Supporting What Comes Next: A Conversation with Andy McKim and Raoul Bhaneja

Winter 2025, Theatre Passe Muraille publicly launched the Andy McKim Endowment Fund for New Works, building on the theatre’s commitment to supporting artists and the development of new work. The fund provides a long lasting source of financial support that is dedicated to artists and their work. The fund’s interest earned is awarded to a different artist each year.

TPM’s commitment to championing artists began long before the fund. For decades, the theatre has provided space for artists to take creative risks, bring new ideas to life, and share their work with audiences. Raoul Bhaneja knows this firsthand. Hamlet (solo), his one-person adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, premiered at TPM in 2006 marking the beginning of a production that would continue to reach audiences well beyond its first run. This November, Hamlet (solo) returns to TPM for a weekend of fundraising performances in support of the endowment fund.

We sat down with Raoul and former Artistic Director Andy McKim to talk about the importance of supporting artists and the creation of Hamlet (solo). In this conversation, Raoul and Andy are speaking to one another. Raoul’s text will be denoted by R and Andy’s by A. 

About this interview: The audio and written versions of this conversation have both been edited for length and clarity. The written version has also been edited for readability, so it will differ from the audio and is not a word-for-word transcript. Both versions aim to preserve the initial intent of the conversation.

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R: Hi, my name is Raoul Bhaneja. My first experience with Theatre Passe Muraille was when I was still a student at the National Theatre School. I came into the Mainspace to audition for Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons by Wajdi Mouawad, which was having its Canadian premiere directed by Baņuta Rubess. And that was the first time I stepped in the building. And it would not be my last. 

A: My name is Andy McKim and my first experience with TPM was in the late 70s. I had met Eric Peterson in the early 70s because he was on tour when I was working at Neptune Theatre in the John Gray musical, Billy Bishop.. But my first experience with TPM was the late 70s. I came to Toronto and somehow tracked down Paul Thompson and told him how giddily excited I was about everything that was happening at Passe Muraille. Because, you know, when you’re away from Toronto, you got to read all the scripts in local libraries. So I was up to date on what was going on. After we had coffee together, he said, I’m doing a rehearsal for the tour of Farm Show and 1837. If you want to join me. So, yeah, I said, sure. And he took me to Yonge Street, up to the second floor of an office above Yonge Street. And it was completely vacant with wires hanging from the ceiling. And that’s where they were doing the rehearsal. So there’s Eric and all these people in there. It was amazing.

R: Andy, it’s so great to be sitting here, in what was once called the Backspace of Theatre Passe Muraille. After your great 12-year run as Artistic Director. If you were able to summarize it, what’s your overarching vision for what the theatre experience should be?

A: I would say my overarching ambition coming to the theatre was, as always, like – ‘what is this theatre distinct for’? I wasn’t coming with something new. I was coming with a very powerful idea of its distinctiveness, and that for me was it was always a theatre that embraced those who had really not a lot of other institutional options for their work. It embraced those who were not just theatre artists but practiced other arts, but at the same time their art found its way into the theatre somehow. The theatre was always interested in other than playwright driven work. The theatre has a good history of playwright driven work, but it’s also really interested in creation based work, and that I thought was the really distinctive quality of the theatre. And the challenge the theatre always faced was it just never had enough money to sustain it or to allow it to achieve its ambitions. I thought the way I could work with that is to use the kind of institutional portion of the theatre, its staff, its space, its history, as the offer for those who were in the creation-based space side of the theatre and were younger and had a lot of really great ideas.

If I could find a way to merge those two things, then the support of the institution, its history, and its many physical offerings would underpin the soaring creative ambitions of folks who had nothing, except to create ideas.

R: That seems to go back to, I mean to me, that shows that you had a really clear and potent understanding of where the theatre itself came from.

A: I did. I was so… singularly inspired by Jim Garrard’s statement:

“Imagining a theatre where art is foremost, that the forms of administration subject themselves to the needs of the art. And that the institution does not seek for its own power or strength”. 

It’s just… I just didn’t see it a lot around me.

R: Sure, of course. That’s got Rochdale College roots right at its absolute essence.

A: Yeah, but it describes for me an art-centric institution as opposed to… an institution centric one.

