Nearly fifty years ago, a young man named Tom Patterson did something extraordinary to save his home town from financial disaster.

The economy of Stratford, Ontario, where Tom was born, had been sustained for eighty years by the railway industry; but by the beginning of the 1950s, Stratford's role as a centre for that industry was in severe decline.  When the Canadian National Railway decided to close down its divisional offices and locomotive repair shops in Stratford, the result was the loss of some 2,000 jobs from a community that then numbered about 18,000 people.

Something was badly needed to keep Stratford on the map.

Tom Patterson was no artist, and certainly no theatre expert.  A journalist by profession, he'd seen maybe two plays in his life.  But he was a man of vision nonetheless, and he saw in the fortuitous circumstances in Stratford's name, and in the attractiveness of its rural setting, an opportunity to do something daring that might just save the day.  And so he started a festival of Shakespearian theatre.

It was an utterly crazy idea, and it should never have worked.  In March of 1952, Tom boarded a train for New York, having persuaded Stratford City Council to give him $125 with which to go and recruit the services of Lawrence Olivier, the greatest actor-director Tom could think of.

In fact, Olivier was probably the only actor-director Tom could think of.

The only slight problem was that Tom hadn't actually managed to get an appointment to see Olivier. In fact, he'd been repeatedly turned by the great man's secretary. But he figured if he showed up at the Algonquin Hotel, where Olivier was staying, he'd manage to bluff his way in.

In the movies, this would have worked.

Rebuffed and despairing, Tom went to the Rockefeller Foundation, where by some miracle he actually succeeded in talking to someone.  He got a polite brush-off, which concluded with the words, "Please let me know how you get along."

Tom went home and told City Council that Olivier had regretfully had to decline his offer because he was tied up with other commitments for the next two years, but that Charles Laughton or Sir Cedric Hardwicke would probably be available.  And he said, the Rockefeller Foundation had expressed interest.

The next edition of the Stratford Beacon Herald bore the headline "Rockefeller Foundation to Consider Festival Proposal."  Tom had to assure his anxious wife that nobody in New York read the Stratford newspaper.

By all reasonable expectations, the matter should have ended there.  But it didn't.  Eventually Tom got in touch with someone who did see something in his proposal and was in a position to do something about it: the legendary British director Tyrone Guthrie.  Guthrie came to Canada, was impressed with the integrity of the vision expressed by Tom and his supporters, and agreed to become the fledgling festival's first Artistic Director.

Mere months later, on the night of July 13, 1953, Tom's crazy dream became a waking reality when Alec Guiness stepped to the first thrust stage in North America and spoke the opening lines of Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer."

Today, the Stratford Festival of Canada is internationally renowned as one of the great classical theatre companies of the English-speaking world, presenting a season of as many as fourteen productions in repertory, to standards of artistic and technical accomplishment that are second to none in North America.

With a budget this year of $40 million, the Festival has not merely rescued Stratford's economy, it has utterly transformed it.  The festival is now responsible for nearly $167 million worth of economic activity, or about four times its operating budget. It generates nearly $64 million in tax revenues for the Ontario and federal governments: a whopping 4,500-per-cent return on the $1.4 million invested by those governments in supporting its annual operations.

Those figures are all in Canadian dollars, of course, but even when converted to U.S. funds, they provide pretty compelling evidence that the arts -- which far too many people still regard as a self-indulgent drain on the public purse -- are in fact a major source of a community's wealth.

In Canada as a whole, the arts and cultural industries are the fifth largest employer, and the second fastest growing occupation.  And they generate at least three dollars for every dollar invested in them.

The arts generate wealth not only in terms of the kind of direct economic impact that I’ve just described, but in less obvious ways too.

One of the worries that keep CEOs awake at night is how to attract and retain good people.  In today’s knowledge-based economy, the quality of a company is directly based upon the quality of the people who are working for it, and to get those people you have to provide the right conditions.

The kinds of creative, thoughtful, imaginative minds that offer value to a company are attracted by culturally rich environments -- and, more than that, they are stimulated by them.  The arts add value to people, encouraging them to think and to feel, to become more flexible and perceptive, to develop, vision to dream -- as Tom Peterson dreamed.

And when I talk of dreaming, I mean disciplined dreaming.  We theatre artists are a more practical class of people than we’re often given credit for.  We have a product to sell and staff to manage and bills to pay and accounting practices to follow, just like any other corporation.  We ensure that our business is run effectively and we seek new opportunities to make it grow.  In placing value on the imagination, we are doing exactly what the most successful corporations do.

For disciplined dreaming, in the fast-changing business world of today, is where the money is.  The kinds of people who can conceive of a new phone system, for instance, are the kinds of people who, as Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, have the imagination to body forth, “the forms of things unknown,” and give “to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”

Imagination, then, and the cultural activity that is inseparable from it, makes a major contribution to a successful economy.  You don’t need me to tell you that Cleveland would literally be a poorer place without the Great Lakes Theatre Festival, the Cleveland Play House, the Cleveland Orchestra or the Cleveland Opera.

