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Adrian Waller: 'A Man For All Seasons'
Sprinkled throughout Dr. Adrian Waller’s long and busy career as a journalist and author are numerous appearances as an actor and opera and concert tenor, and assignments as a stage director. Despite having studied acting, and playing roles in London’s West End and on BBC television as a juvenile back in the 1950s, Waller always maintained he was “a poor actor who had more audacity than talent.” This was not, however, true of his work as a journeyman opera tenor in both England and Canada throughout the 1960s and 1970s — and certainly not of his success as a blazing young stage director who helped upgrade theatre in many corners of his adopted country.
Far from it. Following his directorial debut, with the Keith Waterhouse-Willis Hall play Billy Liar in Scarborough, Ontario, in 1964, Adrian Waller was in constant demand to stage both plays and musicals. After singing in Rigoletto, La Boheme and Turandot with the Canadian Opera in its1965 season, and while working as a Globe & Mail theatre critic, he was contracted by the Arts Council of Canada to help amateur groups throughout Ontario, Manitoba, and Canada’s Maritime Provinces upgrade their work.
A slew of some 40 productions — plays by Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, N.F. Simpson, and Neil Simon, for example — culminated with successes at the Dominion Drama Festival, known as the DDF. For three straight years, in fact (1966, 1967, and 1968) Adrian Waller took an amateur group to the Festival’s finals, picking up many awards for his actors and designers, and three best-director awards for himself.
The plays he directed at the festival were Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace, one of his favourites, John Williams’ Can You Hear Niagara Falls?, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Waller's production of this searing drama was widely acclaimed, and in 1969 he was invited to stage it in the Stratford Festival Theater, Stratford, Ontario, with the same cast he had used at the DDF!
At one point in the late 1960s, Adrian Waller was directing three shows simultaneously, in three widely situated Ontario centres, and still wonders how he ever did it — George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion in Toronto, N.F. Simpson’s A Resounding Tinkle in Woodstock, and the Richard Rodgers musical The Sound of Music in St. Catharine’s.
Then followed three productions of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (in Hamilton, London, and Saint John, New Brunswick), numerous theatre workshops, and a handful of Neil Simon comedies that yielded him more best-director awards—Barefoot in the Park in Kitchener-Waterloo, The Odd Couple in Burlington, and Plaza Suite in Montreal, where he completed the first of his 16 books. This was Theatre on a Shoestring, in which Waller sought to show how to produce a theatrical production with little money,
As his writing career, journalistic travels, and academic pursuits demanded more and more of his time, Dr.Waller turned to what he called “the less arduous task of acting.” Poor actor or not, he appeared in character roles at Montreal’s Saidye Bronfman Theatre, Thęatre La Poudričre, and Centaur Theatre, and on CBC radio in both Toronto and Halifax, Nova Scotia. At one point he took part in a play for Radio Canada, in French.
Today, he reflects on theatre work that earned him many friends and won him much critical acclaim. Stuart Brown of The Hamilton Spectator called Adrian Waller "a one-man cultural explosion,” and The Globe & Mail’s Herbert Whittaker said he was as good a stage director as he had seen anywhere, and “one who, as an intellectual, never suffered theatrical fools or poor playwrights gladly.”
Not only that, Whittaker added, Adrian Waller, "a man for all seasons," was shrewd enough — even during days when he needed the money from stage direction badly — only to tackle those plays he liked and completely understood, and could cast intelligently within the scope of the resources available to him.
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