R: I have a follow up for you then. If that’s the case and the aspiration, what does an artist, and I would say particularly an emerging artist, need in the earliest stages of creating something new.

A: If I had one word it would be support. They need the support that allows them to invest in their own instinct, their own creative focus, and ambition. And not to feel they need to resort to pre-existing templates for creating, or producing, or promoting their work. And I felt that as an institution we could provide a space where we take on more of the institutional responsibilities and find ways to support them and empower them with their own ideas. Now, not all of the work that we did was work where we were pairing ourselves with folks from the outside of the institution.

We also were very interested in developing and producing our own work. The challenge with that was always money. You need to have enough money to develop work. Any theatre that’s developing new work needs to put a lot of money into that portion of the production before it even hits a rehearsal, and it’s a lot of investment, financially.

R: When you left as Artistic Director of the theatre, there’s been this great initiative to begin and fund the Andy McKim Endowment Fund for New Works. Now, what was the… motivation behind setting that up particularly when you were no longer going to be Artistic Director.

A: Yeah, well what I felt was this problem, this challenge we were facing was constantly throttling our ambition, and our vision, and our passion, and our imagination and it was just financial resources. So part of the responsibility I had as one of the two leaders of the theatre is to work in concert with the General Manager. I mean, I jokingly said, I spent all of my time here trying to make sure I didn’t screw it up and kill the place. But you have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to balance the money that it needs, you need, to sustain an institution with people employed in it and all of the maintenance of an older building like this. Ultimately, only 10% of the whole budget would go towards the development of artistic projects and the support of artistic projects we were producing.

R: Wait, so 10% of the budget, so that’s not just for new play development. 10% of the budget is what you could actually spend on putting on plays and creating new work? Both things. 

A: Yeah. Otherwise, we were going to just close the place. Because there was so much… need for financial support just for the plant. Plant including people. Everything you do when you have a venued Company. It’s just hard. I mean, over time, it got harder and harder to fundraise or to get money from arts councils. That money is constantly, in context with inflation, constantly getting smaller.

R: So what does the fund provide?

A: Perfect question. The whole point of the fund is to sequester money so that it can’t be touched even by the most well-intentioned person who, like myself, wants to save the theatre. You can’t touch it except to give to artists. So that’s what happens with an endowment fund. An endowment fund is two prescribed things: one is you only get the interest of the whole amount of money. And so that’s an annual question mark because it depends on how the fund is invested. The second thing is you can only spend it on the mandated focus point of that endowment. So I wanted an endowment whose only focus point was art or artists, production or development, and then that money couldn’t be taken away.

R: So any amount that goes to this fund supports that and that alone.

A: Exclusively and no one can take it away from that. And I just wanted that to be the case because I was taking money away just because I wanted to make sure the theatre survived. But if we have an endowment fund, then we’re protected when it comes to artists.

The thing that’s so cool about you doing this fundraiser is I think you instinctively understood what the endowment was about and you thought of the best way of throwing your support at it, which is to give something of yourself and the something of yourself was a piece of work. Where did you first put that piece of work on?

R: Right here in the backspace of Theatre Passe Muraille. That’s where we premiered.

A: Yeah, and what guided you to that choice?

R: Well, I lived a block from here. I used to live on Vanauley in city home subsidized housing with my wife and she had also performed The Rochdale project here. To come back into the originating space and present it was just too cool of a thing to let happen.

A: Also, the way you describe the creative evolution of this from the cabaret space to here, exactly replicates what I was describing earlier: it’s using the building as the thing you could share with other people.

R: And that would happen with you and I 10 years later with Life, Death and the Blues. Which would have more than just, you know, “here’s the space for half price”. Together our companies created this show that toured all across Canada, which started at BUZZ, your initiative here in this building, and kept workshopping and kept growing. And then as I’ve said from the beginning, if it wasn’t for your incredible Artistic Director and productorial skills, you basically had us booked on a national tour before the play was even finished being created. And then we went on to tour all across Canada over two years. 20,000 people saw it and we had a standing ovation every night. 100 performances on the button. Creation built. Not playwright driven. 

