Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic voices shaping Canadian theatre today. The column invites artists to share nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of a glorious, frustrating art form.
In 2017, Intermission Magazine commissioned a Spotlight article on acting teacher Peter Wylde, with photos by Dahlia Katz. At the time, Wylde was in his late 80s and had lived, so it seemed, several lifetimes.
Born Peter Norman Cherrie, he was an actor in Canada and the U.K. during the waning years of an older theatrical model, one based on the British repertory system. He was also an academic, who studied and taught Slavic languages at North American institutions including Harvard. By 2017, Wylde had become an educator and mentor who shaped generations of theatre students: at the National Theatre School of Canada, where he taught for two decades beginning in 1980; at Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan University), where he worked from 2000 until 2010; and at George Brown, whose theatre program he played a significant role in shaping, from 1986 to 1999, and then again from 2013 to 2019. He was particularly respected as a teacher of the Zone of Silence technique (more on that below), which educators like Jennifer Wigmore continue to pass on to acting students today.
The Intermission article never materialized, and Wylde passed away in 2022. But a few months ago, the magazine’s current senior editor, Liam, asked if I’d be interested in doing a column on Wylde, so that Katz’s beautiful pictures could finally see the light of day. I was happy to oblige: preservation is one of my great motivators to write Speaking in Draft. Theatre being such an ephemeral art form, it’s important that we recognize and record the impact of the artists who came before us, as well as those shaping our landscape today for future generations.
I spoke with seven theatre artists who knew Wylde — a mix of former students, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. Joshua Stodart, the third person I spoke to and one of the people closest to Wylde at the end of his life, surprised me during our conversation with a bag of archival material. It contained a small mountain of cards and letters from Wylde’s former students, as well as Wylde’s own translation of Chekhov’s The Seagull from the original Russian, for a 1964 production in Port Carling, Ontario in which he himself performed.
There was also a black-and-white headshot of a young Wylde, which Stodart told me was from his early years performing in England. Compared to the man in Katz’s photos, this Wylde is younger — but his mischievous eyes and bushy brows are more or less unchanged. How fitting for a man that almost every interviewee described as existing outside of time.
What follows is an edited and condensed collage, loosely organized by theme, that only scratches the surface of Wylde’s life and impact. If you knew him, feel free to share your own Wylde tales in the comments below.
The cast
Burke Campbell (BC): Theatre artist, journalist, and photographer.
Sue Miner (SM): Theatre artist, and program coordinator for George Brown’s theatre school since 2017.
Iain Moggach (IM): Theatre artist, and artistic director of Theatre By the Bay in Barrie, Ontario from 2018 to 2024.
Philip Riccio (PR): Artistic director of the Company Theatre in Toronto. As co-founder of Intermission, he commissioned the 2017 photos.
Joshua Stodart (JS): Theatre artist and artistic director of Ale House Theatre in Toronto from 2012 to 2015.
Julie Tepperman (JT): Theatre artist and co-artistic leader of Convergence Theatre in Toronto since 2006. Partner of Aaron Willis in art and life.
Aaron Willis (AW): Theatre artist and co-artistic leader of Convergence Theatre. Partner of Julie Tepperman in art and life.
Meeting Peter
PR: For my generation, when it comes to Canadian theatre-school teachers, Peter’s the guy.
IM: In 2010, I was studying history at Carleton, and I decided I needed to get back into theatre. A friend said, ‘You have to study with Peter Wylde.’ At that time, he was running classes through his own private academy called the Wylde Project. I moved to Toronto for a summer from Ottawa, and took this Zone of Silence course with Peter. It fundamentally changed the direction of my life.
JT: He’s probably the reason Aaron and I met in 1998, because we were in the same George Brown class. We used to joke that Peter and the rest of the audition panel accepting us into the program is the reason why our children exist.
SM: I’ve known Peter since I was 18 and a student at the National Theatre School. First year was the only time you had theatre history, and our teacher was so boring — we all slept through the class. But when I got to second year, the new first years had a different teacher: a character with big bushy eyebrows and big white hair. His students would always show up the next day exhausted, because he would keep them until 11 at night with story after story. This was 1981.
JS: I first met him when I was a student at Ryerson, in the autumn of 2009. At the end of his life, I was seeing him every week, and fell into this sort of caretaker relationship, [though for me] we were taking care of each other. I was helping him with groceries, and we’d have dinners together on a weekly basis.
