Early Days -The Road to Theatre?

“The  artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.”

Novalis, (May 2, 1772 – March 25, 1801), a poet, author, and philosopher of early German Romanticism. 

"Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head? How begot, how nourished?” The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 2

Where did my love for theatre come from? How did I end up a theatre director? A total enigma to me. There was no theatre in our family background.  Even now, when I look in the mirror, I don’t see a theatre director. But that is who I am ….

Until my mid-teens, when asked what I wanted to be, I would reply, with confidence, that I intended to follow my father into the Canadian Army. A traditional path, the son taking up his father’s career. I see him clearly in my mind’s eye, bringing me, a mere five-year-old impressionable lad, to the regimental field day of the Canadian Guards at Valcartier, QC. He, the Commanding Officer of the Third Battalion, with his son at his side, standing erect, reviewing the soldiers under his command as they competed in the events of the day. Jungian imprinting at work? Dad was a war veteran with an old-school belief in discipline, honour and service to your country. He also believed, during the first decade of my childhood, that a Father had a responsibility to provide a role-model for his son.  My memory of him, in the early post-war years, is of a man concerned to perform something akin to a 19th Century concept of a father-figure for his ‘offsprung’. The Third Battalion was the bilingual battalion of the newly formed Canadian Guards. Composed primarily of units from the 2nd Battalion of the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry, but had, at the time, (my memory here contradicts the perfunctory historical data in Wikipedia) a company of (francophone) Van Doo’s (The Royal 22nd Regiment) in its formation. Dad, a Winnipeg-born Prairie boy, although he did not speak a work of German, won a scholarship in 1936 to Berlin University, and learned the language so proficiently he was able to write his PhD in Philosophy in 1939. His fluency in German had him, initially, after he signed up, seconded to the British Army Intelligence Corps during the war.  Dad, a good Winnipeg prairie boy, his French rudimentary, his knowledge of Québec and Québec history minuscule, benignly/naively associated Canada’s French-speaking population with the sophistication of European civilization. He was sympathetic, supportive. Always talked positively of “the French boys.” My theory, based on zero evidence, is that the very Brit-orientated higher-ups in the Canadian Army assumed it was more acceptable to have a “bilingual” Commanding Officer of the bilingual battalion even if that officer’s second language was German. In any case, after one year of living in Québec, my first year of school, Dad was replaced by a francophone commanding officer and posted to Ottawa as Adjutant to General Guy Simonds, at the time the Chief of the General Staff, the highest ranking Officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. They must have had a good working relationship, General Simonds had been the Commanding Officer of the First Canadian Infantry Division during the 1943 allied invasion of Sicily. (Father won a Military Cross for bravery in that campaign.) He even named me “Guy” (I was born in 1947) as an homage to his General. A few years later, now I am seven, we are living in Ottawa, I have a clear memory him of defending the choice of my name to dinner party guests, explaining that naming your son after your Commanding Officer was an accepted European military tradition. We lived a modest existence in a modest home, Army wages at the time being limited. I remember my mother angrily remonstrating me one time at supper, when I asked for yet another hot dog, "We are not a three hot dog family.” But, again in a quasi-European tradition, my parents liked to entertain. Dinner parties were frequent. We, the children, that is my older sister Ingrid and I, were introduced to the guests formally and then ushered off to bed. “Children should be seen but not heard” was the maxim the household functioned under.  Dad’s war service imbued him with a bit of reputation, he was seriously respected by the Ottawa military social world. In the 1990’s Was on a McGill committee that responsible for visiting celebrities to a public speaking forum. Desmond Morton, one of Canada’s most respected Military historians was on the same committee. When he heard my name, his jaw dropped. “Are you related to Spike Sprung?” Desmond explained that in the 50’s in Ottawa, my parents were considered “Royalty” and being invited to dinner at my parents was a coveted invitation.  I suspect the General a bit of role model. Years later I suggested, making light of it, that he named me “Guy” as a way to suck up to his “Boss”, he denied it vehemently. As an aside, my younger sister’s middle name is “Patricia” after the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry, the regiment Dad joined when he signed up during the war.

