How Shakespeare's champion brought the Bard to the beach for 37 years

Christopher Gaze's memoir, The Road to Bard: A Legacy of Shakespeare on Canada's West Coast, arrived at a moment when the publication became an occasion for reflection — the opportunity to linger in the past and consider previous accomplishments. But for an artist still in the game, reflection soon gives way to the oldest of all theatre maxims: the show must go on.

Even with the release of his memoir, Gaze is very much still performing and building. Bard on the Beach's 37th edition opens with The Merry Wives of Windsor on June 9 and also includes Macbeth, Goblin: Oedipus, and Antigone.

"I think it will be a helluva season," Gaze says.

While the venerable Bard on the Beach is a local arts institution and Western Canada's largest not-for-profit Shakespeare festival — memorably situated in Sén̓áḵw/Vanier Park with its stunning backdrop of mountains, sea, and sky — it still belongs to one of many creative industries where continued existence is never a sure thing.

Over a Saturday morning coffee, Gaze, the founder and artistic director of the festival, admits that much of his time these days is devoted to acting as the Bard on the Beach ambassador and fundraising. His focus is to "just secure our future" — whether that's a long-term lease in Vanier Park or getting attendance back up to pre-pandemic levels. That will enable the festival, as Gaze says, "to put more actors on our stages and to do special things in our theatres."

Gaze has been doing exactly that in Vancouver and throughout Canada for 51 years since he left his native England. While The Road to Bard is a detailed history of the festival, it is also his grateful chronicle of a dynamic journey from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in England to a life on stages all over Canada, and eventually to his signature gig at Bard on the Beach.

The memoir is warm and engaging, prone to fascinating stories about theatre luminaries and sincere, respectful reminiscence of family, mentors, and colleagues who have clearly meant so much to him.

One such mentor was the great Scottish-Canadian actor Douglas Campbell, who shows up on page 2 of The Road to Bard and remains an enormous influence on Gaze. Campbell, a member of the original Stratford Festival ensemble, auditioned a young Gaze in London in 1973 for a role in The Fantasticks. But it was the advice Campbell soon offered Gaze that made a lasting impact and changed the course of a young actor's life.

As he was on any stage, or in any room or pub for that matter, Gaze says Campbell was a force of nature. "He looked me in the eye and said, 'You are going to do something'. He had tremendous confidence in me and almost put in me a responsibility," Gaze recalls. "So you take the left turn — the road less travelled. Did I mean to do it? I was 23 and I set off on an adventure inspired by a great person I trusted and loved. And things just tumbled along."

That meant tumbles in stages and festivals in Stratford, Toronto, and many other cities, including an outdoor Shakespeare gig in Edmonton's river valley in the late '70s that made an impression. He played roles in As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The audience sat on the ground on blankets and the players performed in a tent open at both ends. Audience members could see the city skyline behind the stage.

Gaze eventually made his way to Vancouver and started Bard on the Beach in the late 1980s. The festival began as a grassroots experiment and grew into an institution that draws thousands of theatregoers every summer. The outdoor setting — the park's natural amphitheatre, the view of water and mountains — became part of the experience, inseparable from the plays themselves.

The book traces the evolution of the festival through decades of productions, the relationships Gaze built with actors, designers, and audiences, and the creative risks the company took along the way. But it's also a love letter to the transformative power of theatre and the people who make it happen.

For Gaze, the work of securing the festival's future is part of the same mission that drew him across the Atlantic as a young man — the belief that theatre matters, that it changes people, that it belongs in public spaces where anyone can experience it.

"I want to see theatre continue to thrive in Vancouver," he says. The memoir is both a testament to what Bard on the Beach has already accomplished and a reminder that the real work is still ahead — making sure there's a season 38, 39, and beyond.

For theatre lovers in the city, Gaze's book offers a backstage pass to how one man's belief in the power of Shakespeare on the beach became a defining cultural institution for the region.