Creative Director -Song of the Week

Robert Winslow, Founder/Creative Director

As one of Canada’s leading theatre artists, Robert Winslow has written or co-written 17 of the original plays that have been presented environmentally at the 4th Line Theatre since 1992 and has directed several of the productions and performed in many of them. An established theatre artist, he has been involved in theatre for 40 years as Playwright, Actor, Director and/or Artistic Director. Mr. Winslow has performed in theatres across Canada, the U.S. and Britain since 1982, including the Blyth Festival, Edmonton’s Theatre Network, Northern Lights, Citadel Theatre, Catalyst, Nexus Theatre and the Fringe Festival. In 1988, he founded an improvisational theatre company, East City Productions, in Peterborough, Ontario and began directing and writing for the stage. His first full-length play, The Cavan Blazers, was staged as 4th Line Theatre’s first production and later published by Ordinary Press. The production has been mounted six times and continually performs to capacity audiences. Additional writing credits include Gimme That Prime Time Religion, Cavan Casanova, Two Rounds and a Square, Fair Play, The Bell of Batoche, The Orchard, Crow Hill: The Telephone Play, The Winslows of Derryvore, Doctor Barnardo’s Children, The Last Green Hill, Welcome Death, Wounded Soldiers, The History of Drinking in Cavan and Carmel, all for 4th Line.

He is currently working on the fourth in the Barnardo play series, Eleanor: The Housekeeper, with longtime collaborator Ian McLachlan.

What's That Creative Director Up To?

October 2019

What do I write about?

For so many years I have written newsletter articles about the plays I am working on, or about new ideas for productions. Hardly a day goes by that some idea for a play from our past doesn’t enter my consciousness. For over 30 years I have been mining the lives of others who have come before me as inspiration for my creative art. The other day at an event in Millbrook I read some transcripts from interviews I did over 20 years ago with local residents. And I loved every minute of hearing their voices come to life – Grace, Clare, Harry, Hubert, Harold, Lillian, Bob, Marion. And those are just a few names out of hundreds I have interviewed since the 1980s, most of whom have passed.

But this year I’d like to write about something different. As much as I love hearing and telling the stories of area elders and residents, my other great passion is reading. I read historical works often as part of my research and that is key to creating our plays. But my real love is fiction. I end each day with a book on my lap and find time whenever I can – on a lunch break, waiting in a doctor’s office, on a train, or mostly, in my front yard in summer and at my kitchen table in winter - for reading. This year’s books include Michael Crummey’s The Innnocents, Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, Jo Baker’s A Country Road A Tree, Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, Joyce Cary’s The Captive and the Free, the Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, and A.A. Milnes’s Winnie the Pooh. Next up is Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s final novel in his My Struggle series. With all that life throws at one, my hope is that I can find time each day to read, to throw myself into imagined worlds and past eras, breathing in the hopes and fears of these novels’ protagonists. They all become very real to me. I can be in Victorian England, early 20th century Newfoundland, modern-day Norway, France during World War II, Tsarist Russia, early Twentieth Century America or in a land where bears, donkeys and piglets talk. I can smell the air, watch the moon rise, travel the ocean, listen to all sorts of complicated or simple conversations and, most of all, care about a world and people created entirely out of the minds of great writers. It blows my mind that I can walk into a used book store and pay five dollars for a world or a bit more for one in Chapters or Indigo. I truly hope that all those folks carrying iPhones all day and constantly using them are sometimes reading great books on them. I like to think they are anyway.

Sometimes we might feel sorry for someone who is constantly reading, thinking that he or she might be lonely or sad. Quite the contrary. Books are the greatest antidote to loneliness. Where else can you contact and experience such splendor, variety and insight? I love books. I pray that I have some years of reading left. Maybe I better have another go at Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past while I can still remember things past!

Hope to see you all next summer, water bottle in one hand and a novel in the other!!

Rob Winslow

Creative Director/Founder

4th Line Theatre