our theatre. At one point, through a trade mark agent in Ottawa, the Toronto Free Theatre even took out a patent on the name, “National Theatre Of Canada.” Dragging a lethargic and annoyingly phlegmatic Bill Glassco, at the time the Artistic Director of Centre Stage, with him, together they founded the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto. When it came time to chose a name, the moniker, “National”, by consensus, was deemed too staidly institutional. Mr Sprung decided that the legacy of the English Stage Company, the resident company at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England, was more in line with the creative aspirations of the new company. It was the English Stage Company, developing and producing plays from John Osborne to Caryl Churchill that had revolutionized (and today continue to revolutionize) the theatre of the English-speaking world. It was the English Stage Company/Royal Court Theatre that had brought new voices and new political perspectives to British Theatre. That was the vision Mr Sprung wanted for the new canadian company. So The Canadian Stage Company was chosen as the name of the new theatre. For the first two years, Mr Sprung and Mr Glassco were co-artistic directors, with Mr Sprung taking over sole artistic leadership when Mr Glassco resigned from the company in the Fall of 1989. Mr Sprung opened his first season as Artistic Director of Canadian Stage with the English Stage Company’s touring production of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play, Our Country’s Good. It was a deliberate, conscious challenge, both to himself and to theatre in Canada: Develop our own writers and our own performance style, and we too will invigorate theatre across the country and develop playwrights that will be celebrated around the world, just as the English Stage Company had done.

In line with this vision, in the Spring of 1990, Mr. Sprung announced a season entirely of Canadian plays, the majority of them new works. It was a principled decision intended to cement the mandate of the Canadian Stage. Facilitated by the insidious and underhand complicity of Bill Glassco, the Board of Directors blocked his vision. At a meeting on June 2, 1990, attended by less than 40% of the full membership, the Board of Canadian Stage highjacked the theatre and cancelled Mr Sprung’s publicly announced season, triggering a public scandal that have consequences to this day on the Toronto theatre scene. (For details see the Highjacking.)

One of Mr. Sprung’s lesser-known legacies is his strategic coup in convincing of the City of Toronto to lease the Berkeley Street Campus, one of the most exciting theatre and production venues in the country, in perpetuity for a token rent, to the newly formed Canadian Stage Company. His vision of founding an outdoor amphitheatre in High Park has allowed, as of 2022, well over a million Torontonians to enjoy accessible Shakespeare and, more recently, dance and musical performances at a reasonable price. The shrinking repertoire and lack of clear mandate of the Canadian Stage in the new millennium has left the Dream in High Park venue, 40 years after its founding, as the Canadian Stage’s central contribution to the city.

In 1989, he was invited to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Russian at Moscow’s fabled Pushkin Theatre. The production ran for eleven years in repertory. Hot Ice, his memoir documenting that adventure, is in libraries across Canada. After the June 1990 hijacking of the Canadian Stage by the board of directors, Mr. Sprung returned home to Québec to direct, write, and act, even working as a literary columnist for the Montréal Gazette. He made three major documentaries in both French and English for Radio Canada/CBC/Télé-Québec. During this period, to help pay the rent, Mr Sprung started acting for film and television. Appearing on screen opposite stars like Gene Hackman, William Hurt, John Malkovich, Rhys Ifans, and Sophie Lorain, and on the stage in productions at the Compagnie Jean Duceppe, in French, and, in Daniel Denis’ That Woman and Rahul Varma’s Bhopal in English. 

