Director Keith Turnbull shook up Canadian theatre and contemporary opera, while remaining passionately devoted to new work as a director, translator, educator and administrator. He believed new Canadian theatre needed to be seen by all Canadians, despite the country’s daunting geography.Pierre-Étienne Bergeron/Supplied
In November of 1973, a new kind of Canadian play came roaring onto the stage of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. Its title was Sticks and Stones, the first part of a trilogy about Ontario’s notorious Donnelly clan, written by poet James Reaney and directed by a 29-year-old magus named Keith Turnbull.
The leading critics of the day were gobsmacked. Urjo Kareda at the Toronto Star called it “just plain overwhelming” and “a landmark evening.” Herbert Whittaker, in The Globe and Mail, declared it an “artistic triumph.”
Sticks and Stones arrived surfing the great wave of new Canadian plays about Canadian subjects that were the raison d’être of the Tarragon and the country’s other “alternate” theatres, founded in a surge of nationalist fervour following the 1967 centennial. Up till then, however, the work often had a decidedly borrowed feel.
“We were heavily into kitchen-sink dramas, looking to American models of how to construct a new play,” veteran dramaturg Bob White recalled. “And Keith and Reaney just blew it all apart.”
As Mr. Kareda enumerated in his review, Mr. Turnbull’s one-of-a-kind production employed a collage of “choric chanting, songs, children’s games, soliloquies, plays-within-plays, indirect narration, mime and even marionettes.” Its unfettered imagination signalled the kind of wildly creative, multidisciplinary approach that would become emblematic of the director himself.
Mr. Turnbull, who died on June 2 in Montreal at the age of 79, would go on to shake things up in contemporary opera as well, while remaining passionately devoted to new work as a director, translator, educator and administrator.
He also believed that new Canadian theatre needed to be seen by all Canadians, despite the country’s daunting geography. After the Toronto premieres of the three Donnelly plays – which included The St. Nicholas Hotel and Handcuffs – he formed a company to tour them from Vancouver to Halifax. Their impact would influence a generation of theatre artists.
“Keith Turnbull changed my life,” said Cree playwright-composer Tomson Highway, who was a young social worker at the time. The Donnellys “were the very first plays I ever saw in a professional theatre. I was smitten. Something inside me told me that I wanted to do the same.”
Mr. Highway would later join NDWT, the company Mr. Turnbull had founded with Mr. Reaney, first to tour the plays and then to produce other works. One of its offshoots was an Indigenous troupe whose young actors included future film star Graham Greene.
Mr. Turnbull would later encourage other artists from under-represented communities in his role as an artistic head of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in the 1990s. In the new millennium, he relocated to Montreal, where he became a translator of Québécois plays and directed and produced new operas internationally.
“He was one of the giants of Canadian theatre, but also one of the true greats of new opera and music theatre,” said his long-time collaborator, Welsh-Canadian composer John Metcalf. “His work was endlessly fascinating and exciting.”
Allan Keith Turnbull was born on Aug. 30, 1944 in Lindsay, Ont., the third of four children of Jean Rebecca (née Fee) and William Doherty Turnbull. He attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), where he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1965. It was there that he met Mr. Reaney, an English professor and a Governor-General’s Award-winning poet with a passion for theatre. He passed it on to Mr. Turnbull, who helped him mount one of his first plays, The Sun and the Moon, as a student production.
The experience launched Mr. Turnbull as a director and his talent was quickly recognized. He apprenticed under John Hirsch and Jean Gascon at the Stratford Festival and spent two seasons staging experimental works on the second stage of Winnipeg’s Manitoba Theatre Centre. He made such an impression at MTC that in 1970, at 26, was appointed artistic director of the company.
Running a big regional theatre was not to his taste, however, and by 1973 he was in Halifax, once again doing new work as artistic director of Neptune Theatre’s second stage. It was there that he began developing The Donnellys. Their sensational debut in Toronto and subsequent 1974 tour provided the momentum for NDWT (Ne’er-Do-Well Thespians), which took shows to towns in Ontario, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. But its name proved prophetic and, facing financial difficulties, the company folded in 1982.
The next chapter in Mr. Turnbull’s career brought him to Alberta, where he spent a four-year stint teaching drama at the University of Calgary. He also began his long association with the Banff Centre, eventually serving as artistic director of its theatre arts division from 1993 to 1999.
It was a sometimes frustrating but ultimately fruitful tenure. Alberta’s Conservative government was slashing public spending at the time and the arts and education were among the victims. When the Banff Centre’s budget-chopping administration put its long-standing but non-revenue-generating playwrights’ colony on the block, Mr. Turnbull saved it by forming a funding partnership with Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects. ATP was producing playRites, an annual festival of new Canadian plays, every winter. Mr. White, who headed the festival, said the deal meant Banff’s spring workshop could also serve as a “boot camp” for those new plays before they ended up onstage.