Or if there were no Cleveland Institute of Music, no Cleveland Science Center, no Cleveland Institute of Art -- or, for that matter, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But of course the arts do far more for a society than just create jobs, attract talent and generate economic activity. They have a profound impact on our intellectual vigour and our spiritual and emotional health. They make us feel better.

In 1784, the German playwright Friedrich Schiller described the theatre as a kind of moral, spiritual and even physical tonic:

The stage is an institution combining amusement with instruction.  When melancholy gnaws at the heart, when trouble poisons our solitude, when we are disgusted with the world, and a thousand worries oppress us, or when our energies are destroyed by over-exercise, the stage revives us, we dream of another sphere, we recover ourselves, our torpid nature is roused by noble passions, our blood circulates more healthily. The unhappy man forgets his tears in weeping for another, the happy man is calmed, the secure made provident.  Effeminate natures are steeled, savages made man, and, as the supreme triumph of nature, man of all ranks, zones and conditions, emancipated from the chains of conventionality and fashion, fraternize here in universal sympathy, forget the world, and come nearer to their heavenly destination.

Extreme as they are, both of these remarks contain elements of truth. The first and most basic thing theatre must do is hold our attention, and restlessness in the auditorium is a sure sign that it’s not succeeding.  As Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the lyrics for the musical My Fair Lady and Camelot, put it: “Coughing in the theatre is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.”

At the same time, the theatre does far more than just distract us.  I won’t say I entirely buy into Schiller’s idea that it brings us nearer to our heavenly destination: in fact I’ve sat through some shows in my life that felt like they were dragging me in quite the opposite direction. And we’ve all had experience of the kind of theatre seating that entirely counteracts any beneficial effects that the play might have on the circulation of the blood.

Still, there is no question that, at its finest, the art of the theatre can make us feel sublimely elevated in heart and spirit.

But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that art fulfills a merely medicinal role in our lives – whether it be as moral medicine or cough medicine.  The arts aren’t something nasty-tasting that we resort to only when we’re sick.  Rather, they’re a fundamental human need.

If you stop and think about it, going to the theatre is one of the most peculiar things that human beings do -- much more peculiar than we usually acknowledge.  We go there to sit in a big, dark room, watching people whom in most cases we’ve never met spend a couple of hours playing an elaborate game of make-believe of their own devising, all the time studiously pretending that they don’t know we’re there.

In other words, we travel sometimes considerable distances and spend sometimes considerable amounts of money to be ignored by a bunch of strangers.

The fact that we do this unquestioningly, without it striking us as odd, indicates how profound a need it is, like eating -- another highly pleasurable activity that, if it weren’t essential to our existence, wouldn’t bear too much thinking about.

To continue this dietary comparison, people often think of the arts as a luxurious indulgence, like liqueur-filled chocolates: fine for special occasions, but hardly as necessary as such bread-and-butter activities as making cars, or selling real estate, or generating electricity, or any of the other day-to-day human enterprises that supposedly make the world go around.

But the bible was right: you can’t live by bread alone, even with butter. If you try it, sooner or later you’re going to develop a vitamin deficiency.  For the arts are not the brandy beans in our spiritual and intellectual diet: they’re the vitamins.  Without them, our reality would be mundane, limited and unforgiving. We would lose our vigour and our resilience, and ultimately our society would wither and die.

In our hearts, we know this, which is why every human society we know of has developed some form of art. From cave paintings to King Lear, we human beings have always needed, and will always need, to create images of ourselves that help us comprehend who and what we are.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw put it this way:
 

Life as it occurs is senseless: a policeman may watch it and work in it for thirty years without learning as much of it or from it as a child or a nun may learn from a single play. For it is the business of [the playwright] to pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings, and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies.

From the sunniest musical comedy to the darkest tragedy, the theatre offers us a safe and healing learning environment in which to rehearse our responses to life. Comedy allows us to laugh at our follies and our anxieties. Tragedy forces us to confront our deepest terrors, and helps us to work through them, imparting dignity and grandeur to human suffering and thus in some measure making it easier to bear with fortitude.

It's no accident that what we go to see is called a "play," because the theatre offers in an adult context the same kind of incredibly rich, fulfilling, life-enhancing play through which, as children, we learn how to be grown-ups.

Someone -- I can't remember who -- once said that the only time we're truly happy is when  we're learning. That's because when we are learning we can feel ourselves growing: we can feel the life force within us, unfolding like a flower toward the sun.

This is what the theatre offers us: a wonderfully sophisticated playground: a jungle gym for our emotions and our thoughts, where we feel ourselves being enlarged through communal play into a richer and more fulfilled humanity.

I have compared the arts to wealth and to vitamins, and now it seems I am comparing them to education. In other words, to borrow from Benjamin Franklin's well-known rhyme, I am arguing that the arts -- like going early to bed and being early to rise -- make us healthy, wealthy, and wise.

This is one reason why Tom Patterson's founding of the Stratford Festival in the 1950s was such a brilliant stroke of entrepreneurial genius. While human beings might not always need railways, they will always need the arts -- this wonderful form of grown-up play that endows us with health, wealth and wisdom.