He also travelled to Winnipeg to direct Oscar-winning American actor William Hurt in Richard III at the (then) Manitoba Theatre Centre, bringing with him a cohort of nine of the best Montréal actors, including la regretée, Marthe Turgeon.
In 1999, he took over Theatre 1774, changed its name to Infinithéâtre, and revamped the mandate to reflect and explore issues of contemporary Montréal by developing, producing, and brokering only the work of Québec writers, occasionally permitting himself to attack significant adaptations of classics deliberately tailored to be relevant to contemporary Québec. This mandate change was Mr. Sprung’s conscious attempt to show that English-language artists can be proud citizens of Québec, participating in the evolution of Québec society and speaking to all Québeckers. One of the early successes of the company was a unique (unauthorized by the Beckett Estate) bilingual Montréal adaptation of Beckett’s Endgame/Fin de partie in the empty, abandoned Darling Factory in Griffintown. The production was chosen to represent Québec and Canada at the 2001 Cairo International Theatre Festival. Other notable Infinithéâtre productions include Trevor Ferguson’s first play, Long, Long, Short, Long (which Mr. Sprung also directed in French, as Le Pont, for La compagnie Jean Duceppe in Place Des Arts), and an adaptation of Yann Martel’s Helsinki Rocammatios. David Sherman’s play The Daily Miracle initiated an important discussion on the decline of the newspaper print industry. The same writer’s Joe Louis placed the issue of racism centre stage and was attended in significant numbers by Montréal’s Black community. Jason Maganhoy’s play GAS was a devastating anti-war drama set in Iraq. Mr. Sprung brokered the script to a japanese theatre company who produced the play, using Infinithéâtre video components, three separate times. Alyson Grant’s play, Trench Patterns was a moving portrayal of a Québec soldier’s post-Afghanistan’s PTSD. the same playwright’s, Progress! played in the vacant former Royal Victoria Hospital, was another huge hit with the public. 

Oren Safdie’s 2014 play Unseamly exposed sexual harassment in the garment industry and was, we understand, after its run Off Broadway, with significant elements of the Infinithéâtre production intact, part of the discussion which led the Board of Directors of American Apparel to fire Dov Charney, the company’s founder and CEO. Recent productions include a contemporary Montréal dramatic interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in conjunction with McGill Department of English, which was deemed “extraordinary”, “powerful”, and “startling” by David Schalkwyk, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Queen Mary University of London.

Infinithéâtre productions created in Montréal have toured around the Island of Montreal, around Québec, Ontario, to the NAC in Ottawa, and even as far as Scotland, New York, Cairo, Tokyo, and Beijing. Plays developed and brokered by Infinithéâtre have also been produced by other theatres, in New York (on two occasions), Toronto, and Tokyo. Infinithéâtre, during Mr. Sprung’s tenure, never had a home venue, but thrived in a variety of “found” spaces, often chosen site-specific to a particular production. Its primary residence, Le Bain St. Michel, was closed for renovations by the Ville de Montréal in 2014, forcing Infini to live a nomadic existence, grateful for the hospitality of venues such as the Rialto Theatre, St James Theatre, Espace Knox, The Royal Vic and Kin Experience. Kafka’s Ape, Sprung’s own adaptation of a Kafka short story, toured the world on and off for four years and was performed over 150 times. Mr. Sprung’s epic play Fight On!, about the 19th-Century European settlers’ occupation of the Prairies, was workshopped in 2018 and 2019 to huge acclaim, and was in rehearsal for a full production in March of 2020 in Montreal’s downtown St Jax performance venue, four days from opening, when the COVID-19 pandemic closed all theatres across the country. Fight On! was printed by InfiniPress in 2021.

For more on the Infinithéâtre days see: Theatre/Director/Infinithéâtre.

Over nearly 50 years of devotion to the art form, Guy Sprung’s commitment to theatre as a unique symbiosis of entertainment and social and political discourse has never wavered. Mr. Sprung has also devoted considerable time and energy attempting to pass his craft and passion on to future generations, working with the Stratford Festival Young Company, the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre School, the Ryerson Theatre School, the National Theatre School, and, in French, at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique. Mr. Sprung has also taught bilingual directing courses at the University of Ottawa. The following is David Fennario’s testament: "...theatre comes first to Guy Sprung, even before his own self interests, because of his love of our chosen art form. It's this commitment to theatre that is the source of Guy's talent as a director, teacher, and producer. It's what makes him special. It's what makes his productions special. He will always serve the artist first."