Mr. Turnbull and Mr. White, who co-directed what was rebranded as the Banff playRites Colony – and is now known as the Banff Playwrights Lab – also used the opportunity to expand the scope of what had historically been something of a closed shop.
“One of the great things about Keith was his foresight,” Mr. White said. “He was one of the first real champions of Indigenous writers and from the get-go he was making sure that they were part of each colony.”
In addition, he organized cultural exchanges with playwrights from Australia, France and other French-speaking countries. “His artistic perspective was always international,” recalled dramaturg Paula Danckert, who helped facilitate them. “He liked to see artists from different cultures working together.”
While at the Banff Centre, Mr. Turnbull started to shift his own creative focus to opera. He established the Contemporary Opera and Song program, commissioned new works and directed a string of world premieres, including Andrew Toovey’s Ubu, which toured to the U.K., Quenten Doolittle’s Boiler Room Suite, Christopher Butterfield’s Zurich 1916 and Kafka’s Chimp by Mr. Metcalf, Mr. Turnbull’s predecessor at Banff.
Mr. Metcalf said that project “changed my whole approach to work.” Mr. Turnbull tossed aside 19th-century orchestral conventions, moving the musicians about the stage like actors and emphasizing the theatricality of their instrumental performances. “It opened up various acoustic and artistic freedoms to the players,” Mr. Metcalf said. “In the field of new opera, it was a big breakthrough.”
They teamed up again in 2005 for the zany comic opera A Chair in Love and once more, in 2014, for Under Milk Wood, Mr. Metcalf’s musical setting of Dylan Thomas’s classic “play for voices.” Mr. Turnbull acted as both dramaturg and director, staging the piece as if it were being performed in a radio studio, complete with Foley effects. The Guardian named it one of the 10 best British opera productions of 2015, while the recording ended up on the in-flight entertainment menu for British Airways.
Despite Banff’s celebrated beauty, Mr. Turnbull admitted he was not a mountain person. When his tenure ended, he moved to Montreal, the kind of cosmopolitan city that catered to his tastes for good food and fine wine, in a province with a greater appreciation of culture. He formed a company, Le Chien qui chante, and produced and directed work, both in Montreal and internationally. One of his first efforts was A Chair in Love, with music by Mr. Metcalf and a libretto, written in English, by Québécois playwright Larry Tremblay. In Mr. Tremblay’s own words, a deliberately “stupid” love story that spoofed classic opera libretti, it involved a fraught romantic triangle between a filmmaker, his dog and a chair. A great success with audiences and critics, it toured the U.K. and Ireland. It also launched an ongoing collaboration in which Mr. Turnbull translated many of Mr. Tremblay’s French plays into English, one of which, The Ventriloquist, was directed by Mr. Turnbull at Toronto’s Factory Theatre in 2006.
“He wasn’t a professional translator in the beginning,” Mr. Tremblay said, but he was a natural. “He had a real sensitivity to the rhythm of the language and choosing the right words in English.” The pair worked together on the translations at Mr. Turnbull’s condo in Montreal’s Village, where, like many others, Mr. Tremblay was impressed by his wide-ranging intellect and his gourmet tastes. Not all of them shared by his guests. Mr. White laughingly recalled that Mr. Turnbull was, among other things, a connoisseur of grappa.
Mr. Turnbull suffered from an undiagnosed neurological disorder, similar to multiple sclerosis, whose first signs appeared while he was still in Banff. It reduced his mobility drastically over the years, eventually forcing him to use a scooter and, in the end, a wheelchair. That didn’t stop him from travelling internationally, directing operas in Sweden and Wales. He also continued to winter every year in Morocco, where he did most of his translation work, until the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the borders. “He had incredible drive and this huge appetite for art and life,” Ms. Danckert said.
In terms of individual work, the trio of Donnelly plays remains his enduring legacy. Most recently, in 2023, it was given a major revival at Ontario’s Blyth Festival, directed by Gil Garratt, who told Mr. Turnbull that he hoped it would do justice to his original vision.
Mr. Turnbull was predeceased by his older brothers, Brian and David, and his beloved younger sister, Suzy, who followed him into the theatre and became an acting coach at the Stratford Festival. When his health declined in recent years, he was cared for by his close friends and former colleagues Ms. Danckert and Christian Bédard. He also leaves his dear friend and caregiver in Morocco, Lahcen Izikki, as well as four nieces and nephews, and four great-nieces and great-nephews.
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