I hope I have persuaded you of at least part of my thesis: that the arts are one of a society's greatest treasures, in terms both economic and human.

But what evidence can I offer that the Stratford Festival of Canada, located some six or seven hours' drive from Cleveland, is truly a North American treasure, and not merely a southwestern Ontario one?

There are some obvious practical ways in which the Stratford Festival enriches the entire North American theatrical culture.

We are, in the first place, an important centre of training for the next generation of classical actors, including those who join our company from the States through such initiatives as the Chicago Associates Fellowship Program.

Our Conservatory for Classical Theatre Training provides an unparalleled programme of intensive professional skills development, complemented by the ongoing training and coaching received by young actors as members of our company throughout the season.

Those actors take with them the skills they have learned at Stratford and apply them in their future careers in Canada and, often, the United States. Such celebrated performers as Len Cariou, Hume Cronin, Lome Green, Christopher Plummer, William Shatner and Jessica Tandy honed their craft at Stratford, and new generations of stars are waiting in the wings.

Behind the scenes, too, we offer a unique resource, fostering excellence in such areas as costume building, propmaking and wigmaking and helping supply the material needs of other theatre companies and filmmakers throughout North America.

Directors and designers from all over the States see our work and are inspired by it, going home with the new ideas and visions that sustain the vitality of any theatrical culture.

Some U.S. directors -- recent examples being William Carden and Susan Schulman come to work in Stratford's theatres, challenging and stimulating their creative imaginations and ours not only by reinterpreting modem American drama and musical-theatre classics for our stages and our audiences but also - as actor and director Scott Wentworth will do this season in our productions of Henry IV, Parts I and 2 -- by tackling Shakespearean repertoire that they might not otherwise have an opportunity to explore, on a scale that few other theatres have the resources to contemplate.

In all these ways, the Stratford Festival's influence reaches far beyond our own country's borders. But an even more important factor is the very nature of the work we do, and the capacity it has to reach into the hearts of audiences from all over North America -- indeed, from all over the world.

The Stratford Festival exists to produce the world's great dramas. While we present a wide variety of work on our stages, from musicals to new Canadian plays, the core of our mandate is Shakespeare and the great classical dramatists of the past.

Our reason for being is to bring to life, through performance, the plays that transcend national boundaries - that transcend, indeed, their own eras and cultures, and speak as vividly to us today as when they were written, be it 500 or 2,500 years ago,

Our core repertoire is timeless and universal, its scope limited by no criterion save excellence. The appeal and the significance of such repertoire knows no borders. Some 41% of our patrons -- many of whom have been attending since our very first seasons -- come from the U.S., and their numbers are growing.

Those audiences believe passionately in the vital importance of what we do, and it is finally on that account that I presume to call the Stratford Festival of Canada a North American treasure. It is an institution of importance to all North Americans not only because of what it does, but because of what it stands for.

The poet and engraver William Blake once wrote, "Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish." And theatre too, he would have added if he'd thought of it.

His words were later echoed by the Victorian sage John Ruskin, who wrote, "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts -- the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art."

In Canada and here in the U.S., we can take immense pride in the societies in which we live.  We enjoy levels of freedom and prosperity that are unrivalled on the planet. Yet we cannot hope to achieve our full potential as human beings -- and thus as nations -- until the truths articulated by Blake and Ruskin are universally regarded as self-evident.

This is no easy step for us to take: there are many influential voices, both in Canada and the U.S., ready to denounce the arts as a wasteful frill - and, some would even add, a dangerous one -- rather than an essential part of a civilized society. But it is not an impossible one.

There was a time, after all, when our society did not recognize the harmfulness of tobacco, or the importance of quality day care to a child's early development, or the need to limit industrial pollution or to have seat belts in cars. These principles are embraced now by society as a whole, even though some individuals may still resist them.

So too is it possible to convince a society that the arts are as essential to it as clean air and potable water.

It is a matter of incremental steps, of more and more individuals awakening to the notions that one music teacher in a school does more good to our children than a truckload of computers; that mere information, and the tools for processing it, are useless to people whom no one has taught to dream; that bandwidth isn't as important as mind width, and mind depth; that training technicians will advance us not a whit unless we also nurture the imaginations of potential visionaries.

Such institutions as the Stratford Festival of Canada are the catalysts of change: it is their example alone that can bring about the necessary evolution in our thinking. It is thus vital that those of us who would see our nations flourish be passionate in-our stewardship of the treasures that our artists bequeath to us.

"No man is an island, entire of itself," wrote the poet John Donne; "every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."

Similarly, no artistic enterprise exists in isolation. Each theatre, each ballet or opera company, each symphony orchestra, each art gallery on this continent ultimately belongs to and enriches us all, for these and every other artistic institution, large or small, are the wellsprings of our spiritual, emotional and intellectual well-being as a species.

And if, here in North America, we celebrate and honour those wellsprings, regardless of national boundaries; if we encourage them to grow and prosper; if we allow our lives to be touched and transformed by their work; if we regard our artists and their work on our behalf as the priceless treasures they are; then we may one day hope to see the book of our art join the books of our words and our deeds as one of the greatest ever inscribed in the course of human history.