Books on Canadian theatre are scarce enough that any addition to our slim library is a welcome one. Maurice Podbrey’s as-told-to memoir of starting and running Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, however, outstays its welcome depressingly soon, right around the time the expatriate South African arrives to teach at the National Theatre School in 1966. After three years of pedagogy, the actor-director becomes an artistic director, taking over the old city’s former stock exchange and beginning what would become 28 years of programming. In French Revolutionary style, Podbrey refers to these years as Season One, Season Two, and so on, right on up to the recently completed Season 28, his last. He tracks these for the reader with intermittently interesting bits from his diary. The years between are sampled with randomly arranged recollections that offer little more than name-dropping anecdotes and capsule histories of artists Podbrey discovered, employed, battled, and survived.

The brushes-with-greatness stuff is especially cloying. “I once saw Paul Robeson play Othello,” he writes, for no other reason than to let the reader know that he once saw Paul Robeson play Othello. If the fact were supported by a meaningful analysis of the performance, the boast could be excused; but instead of a discussion of the actor’s craft from a man who elsewhere proclaims his love of actors, we get sentiment. “I’ll never forget him,” he says of the fondly remembered Errol Slue, playing Mephistopheles – but why isn’t exactly clear.

On the “I-saw-them-first” front, there are tales of being the first to recognize the talents of playwrights Judith Thompson, David Fennario, and Vittorio Rossi. You can’t blame the guy for wanting to take credit where it’s due, but you can expect a man who was around in the formative years of the country’s indigenous theatre (the late 1960s and early 1970s) to have deeper insights than this: “For some reason there was a sudden outbreak of theatre across the country.”

Here and there in what amounts to an annotated curriculum vitae are stories that hint of the book that might have been. The opening night performance of a play by Peter Desbarats about a racist incident at a Montreal university, for example, was disrupted by what Podbrey calls “Black Power activists” who occupied the stage at intermission, thus becoming part of the production. The premiere of Fennario’s Balconville is recalled with the sort of vivid detail that is sadly missing from the surrounding pages. It’s strange – for a book that addresses at length the need for direction, it is entirely lacking one of its own.