He was the “hero” Dad, Never forced but definitely encouraged to

Father retired from the army at the age of 50 and reverted back to his first love, philosophy. He ended up living in India and learning Sanskrit to return and teach at Brock University in St. Catherines. His days of playing the role model for his son were over. At that same time my desire to join the Army as my career ran out.

A disproportionate number of Army brats ended up in Canadian theatre. Why? The Sprung family was bumped from Ottawa where I was born, to Germany to Quebec City to Ottawa then Paris and Stockholm and back to Ottawa, all before I was fourteen. Does the lack of a rooted home doom us to a life of identity-searching? 

My mother infused her German/European culture and sensibility into our family lives. Given this influence, and that my first year of school was in Québec City, and that my Father’s ancestors were Dutch-American Empire Loyalists (Sprungh) who first immigrated to New Carlisle QC after the American Revolution, it is no surprise that Montréal ended up my creative home base. 

When we moved back to Ottawa in 1961, after three years in Europe, it was mid-term, I was ahead in certain subjects, Physics and German, and I was given special permission to take some classes ahead of my age cohort. My mother arranged this at a meeting with the Glebe Principal, who, clearly besotted, gave her anything she asked for. This meant I completed 4 Grade 13 classes while still in Grade 12, and ended up graduating with 16 Ontario Grade 13 Secondary School subject certificates! (Likely a provincial record then and still now. --At the time you needed only 8 to qualify for university.) During high school, as far as I was concerned, Theatre was for sissies.  But Luba Goy, of Royal Canadian Air Farce fame, went to my high school same time as I did. She was very active in the drama club, she is no sissie. I have a distinct memory of Luba performing in Edna St Vincent Millay’s play, Aria da Capo in our school auditorium. Why would I remember that? Something was imprinting?

Dear Patrick

Towards the end of high school, after a brief stint as head of the Army Historical Section, my father retired from the Forces and was preparing for a late-life career-switch to academe by living in India and studying Sanskrit and early Asian Philosophy. Mervyn Sprung had an unusual concordance of will power and drive that enabled him, at the age of 23 to learn enough German in three years to write a Phd in philosophy in Berlin, and then, at the age of 53 to learn Sanskrit and become an internationally recognized translator of early Buddhist texts.

So many questions I would love to now ask my father. What a waste never to have taken the time to understand what a huge wealth of experience and knowledge he carried in the slowly dissipating octogenarian brain. He died five days into the new millennium, advanced dementia very present in his daily being. Feels like symbolic timing. “I am never going to end up a vegetable”, was a constant mantra in his final years. An earlier heart transplant had left him with poor circulation and heart palpitations. Taken to the hospital in an ambulance for the umpteenth time on January 4, 2000, he was placed, due to overcrowding of the Peterborough hospital, in a corridor. When I phoned from Montreal and spoke to the nurse, she was upbeat. “Oh, he is going to be fine, we can have him back home soon enough. He is a bit restless though, he is trying to pull out all his intravenous and the heart monitoring connections.” I phoned back, on instinct, just 30 minutes later,  to ask a few more questions to be told that he had died.  He was still cognesennt enough to ensure he did not go out a vegetable. I see it as a gift to his wife and family, but also the action of a man who wanted to got out with his dignity intact. A man whose love of history and philosophy was so strong, he dies like a classical Roman or Greek.

I have wrestled with the question of my Father’s influence on my fate in the fictional autobiographical short story, Fathers and Sons; in the 2022 article in the online magazine, Montreal Serai, In the Beginning was the Loghouse; in On Father’s Day a Review of Dad, a column I wrote in 1995 for the Montreal Gazette; and also in the  January 2000 Lives Lived column I wrote for the Globe and Mail. 

