In this Gatherings Roadshow talk, Dr. Stephen Johnson reflects on the power—and the fragility—of memory in shaping our earliest encounters with performance. As part of a broader oral history project collecting “first gatherings” from artists and scholars, Johnson shares two personal stories of attending the Stratford Festival.
The first is from childhood, at just four years old. Led by his parents, he remembers “walking up a hill with a lot of other people towards a round and imposing building.” Flashes of the event remain: the glint of strings of pearls, the largest crowd he had ever seen, the darkness of the theatre, a hat adorned with feathers. These fragments—light, movement, texture—become their own kind of archive, preserving not a full record but an emotional and sensory one.
The second story returns to Stratford during high school, where he attended King Lear starring William Hutt. In the middle of the storm scene—thunder, flashes, rain—Hutt abruptly halted the performance to announce, “Someone threw a spitball on this stage.” The moment lodged itself in memory as sharply as any scripted line.
Johnson’s stories invite us to ask: What do we remember about our first encounters with theatre, and how do these imperfect recollections shape our personal performance histories?
