Partners

Maurice Podbrey, founder and Artistic Director of the Centaur Theatre, met Pam at the time and immediately offered her Trevor Griffiths play, The Comedians, to direct as the final play of his 1976-77 season. He had cast himself as the lead. Less than a week into rehearsal Pam fired Maurice in his own theatre. She didn’t think he could act. She replaced him with Griff Brewer, the props maker at the Centaur at the time. The all-male cast of the play chortled in glee. You won’t find the true facts of the firing in Maurice’s limp, self-serving biography, Half Man, Half Beast.

Pam and I got married in the courthouse in Saskatoon during rehearsals for Paper Wheat. It was a genuine, unique and intense relationship, but the legal signatures were less important to us, less a commitment to a life-long togetherness, and more to ensure Pam had immigration and working status. Our tempestuous interludes started to overwhelm our sublime moments and very soon we parted ways. Pam went on to cut a memorable path through Canadian theatre, doing some great work in Toronto and at Stratford, adored by most of the actors she worked with. She had brought with her a few standard British directorial methods/gimmicks, including always scapegoating, picking on, one actor in the cast to install an atmosphere of a power structure in rehearsals. A British rehearsal tradition, ritual almost, to keep the other actors in line. Pam borrowed the habit, I suspect, unthinkingly, from some of her male British directors whose rehearsals she had witnessed in England. Eventually a few of the more confident Canadian actors, such as Michael Hogan, when working with her, while still adoring her as a director, laid down the law. Before agreeing to be cast in one of her shows, if she once again scapegoated one of the actors, Michael made it clear he would walk. She learned. Did some great work at Stratford, where she got on with the Artistic Director, and fellow working-class Brit, Robin Phillips. This lead her to be named one of the “Gang Of Four” that initially were appointed to run the Stratford Festival after the departure of Robin Phillips. Installing an entirely unworkable four-person Artistic Directorship was, as I saw it, a deliberate ploy on Robin Phillips’ part to ensure chaos would follow in his wake. “Après moi le déluge”, was his game. The Gang of Four, predictably, were fired by the Stratford Board even before their first season, precipitating a huge scandal in the Canadian Arts world. Pam was capable of many things, including, according to Martin Knelman’s account of the 1980 Festival shenanigans that surrounded the succession to Robin Philips, documented in his book A Stratford Tempest, clandestine job negotiations with John Dexter, the Brit director who was to be parachuted in to run the Festival after The Gang Of Four were ousted by the Board. A rather underhand way of undermining solidarity with the other three fired co-artistic directors. But the hiring of yet another Brit, regardless of his merits, was correctly seen as an insult to Canadian theatre and an unnecessary perpetuation of our colonial status. The outcry in the Arts community forced Lloyd Axworthy, then the Immigration Minister in Ottawa to deny Dexter a working visa. The “Tempest” was resolved eventually with the hiring of John Hirsch to run the Festival. Pam was given a severance package after the Stratford firings that, as she proudly would state, allowed her to buy a small cottage in Donegal. She went back to Britain, first to become a lawyer, eventually living and running a theatre in Belfast. Years later, I was in a bar in Glasgow, attending a documentary film festival, and was told a typical Pam Brighton story by a friend of my host, himself a leader of the left-wing Scottish union movement. Pam had been training to become a Barrister on her return to England in 1981 at a respected left-wing Inn in London. Defending members of a West Indian Community who had been accused of murdering a policeman during a race-riot on a housing estate she was interviewing a police Inspector in court and managed to humiliate him and his testimony and cause him to break into tears in the dock. So the story goes. Twenty-four hours later Pam’s flat was raided by the police who ‘found’ a small quantity of marijuana in her home. She was charged with criminal possession, ensuring her career as a barrister was over. True story? Who knows. A typical tale Pam was capable of instigating. She quit law, moved to Belfast, returned to directing and running a theatre. Fifteen years later she came for a visit to Montreal, tangentially hoping to get back together, it was not going to happen. An amazing woman, at times a good friend and colleague. Her faults, unlike those of most of the rest of us, are eminently forgivable.

I’m not sure how life would have turned out if Pam and I had had our child. Perhaps the child knew and simply opted out of the future.

The Guardian Obituary adumbrates the enormity of Pam Brighton.