Turning on the stars: Cameron Porteous reflects on a life in the theatre

Cameron Porteous, the now retired curator and founder of St. Marys Station Gallery, has a rich background in theatrical set and costume design some may not know about.

By Dan Welcher

There was a spectacular theatre in Toronto called the Runnymede, which opened in 1927 with silent movies and vaudeville shows. One of its many innovations was a projected “sky,” with clouds and stars, in the ceiling. On the lighting board backstage was a large electrical switch with a sign on it: “Turn Out The Stars Before Leaving.”

Born 10 years later in Rosetown, Sask., Cameron Porteous has spent his life designing magical stage sets and costumes all over the world. In a way, he has been turning on the stars, as well as the clouds, fires, floods and the smoke of battle for most of his life.

John Cameron Porteous is known to most of us as the man who started an art gallery inside the Via Rail Station, but that’s been a retirement job for a man who was head of production design for the Shaw Festival from 1980-1997 and who had also been a production designer for CBC television, HBO films, the Stratford Festival and numerous stage and opera companies in North America and Europe.

Having a conversation with Porteous about theatre is like talking with Mozart about opera; his eyes twinkle, his irrepressible smile deepens and the pure love he feels for theatre just flows out of him.

“When I designed Peter Pan for the Shaw Festival, we decided to make all three of the children’s beds fly up in that London bedroom scene – not just the children,” he recalled. “The problem, as you can imagine, was what to do with those beds once they got up above the stage. The next scene is in a magical clearing in Neverland. Two of the beds could be left hanging above the set, out of sight, but there was no space in the flies to deal with the third bed. So, we simply had it land on the ground in Neverland, where the Indians discovered it and marveled at this flying bed from the sky.”

Like so many other Canadian artists, Porteous brought his small-town sense of wonder into his mature work. Raised in Saskatchewan, he was introduced to theatre in high school in Vancouver, where he won a prize for acting. He soon realized that his real love was not acting, but in art direction and set design. His trajectory – from King Edward High School in Vancouver to the University of British Columbia, designing for television and movies at the CBC and CTV for five years, and then to England for serious study at the Wimbledon College of Art and entering the world of live theatre and opera – has been a non-stop ride on the wild horse that is theatre. And that ride has been exhilarating, if sometimes taxing.

Designing Christopher Plummer’s one-man show Barrymore, Porteous was faced with finding the perfect top hat for a scene in which Lionel Barrymore looks in a mirror and sees his grandfather. He had lined up four hats for Plummer to choose from, one of which Porteous had silently decided upon already. Plummer’s reaction was that of a roaring theatrical lion: “This is the best you can do? I need many more to choose from! Call me when you have a whole table full of hats.”

So, Porteous rounded up about 20 top hats from thrift stores and prop shelves, and called Plummer back.

“That’s more like it,” exulted the star, who then chose the very same hat Porteous had already selected at that first fitting.

Porteous achieved international renown during his 17 years at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-On-The-Lake, designing some of the biggest and most successful productions the festival had mounted. In addition to plays of George Bernard Shaw and a host of other playwrights, he designed Cavalcade by Noel Coward, with director Christopher Newton. This now legendary production, which has 40 scenes, hundreds of characters and countless costume changes, could not have been done without Porteous’ turntable design. This allowed lightning-fast scene changes, keeping the show moving in an adrenalin high. The Shaw Festival is also where he met his wife-to-be, wardrobe mistress Tracy Fulton, who now works at the Stratford Festival in the wardrobe department.

The Station Gallery in St. Marys was Porteous’ baby from its inception in 2017, when he (along with Charles Sharun and Reed Needles) persuaded St. Marys town council to allow a small art gallery to be set up inside the vintage, turn-of-the-century building, a local treasure that was underappreciated. There are new installations every six weeks, with prominent and emerging Canadian artists displaying and selling their work.

Some of the artists, like Lionel Venne, achieve sudden local fame. Venne’s northern Ontario paintings were such a sensation last year that Naina’s Restaurant in St. Marys now has more than a dozen of his paintings adorning its walls.

Asked how he would describe his own art, Porteous offers these words.

“Art is the excess beyond basic requirement, which is, of course, the most essential requirement of all.”