Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Designer makes theatre stages come alive

What: The Marriage of Figaro by Pacific Opera Victoria When: Tonight, Saturday and April 30, 8 p.m. May 4 at 2:30 p.m. Where: Royal Theatre Tickets: $40 to $135 at rtms.bc.ca or 250-386-6121.

What: The Marriage of Figaro by Pacific Opera Victoria

When: Tonight, Saturday and April 30, 8 p.m. May 4 at 2:30 p.m.

Where: Royal Theatre

Tickets: $40 to $135 at rtms.bc.ca or 250-386-6121.

When the television series that designer Cameron Porteous had been working on was cancelled, he found himself with unwelcome extra time.

Toronto’s film industry was experiencing a temporary collapse at the time, coinciding with the SARS outbreak. With 40 resumés distributed, Porteous was playing a waiting game.

“What cliff are you going to jump off?” he said in an interview for the Theatre Museum of Canada. “I had to build, you see, I had to create worlds.”

Porteous filled that creative void by turning to an old pastime: He built a Vancouver Island-inspired model train set.

“When I was much younger, I used to chase the logging trains — watch them, photograph them — I was just fascinated by them,” Porteous, who visited his cousin in Chemainus fairly regularly, told the Times Colonist.

The Comox logging locomotives kept Porteous busy and his modelling skills sharp — he always sculpts his scenes before sketching them out — until work returned.

About a decade later, he’s creating the world of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro for his Pacific Opera Victoria debut. It will be only his second time imagining a world for this story (which picks up the comic plot of The Barber of Seville several years later), despite almost half a century of creating scenes for theatre, opera, film and TV.

The first was for his thesis in art school at England’s Wimbledon School of Fine Arts.

“I don’t think I got very high marks on it because I think they felt my design was a bit too dark,” he said.

This time around, Porteous said he was inspired by photographer Deborah Turbeville’s 1979 shoot at Versailles while it was in a state of disrepair, ahead of renovations. Jackie Onassis commissioned the shoot as an editor at DoubleDay publishers, saying she wanted Turbevilles to conjure the ghosts and memories of the iconic space.

Porteous said it gave the right mix of modern design and history for the scenes in Mozart’s opera.

“I always felt that there was not a Spanish feel to the opera, but more of a French feel. When I hooked up with [director] Brent [Krysa], he said, ‘You’re absolutely right.’ ”

Porteous’s path to becoming one of Canada’s most prolific designers began in an unlikely place. As a child growing up on farmland in Rosetown, Sask., he felt his first inclination to create worlds.

“I had nothing else to do, there were no neighbours or anything around, I only had chickens, pigs, horses or cows. So I used to daydream,” he said.

He didn’t intend to get into the arts until that daydreaming caused him to fail chemistry, knocking him from a loose plan to become a chemical engineer or other scientist.

“My biggest disadvantage, going to school in a one-room school house, was daydreaming too much,” he said.

The path he did take led him to become head of design for the Vancouver Playhouse in 1972 under artistic director Christopher Newton, whom he followed to the Shaw Festival, where he served in the same position from 1980 to 1997.

Porteous began working at a time when Canada was just beginning to recognize the art of “scenography” — in other words, the act of creatively building a world through atmosphere, rather than simply decorating the stage. His contributions to the field were recently recognized in a travelling 40-year retrospective exhibition called Risking the Void — the Work of Cameron Porteous.

Porteous said it was Shawn Breaugh, who co-curated the exhibition with Patricia Flood, who came up with the title.

“I think it’s because I used the words, ‘The stage is a void.’ When you walk into this empty space, you have to bring it alive,” Porteous said.

Usually, it involves some risk.

“Even in this opera, I’ve never done it like this before. I’ve never done anything like this before, and don’t think I didn’t have a few stressful nights wondering if it was going to work.”

While exhibitions celebrating visual artists in Canada are the norm, a show dedicated to a designer or scenographer is much less common. Porteous said that’s a phenomenon unique to our continent.

“It’s not rare anywhere else in the world, but it’s extremely rare in North America,” he said.

The answer to why is very simple, he said.

“A lot of people don’t think that designing for theatre or for opera is an art form. They think it’s a craft,” he said.

“I’ve always maintained that I am an artist who chooses to work in the theatre. That’s my palette, that’s my canvas. And it’s starting to get around that maybe there’s a point there.”

asmart@timescolonist.com