Peter as actor and academic
JS: I’m not sure of the exact timeline, but when Peter was young, he decided he wanted to be an actor and that he’d have to do it in England. I think all he had was the phone number of an aunt or uncle there. He [moved to London and] slept in a park for a night or two, and ended up finding a place with the Bristol Old Vic. They let him clean the paint out of set pieces between plays. He worked his way up through stage management to actually getting some parts on stage.
SM: He was in the British premiere of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible [in the role of Judge Hathorne, at the Bristol Old Vic in 1954].
AW: He’s one of a handful of people who felt connected to that old-world theatre of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Peggy Ashcroft.
JS: After returning from England, he started studying Slavic languages at University of Toronto. He never completed his PhD, but he taught Slavic languages at Harvard. He called it his academic parabola.
BC: He was a member of the original Stratford Company when Tyrone Guthrie was artistic director.
IM: One beautiful story Peter told me is from his time at Stratford. In 1956, William Shatner was understudying Christopher Plummer in Henry V. Plummer had a kidney stone, and Shatner found out three hours before showtime that he had to go on as Henry. Because of the resulting understudy reshuffle, Peter was on that night, I think as the Duke of Gloucester.
During the show, Shatner freezes on stage. It’s clear that he’s forgotten his line. Who does he go to for help but Peter? So he crosses over to Peter, who just tells him the line perfectly. Shatner breathes that in, takes a few steps, delivers it, and keeps on going. He knew that, out of all those people on that stage, Peter would know every single line of Henry V.
Peter, the style icon
BC: It was 1971, and I was going to see a production of Bon Johnson’s Volpone at Stratford. Peter was driving me and some other people. I’d never met him. I remember this tall man with long, blondish hair, raising his hands skyward, almost in benediction. He was wearing a floral purple shirt, caramel-coloured leather pants, and sandals. This was not very Canadian of him at this period in time!
IM: He was probably one of the most eccentric people I’ve ever met. The kind of person who, the first time you meet him, he’s wearing a leather vest that he wears every single day, a Celtic knot symbol dangling from a leather cord on his chest, and a coin purse by his side.
BC: In the early ‘70s, he wore these insane costumes up and down the streets of Toronto. He would walk around with an Elizabeth coin purse and a silver box of snuff, or elaborate capes.
SM: He wore a top hat. My husband and I used to call him Master Wylde.
BC: To see this man sitting at a computer was an anomaly. It was like the Prince of all the Russias at a computer.
Peter on the first day of school
SM: He had this scary way about him, and he loved it. He looked at everyone from underneath his giant eyebrows with a sparkle in his eye.
PR: I went to George Brown Theatre School beginning in 1997, and at the time, Peter was the head of acting.
SM: I remember my first year as program coordinator at George Brown, in 2017, welcoming the new students and introducing them to their teachers. At the time, George Brown had brought back Peter to do a text analysis class once a week.
PR: He would give this famous speech to anyone auditioning, basically telling us all to get out: that we shouldn’t be there, that acting is a terrible profession, that none of us are going to make it. It either terrified you, or it inspired you to want to prove him wrong.
SM: He said, ‘TEXT’ — pause — ‘IS NOT’ — pause — ‘SOMETHING THAT ONLY EXISTS ON YOUR TELEPHONES.’ He wanted to stop time, so that everybody could get on board and stop time with him.
JT: I’d come to theatre school right out of high school. I was 18, really a fish out of water. I found Peter scary in a school principal kind of way. But in third year, he dropped a lot of the facade: he was really open and vulnerable, full of lightness and good humor. I remember him saying after our first class in third year, ‘Now we can really get to work.’
‘The Zone of Silence’
IM: Basically it’s a series of exercises. The one that he’s most known for is the waiting room exercise, where you just enter the playing space and wait on stage. The idea is that it strips all pretense from the actor. You’re in a room. That’s all you’re doing.
AW: You’re putting yourself through a crucible of honing your attention. How do you keep everything about you as a performer alive and vibrant and reactive, even before you speak?
IM: In later exercises, you’d enter the playing space with an intention, and you’d have to fulfill that intention without speaking. You and your scene partner don’t know what your respective objectives are. You have to suss it out.
JS: We would sit for 40 minutes at a time and watch people be quiet. We’d witness something kinetic happen between the actors onstage that was unplanned: the emergence of these truthful moments.
AW: He’d watch ‘Zone of Silence’ from the back of the class, standing for hours on end while the rest of us sat.
JT: You’d turn to the back of the room and see him, eyeballs popping out of his head.
AW: When someone did something onstage that was surprising and authentic, he’d point it out: ‘You see what happened there? Contagion!’ For me, what he meant was that, if an actor’s able to find that truthfulness, it’s contagious. The other actors catch it, then the audience catches it.