A: So again, it’s in the mold. When you originally thought of doing this, It’s an outrageous prospect, right? You’re going to do all of these characters and the character that Shakespeare wrote the most lines for. So… What possessed you to think, “Oh, this is what I’m going to do”?

R: Clare Coulter came to my school, National Theatre School, and in the rehearsal hall performed The Fever with no set, no costumes, no lights. 

A: I directed that. 

R: Which you directed. The thing about your production was that for young student theatre artists to see, we saw a play that had no set, no costume, no lights. It was a…an actor, words, space, and an audience. And a story. She pulled up her chair and said, can I start now? And we went, okay, sure. And 55 minutes later, whatever it was, we had just been completely transported and we had just really questioned had we seen a play? Like, was that a play? It didn’t have all the things that we were taught were in plays, but it absolutely was a theatrical experience. And of course it’s a play. So that was hugely influential to me in every aspect of all my theatre life. Thanks for that one, by the way. I forgot you directed that.

Claire’s show was one of the things that made me think it was possible. At the same time, I saw a dress rehearsal of Robert Lepage’s Elsinore. Which was three hours long and a solo Hamlet. But the total extreme of genius Quebec theatre. Video cameras on the end of the frame.

A: The opposite of sitting in a chair. 

R: The opposite. And so when I walked out of that three and a half hour dress rehearsal, at which one point Polonius slid through a giant ear-

A: You said ear?

R: Ear. A giant ear that Polonius uses like a fun slide. That was cut, so that just shows you Quebec Theatre, right? If that was a show in Toronto at the time, the whole show would have been about the ear, because that would have been the entire budget. So, and it was a solo show, but there were guys, like he had five or six helpers running around doing all of it. And when I left, I thought, wow, that’s like quintessential Quebecois genius sort of theatre, but what would the Anglophone antithesis be? Oh, it would be the version where it’s one person, but it has nothing, none of that stuff. It only has the words, and the space, and the audience like Clare.

A: But also like the original Shakespeare, which didn’t have anything but a natural environment. 

R: Exactly. And then the final inspiration was Kurt Reis, who was an acting teacher, a director too for many years. Kurt Reis taught us for many years at the National Theatre School, our kind of foundational acting training. He had mentioned that there was a story that when Richard Burton had come to Toronto to perform Hamlet at the O’Keefe Centre in the Gielgud directed production, that would transfer to Broadway with the great Hume Cronyn, Canada’s own in it, that Burton came to Canada to a press conference. And in the press conference he did a reading of Hamlet where he played all the roles, and supposedly it was spellbinding, and that had caught my attention, too.

So those three things all happened to me at the National Theatre School, and they all became inspiration of the thing. And one of the other cool things we’re going to do in this process is that we’re having a screening of a documentary that my friend made about this between 2000 and 2006, and that sort of fills in some of the blanks of this stuff.

A: And you’re not just bringing it back as a fundraiser. When you bring it back as an artist, there’s going to be something different about it. The story that’s going to impact you, if not us, are you anticipating what that could be or are you waiting to see?

R: When we made the documentary, I interviewed different actors who played Hamlet. And when I interviewed the late John Neville in probably one of the last plays he ever did, which was Twelfth Night at Soulpepper when I was in the Soulpepper Company in 2000, he said to me, I asked everybody I interviewed what the play was about to them and he said to me, “Hamlet is about the disillusionment of youth.” And when he told me that at 25, I kind of nodded and went, “Oh yeah, cool, that sounds right.” And he was in his 70s when he told me that.

And now that I’m in my 50s, I just think about how much that resonates with me more than it did when he told me that. So my whole understanding of the play has continued to evolve and the chance to bring it back into the original lab and see how it feels is really cool.

A: And that confronts its usual description by those of us in the business as play without action. The opposite of action in a way. So, like, that’s a discovery play.

R: It is action-packed as far as I’m concerned, and I also think it’s really funny.

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Hamlet (solo) runs November 6-8 at Theatre Passe Muraille in the backspace. 

You can find tickets or donate here: https://www.passemuraille.ca/hamlet-solo/ 

For Emerging and young artists, there is a screening of the Hamlet (solo) Documentary on October 26th at 8pm, sign up here for a chance to win tickets to Hamlet (solo) and a conversation with Raoul and your peers.