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Interview With Guy Sprung Director Of Balconville
Guy Sprung has worked extensively as a director in Canada and in England. After directing David Fennario's play Nothing to Lose in 1976, he directed the premier production of Balconville which then toured across Canada, as well as to Belfast and London. He spoke with Susannah Schmidt and Sean O'Hara at Theatre 1774 in Montréal where he is currently Artistic Director.
The thing about David is that he was always changing... Literally up until the last preview he was still handing Peter, who was playing the lead role, rewrites until Peter came to me saying, "No more fuckin' rewrites!!" There were some things that actors added in, for example, the lady who played Muriel, she was very good at adding things in the middle of a scene. We'd be rehearsing one scene and then suddenly out of her place, she had the downstairs apartment, we'd hear a crash bang, and it wasn't in the script or anything, but she'd figured out that she was having a fight with her son and so on...and she'd have tossed a boot out the window. All the actors got into their parts so nicely, and it did inform some of the rewrites. In the reviews there was so much delight about the bilingual swearing and jousting back and forth. In the script it's very animated-- did a lot of that come out of rehearsals as well? David doesn't speak French and he wrote it as an English play. At some point very early on when I read it I put the suggestion out for it to be bilingual, but that's not how it was originally conceived. There was a review for the Ottawa Citizen that noted that the ending changed at the production in Ottawa. It was always changing. David always wanted to have the actors turn to the audience in a kind of agit-prop theatre and say, 'So what do we do now?' and the actors and I were always going, David, no, this is a lovely, well-written play... you don't need to do that at the end. Please, no. In the published script he wrote it that way but we never really played it that way. But we were screwing around with each incarnation with the fire in the last scene... it always shifted, in one production it was four pages this way, and then four pages that way. So the ending did change. I read in the Canadian Theatre Review that you guys were unable to play in Vancouver because of a public employees strike. Was the theatre closed, or was it because of David's notorious pro-labour support that you didn't do the show? Geez, you guys did your research. Yeah. (Laughing) I don't remember. Were we supposed to play Vancouver? I think that's confused with Montréal-- there was a strike at Place des Arts, and David did demonstrate on the picket line while his play was going on inside. In solidarity with the ushers? In solidarity with the ushers. Did it drive people crazy? Well.... there was a certain hypocrisy involved. I mean, he's collecting royalties and then he's picketing at the same time, it's kind of having your cake and eating it too. But he was at a loss, he really didn't know what to do. He knew he had to do something about it, he was beside himself... He could have pulled the play, but that would have been untenable to ask a playwright to do that, considering the pittance that they make in royalties in the first place. But he has absolutely stuck by those ideals. Hypocrisy in retrospect is perhaps the wrong word. Really, he was caught. But yes, I think what happened was that we were supposed to play the Vancouver Playhouse and we just never went. The tour was cancelled. After you took the show out west you performed at the Grand Opera House in Belfast for its grand re-opening after having been bombed. There's obvious parallels between the French-Anglo tensions in Quebec and republican and nationalist tensions in Belfast, but did you have to change or translate any of the script to make it accessible? It was the same production. In different places, like in Montréal we counted the number of "fucks" that Johnny had, it was something like seventy five, and then just out of a sense of reaction from the audience, by Winnipeg it had been cut down to fifty one. I think when we went to Belfast, we cut it down even more. But what was amazing was that opening of the Grand Opera, and they had totally redone it, and there was this great energy. And after the show, there was no question that for them it was absolutely relevant, and they stuck around and talked in groups, they talked to us... And they had no problem understanding any of it, even the French because of the interplay. That was one of the richest experiences. Any other favourite moments? When we switched (Balconville) over to Place des Arts from the Centaur,
the audience was largely francophone, and I looked into the audience
and saw all the Montréal Canadians in suits and ties.
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