Peter, the walking encyclopaedia
PR: He would talk about Shakespeare and you’d think, ‘Was he there? Is this guy a time traveller?’
JS: Working on a period piece with him in school, the first few weeks you’re sitting down with the script and the Oxford English Dictionary. We would investigate how a particular word was used during the time a piece was written. It was hard work, but the robustness it would give the actors was truly amazing.
BC: He transcended discipline.
JS: Every hour of every day kind of had its own program. Every Sunday he’d sit and listen to an opera.
SM: I was offered a job at Sheridan to teach melodrama as an acting style. I knew nothing about it, but I thought, ‘Peter will know.’ So I called him, with the goal of arranging a meeting — but he just launched in. I had nothing to write on but my address book, which I still have with the notes I took. Peter talked at me for about 25 minutes, after which I immediately went to the reference library and found all the old plays he’d mentioned. I cobbled together a course from that conversation.
PR: I was working on a play once that was set in the 1960s. I thought I’d talk to Peter about that time — but when I asked, he didn’t really know anything. I was like, Peter, ‘You lived through the 1960s!’ It was as if he’d been studying and immersing himself in the Elizabethan, the Jacobean, the Restoration periods so deeply that he had no memory of his own lifetime.
SM: In [my] second year at NTS, our class did this project called ‘An Elizabethan Evening.’ The next year, Peter turned it into [a] full-on period study: anywhere from five to 12 hours of scenes, dancing, and music from a specific era in theatre history.
JS: He started the period study at NTS. Usually it was done in two parts over a day. Talk about his gift of changing time, right?
BC: He installed more and more bookshelves in his one-bedroom apartment. The books were so heavy, you assumed the floor was going to give way, even in a concrete building. For him, any library was like a church.
Peter, the champion of others
JT: He lived for teaching, reading, studying, building courses. And then his second career, I think, was seeing students’ work.
AW: He would say, ‘Ah, he’s one of mine. She’s one of mine.’ He took pride in the success of the people he taught.
SM: He’d just show up: to a commedia show on the steps of Central Tech Secondary School, or a kid show at the Fringe Festival. He’d be like a kid in a candy shop.
JS: Some colleagues and I started Ale House Theatre in Peter’s image right out of school. Peter saw a version of Macbeth that we did in 2012, that I directed. After opening we were at the Imperial Pub — R.I.P. — and the whole cast was celebrating. Peter had me at a table telling me everything that was wrong with the production — because I asked! Of course, the next day we implemented his suggestions, and the show became a lot better.
IM: I went to George Brown, on Peter’s recommendation. While I was there, our class did a text analysis class with him on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Some of the women in my class really took to the final chapter, ‘Penelope,’ because of Peter’s instruction, and they told him they wanted to turn it into a show. Peter volunteered his time to work with them. That production — Molly Bloom by Fourth Gorgon Theatre — went on to have multiple runs.
SM: One time Peter showed up to a commedia show I was working on, with a cast on his arm. I said, ‘Peter, what happened?’ He said, ‘I broke my elbow.’ ‘How did you do that?’ He said, ‘I was directing.’ He’d pointed so emphatically that he’d broken his elbow.
Coda
JT: I’ve heard from lots of former students of his over the years, and I get the impression that he evolved and adapted his practice to meet students where they were at — which doesn’t mean a lack of rigour.
AW: He would say this, ‘It takes 20 years to make an actor.’ Julie and I are more than 20 years out of school now, and I feel that’s true.
IM: He instilled in me this hunger to learn more, to do better, to live, to seek excellence; and that excellence in theatre came from working with the text, getting to the heart of exactly what you’re saying, down to the word. There’s always more you can learn.
JS: His book collection was over 2,000 volumes at the end of his life. We started to catalog his entire library. Part of his will was to leave it behind to his students. When he passed, we packed up the books into 40 boxes and reached out to people.
SM: There were all these boxes, neatly laid out in this empty room, and a chair in front of them with a top hat. All the boxes were numbered: You picked a number, and that was your box.
JS: Now the library is spread out around the entire city, a little bit around the province. If you go to the Wylde Project on Facebook, you’ll find recordings of the classes we did during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can see him teaching in action, as an old man sitting in a chair.
Just imagine what he was like when he was on his feet!
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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WRITTEN BY
Dahlia Katz
Dahlia Katz is a professional photographer who specializes in portraits, promotion, lifestyle, events, weddings, and the performing arts. She is also a director, dramaturg, and puppeteer.
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