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The British Canadian Theatrical Organization Society and The TransCanada Theatre Society PATRICKB. O'NEILL The story is told of an aged Sir William Mulock searching frantically for a ticket in a train club car. The conductor reassured him, "Dont't worry' Sir William, I'm sure the CNR won't mind if you mail in the ticket when you find it." Sir William replied, "My dear fellow, it's not that simple. The problem is not where the ticket is. The problem is - where am I going?'' I Anyone investigating the development of theatre in Canada during the twentieth century can sympathize with Mulock. British and Ameri- .can as well as Canadian influences affected this development, but the precise nature of the influences is little documented. Neither the Ball and Plant nor Sedgewick bibliography of Canadian theatre includes any reference to the British Canadian Theatrical Organization Society of 1912 or to its successor, the Trans-Canada Theatre Society of 1919. Since both compan~es were established for the purpose of exploiting the theat~ rical market in Canada, their activities should suggest a possible route the development may have followed. In 1914, J.E. Middleton, Toronto's civic historian and sometime drama critic for the Toronto News, noted: "There is no Canadian Drama. It is merely a branch of the American Theatre, and let it be said, a most profitable one."2 Mindful of the glory of Empire, the British Canadian Theatrical Organization Society and the Trans-Canada Theatre Organization. both attempted to change this situation in Canada and to restore a British-American balance in the Dominion. What they hoped to achieve was not the creation of a Canadian Drama (although 56 both organizations cited this as one of their implicit aims), but the establishment of Canada as a profitable extention of the provincial English theatre. An examination of the professional theatre in Canada, primarily between 1910 and 1930, reveals the conditions which fostered the formation of these two syndicates and brought about their inevitable failure. By the end of the nineteenth century, large profits could already be made in Canada by travelling companies. Sir Henry Irving toured Canada six times, and one of these tours netted his company $200,000, a fortune in the late nineteenth century.3 But inevitable progress towards increasing efficiency was taking place in the theatre as in other business areas. The actormanager who had dominated the theatre in the late nineteenth century was superseded by business men whose interests were commercial more than artistic. After its formation in 1896, the Theatrical Syndicate, consisting of booking agencies headed by Abraham L. Erlanger and Marc Klaw, Al Hayman and Charles Frohman, and Sam F. Nixon and Fred Zimmerman, steadily assumed control of American and Canadian theatres.4 By 1905, they had acquired a virtual monopoly. I.f English actor-managers wished to tour Canada, the arrangements would have to be made in New York. Enlarging on a format originally devised for vaudeville by M.B. Leavitt, the Syndicate had developed a general booking exchange through which both theatre managers and producers could book a completely integrated season through one office. They eliminated the chaos which characterized bookings in the late nineteenth century, but both managers and producers were to pay dearly for the harmony. Between August 1896 and June 1903, the Syndicate increased the number of theatres in important cities under its direct control from thirty-seven to seventy. More important to the success of the Syndicate than these theatres were the hundreds of one-night stands on the routes between the major centres provided by Syndicate bookings, since companies needed such intermediate stops to reduce the prohibitive costs of Revue d,etudes canadiennes Vol. 15, No. l (Printemps 1980 Spring) transferring from one large city to the next on the vast North American continent. According to David Belasco, the Syndicate controlled over 500 theatres in 1904; at the height of its power, it must have booked at least 700 theatres across United States and Canada. In addition to the booking service, the Syndicate produced plays, which competed with those offered by its producer clients, usually to the latter's disadvantage. The Syndicate collected a fee...

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