Background
In 1958, when Davies undertook to record his theatre-going experiences in a separate set of diaries, he began by summarizing as much as he could remember of the plays he had seen to that date, beginning in 1917, when he was four years old. Thereafter, except for a hiatus covering the years from 1971 to 1973, during which he was plagued with writers’ cramp, he meticulously recorded and commented on every performance he witnessed, both at home and on his trips abroad or to the United States. These were mainly plays, but included as well operas, which he attended regularly, musicals, ballet and any other theatrical events that sparked his interest, such as revues, puppet theatre, circuses, magic shows, solo shows by headline performers and the like. His theatre diaries are thus valuable both for their broad timespan and for the wide range of theatrical performance they include.
Davies’s childhood and adolescent passion for the theatre blossomed during his years as a young man in England, with his experiences as a member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society and his subsequent brief professional career as a member of the Old Vic Company. These two avenues led to contacts with many who would become the foremost actors and directors of the British theatre in their generation. Most notable among these was the director Tyrone Guthrie, whose path crossed Davies’s repeatedly in the years to come. Even more important, at the Old Vic he met Brenda Newbold, who would become his wife and share his life-long interest in theatre. Once returned to Canada, Davies turned into a prolific playwright, his aspirations in that field always slightly greater than his reputation, and played a seminal role in the creation and development of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival as a founding member of its Board of Directors and personal friend of its first Artistic Director, Tyrone Guthrie. At every turn in the Theatre Diaries, these experiences in the professional theatre enliven his observations as a spectator.
Structure and Organization
The Theatre Diaries comprise three bound volumes in Davies’s own hand. The first, a blue leather-bound, “Portland” Account Book, opens with twenty pages of general observations about playgoing that attempt to reconstruct a record of plays he had himself seen, from childhood experiences in 1917 to the time at which he begins the volume. Parts of it are amended with much later dates, as Davies updated his original lists. An entry in the Personal Diary for February 18, 1958, confirms that Davies was still developing his list of Shakespeare plays on that date. A regular entry in the Theatre Diary, dated September 20, 1958, concludes the volume. 1958 is therefore taken as the identifying date for the volume in this edition. By the twentieth page, Davies has moved forward to 1960, where he begins an extended description, written contemporaneously with the events themselves, of his experiences in trying to bring his novel, Leaven of Malice, to the stage in a dramatized version eventually titled Love and Libel. This account occupies the next sixty-two pages of the diary, to Thursday, December 8, 1960, the day after opening night on Broadway. On this date, it was decided to close Love and Libel on the following Saturday (December 10). Two summing-up entries follow, dated January 1, 1961 and June 5, 1961. A much later postscript, dated November 26, 1962, is inserted in the unused portion of the page immediately after the June 5 entry. On the next page, the volume reverts to regular, dated entries, beginning on June 2, 1961.
This first volume, however, contains one more departure from the regular chronological sequencing of diary entries. Following the entry for May 14, 1964, Davies arbitrarily inserts four pages headed “Some Notes from a Schoolboy Diary”, covering the period 1928 to the spring of 1932, the years during which he attended Upper Canada College in Toronto. These notes in the Theatre Diaries are the only known record of this lost “Schoolboy Diary”, and indicate that Davies had made at least one attempt at keeping a diary even before the material presented in this edition. Regular diary entries resume on May 24, 1964, and continue without any further interruptions of chronology to the last entry in the volume, June 12, 1968.
The second, a red, leather-bound volume headed, in Davies’s hand, “Theatre Notes: a second volume”, begins in 1968, on or about August 26, 1968, with the first of the regularly dated entries on August 27, 1968. These continue in chronological order, but at irregular intervals, to August 6, 1970. This entry is followed immediately by the entry for September 25, 1974, still in Davies’s own hand, which opens: “Decide to revive this book, discontinued when I had trouble with writers’ cramp.” The handwritten entries then continue, in chronological order, to January of 1975, at which point Davies seems to have problems following the calendar. The entry for Tuesday, January 28, 1975, is followed immediately, and without comment, by the entry for the preceding Thursday, January 23. This entry is followed by the entry for Wednesday, March 19, 1975, but Davies has subsequently gone back and inserted between January 23 and March 19, in square brackets, and in red ink instead of black, the notation: “[February 25: Question Time opens at St. Lawrence: comment in College Diary.]” The entry immediately following March 19 is headed March 30, which is then crossed out by Davies and changed to April 1. Thereafter, regular chronological order of entries resumes. These inconsistencies in dating can be explained by the fact that Davies sometimes updated his diaries at irregular intervals, covering large blocks of time, and could thus confuse and later have to correct the chronological order of events. From April 1, 1975 to the entry for December 21, 1983, with which this volume concludes, volume two proceeds in orderly, uninterrupted fashion.
The third, a simpler black hardbound volume, has a plate glued to the cover which states, in Davies’s hand: “Theatre Notes: Vol. III”. On an inside page, again in Davies’s hand, is the heading: “Theatre Notes vol. III. Robertson Davies Windhover: Caledon”. This volume opens with the following disclaimer:
I see that I have fully prepared and labelled this volume upside down, but cannot change now. And why this book, so much less impressive than the two that went before? Simply that such books as those, heavily bound and with leather spines and corners, must now be made specially at an extravagant cost. I have not the patience to wait four months. So this simple exercise book it must be and the contents must make up for want of elegance in appearance.Following this note, the volume begins with the entry for January 19, 1984 and proceeds, in chronological order and without interruptions, to its final entry on October 17, 1995, a performance of Janáček’s Jenůfa by the Canadian Opera Company. Robertson Davies died on December 2, 1995.