David French,
OC was a Canadian playwright died from cancer he was , 71.
(January 18, 1939 – December 5, 2010) Early life |
French was born in the tiny Newfoundland outport of Coley’s Point,
[1] the middle child in a family of five boys. His father, Garfield French, was a carpenter, and during World War II worked for the
Eastern Air Command in
Canada. After the war, David’s mother, Edith, came to Ontario with the boys to join their father and the family settled in Toronto among a thriving community of Newfoundlandian immigrants.
French attended Rawlinson Public School, Harbord Collegiate, and Oakwood Collegiate. He was indifferent to books until Grade 8, when his English teacher, to punish him for talking in class, told French to sit down and read a book. The book David happened to pull off the shelf was
Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. French says that by the time he finished reading it, he not only knew that he wanted to be a writer
[1] – he knew that he was one. Almost immediately he began to publish original stories and poems.
After high school, French trained as an actor. He spent a summer at the
Pasadena Playhouse, and studied at various acting studios in Toronto. In the early 1960s, he played roles on stage and in CBC television dramas. Then he began writing for television. Over the next several years he wrote many half-hour dramas, including
The Tender Branch,
A Ring for Florie,
Beckons the Dark River,
Sparrow on a Monday Morning, and
The Willow Harp. He also wrote episodes of the popular children’s program
Razzle Dazzle.
Work for the stage
The Mercer family play cycle
In 1971, he became aware of a new theatre, the
Tarragon in Toronto, that was producing a play called Creeps. After seeing the play, French was so impressed that he called up the director,
Bill Glassco, and asked him to read a play he had been working on,
Leaving Home (1972). Glasco produced the play and it filled the final slot in the Tarragon’s first season. A collaboration between the two men followed which lasted for over thirty years, with Glassco directing each of French’s premiere productions.
Leaving Home is a landmark play in Canadian theatre history. After its very successful run in Toronto in 1972, the play went on to be produced at virtually every regional theatre in the country – the first Canadian play ever to do so. It also received many international productions, including an off-Broadway run.
Leaving Home is taught in high schools and universities across Canada, and is one of the most familiar of Canadian plays. It was named one of the “100 Most Influential Canadian Books” by the
Literary Review of Canada) and one of the “1,000 Essential Plays in the English Language” in the
Oxford Dictionary of Theatre.
[2] Leaving Home introduced audiences to the Mercer family, who would come to figure largely in David’s work. The Mercers, like the Frenches, were a Newfoundland family transplanted to Toronto.
Of The Fields, Lately (1973
[3]), French's sequel to
Leaving Home, also produced at the Tarragon, won the
Chalmers Award for 1973.
[1] “I wrote it because people kept asking me what happened to the Mercers after Ben leaves home,” said French. It was adapted for
CBC television and was produced across Canada and abroad, including a critically acclaimed run in
Argentina (in a Spanish translation) and a production on Broadway.
French eventually wrote five plays about the Mercer family.
Salt-Water Moon (1984), the third play, is a poetic drama about the courtship of the parents, set in Newfoundland in 1926.
Salt-Water Moon has had hundreds of productions since its original run. The French language version, translated by
Antonine Maillet, has been produced across Canada.
Salt-Water Moon won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama, the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play, and the Hollywood Drama-Logue Critics’ Award.
1949 (1988), a fond look at the extended Mercer clan as Newfoundland prepares to join Confederation, premiered at CentreStage. And Soldier’s Heart, which explores the effect of the First World War on two generations of Mercers, was produced at the Tarragon in 2001. Toronto's
Soulpepper Theatre has done acclaimed revivals of
Leaving Home and
Salt-Water Moon, with a
Of The Fields, Lately revival running during the summer of 2010.
[4]
Other work
The immensely popular backstage comedy
Jitters (1979) has been regularly revived in Canada, and enjoyed a six-month run at the
Long Wharf Theatre in
New Haven,
Connecticut. Other works include the memory play
That Summer (1999), which opened the
Blyth Festival’s 25th Anniversary Season; the mystery-thriller
Silver Dagger (1993), a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award;
One Crack Out (1975) a pool-hall drama produced in Toronto and off-Broadway, and the comedy
The Riddle of the World (1981). All of his plays have been published and are in print. (Talonbooks and Anansi).
French also undertook translations of
Miss Julie (
August Strindberg),
The Forest (
Aleksandr Ostrovsky), and of
Anton Chekhov’s
The Seagull, a version of which was produced on Broadway starring
Laura Linney,
Ethan Hawke,
Jon Voight, and
Tyne Daley. French was helped by Russian scholars when preparing the latter two texts.
[1]
As a senior playwright, David mentored many aspiring writers. He was Writer-in-Residence at the
University of Windsor[2] (2007/08) and
The University of Western Ontario (2002/03), and has done a short-term residency at
Trent University in
Peterborough, Ontario. He taught a course in playwriting each summer at the Prince Edward Island (PEI) Conservatory.
[2] He also gave
Canada Council-sponsored readings from coast to coast, and often visited high schools and universities that were studying his plays. French’s work is popular with community theatre groups across North America.
David French was the first inductee in the Newfoundland Arts Hall of Honour. He received the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, and the Harold, (a Toronto theatre peer award). He was named an
Officer of the Order of Canada in 2001.
He died in Toronto on December 5, 2010 from brain cancer.
[5]
Works
- Leaving Home - 1972
- Of the Fields, Lately - 1973
- One Crack Out - 1975
- Jitters - 1979
- Salt-Water Moon - 1985 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)[6]
- 1949 - 1989
- Silver Dagger - 1993
- That Summer - 2000
- Soldier's Heart - 2003
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Serving with the First Australian Army Entertainment Unit during World War II, Hetherington worked as a cartoonist (initially freelance, but full-time from 1946) for The Bulletin magazine until 1961, where he worked alongside such luminaries as Norman Lindsay, Ted Scorfield and Percy Lindsay. During the late 1950s, he pursued his interest in puppetry, which began in 1935 when his father gave him a copy of an American magazine called Popular Science Monthly, which contained instructions for making a puppet out of used bicycle inner tubes.