I had joined the Reserves, the Governor General Foot Guards, (the “GGFG’s”) as a summer job, and enjoyed it, but my hankering for a life in the military slowly waned. Having started reading books on the history of ancient Ur, Babylon and Egypt and the exploits of Heinrich Schliemann, I enrolled at McGill (Fall 1965) thinking/dreaming I would end up as the first contemporary Western archeologist to get permission to dig in China.

My McGill professors were so bored with what they were teaching, their boredom infected me. I took what today would be called a “gap year”, hitched around Europe ending up (Fall 1966) in Freiburg, southern West Germany, and enrolled in the university to study German literature. When I saw a poster in the student cafeteria announcing a casting call for actors, not knowing a soul, I plucked up my courage and auditioned in German for the university theatre group. I had barely seen any theatre, (was there any in Canada at the time?), never done any theatre, never even had any interest in theatre. I was merely, so I thought, auditioning to meet fellow students. (Yes, women my age too.) It was an open audition with, as I remember, roughly 40 students vying to act in the next production of the university drama group. We all sat in a small studio theatre and one by one were invited up on the stage to read a poem. After some 39 wanna-be’s had auditioned, a long afternoon, the gentleman organizing the audition asked if there was anyone else in the room who wanted to be heard. Scared shitless, but tapping into an unconscious vein of drama sap I had no idea was in me, I, somehow, raised my hand. Handed a book of Brecht poems, I was asked to read Errinerung An Die Maria A. (There it is, -my first encounter with Bertolt Brecht. Bizarre/Fate?) Imagine my surprise, a week later, to get a phone call: “The actor we had cast dropped out. Are you interested in being part of our production?” The play was The Automobile Graveyard by Fernando Arrabal, cutting edge (for its time), “Theatre of the Absurd”. Not that I had any idea what that was. Where did I get the idea I could act? -It just never occurred to me that I couldn’t. And yes, I did meet a woman, a fellow actor, the brilliant, highly literate, intimidatingly intelligent, Marianne Markgraff. Where is she today? After a moderately successful run in Freiburg, we were chosen as the West German representative for the 1967 international student drama festival in Zagreb in (then) Yugoslavia. 

Marianne and I drove from Freiburg in her green, beat-up VW bug that, with a dead battery, had to be push-started to get going. Ideally we would find an overnight parking spot on a down hill incline to ease the morning’s start. Made for some fun, late-night post Kneipe (bar) pushing exploits through the main streets of Yugoslavian towns and villages. The plays/productions I saw at that Zagreb festival, performed by university drama groups from all across Europe, were astonishing… I had no idea theatre could be so enthralling. The Sorbonne University’s Rabelais adaptation still features in my memory today, over 50 years later, fresh as this morning’s coffee. The Russians brought the latest in Stalinist Romance: Boy meets Girl, Girl meets Tractor, all three fall in love. Manchester University did a trimmed version of Hamlet with a playground balance-beam as the conceptual central prop. (Imagine: “To be or not to be…” on a balance beam slowly undulating up and down!) The host Yugoslavians did their translation of Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden’s fanciful anti-war play, Ars Longa Vita Brevis. My imagination was ravished. That festival was the bell clapper that set my internal creative overtones resonating. I returned to Montreal and McGill for the Fall of 1967, a theatre hook set deep in my guts.

Above two photos taken early morning of July 1, 1967. This is the Bertholdsbrunnen, the statue in the centre of Freiburg commemorating Duke Berthold, the medieval founder of the city.  Look closely you will see the maple leaf on the lance. The sash draped over the horses snout proclaims the founder of Freiburg to be a member of Canada’s “Centennial Knights of the Round Table”. In the dead of night, as a “canadien errant” student at the university, I carried a ladder through the streets of Freiburg and invested Herr Duke Berthold with his adornments as my contribution to Canada’s 100th birthday. Typical student prank. By midday the police had divested the founder of Freiburg of his Canadian Centennial regalia.