[Candrama] Brian Paisley 1946-2026

[Day, Moira]

With the quiet passing of Brian Paisley in Puerto Escondido, Mexico on July 2nd, 2026, we lost not just a notable Canadian producer and writer of film, theatre and television, but another giant of the post-World War II Canadian alternative theatre - one whose roots ran deeply into the Western Canadian theatre scene while reverberating outwards to reshape the national and international scene as well. Our deepest condolences to Brian's family and friends - including his children, Stuart and Erinne Paisley, and their mothers, Ti Hallas and Julia Menard - and our thanks to all of you for sharing him with us all these years.

Born in Belfast, Ireland in 1946, Brian Paisley grew up in Vancouver and took his early theatre training at UBC.  He returned to Canada after a three-year hiatus that included teaching English and Drama in Britain and travelling in  Europe and Africa. In 1977, he established a theatre program at Northern Light College in Fort St. John in northeast British Columbia, and then, with Ti Hallas, went on to found Chinook Theatre, a touring company devoted to producing theatre for young audiences.

Chinook relocated to Edmonton, Alberta in the early 1980s; its new home in an old 1956 firehall (now the Varscona Theatre) just off Whyte Avenue, contributed to making the Old Strathcona district the heart of the Edmonton Fringe Festival after its founding in 1982. Given $50,000 by the City of Edmonton to come up with a summer theatrical project to replace an earlier summer Shakespeare festival, Paisley drew on the model of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to create a 5-venue festival featuring 45 shows in Edmonton's Old Strathcona district. During his nine years as producer, Paisley not only saw the meteoric rise of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival to the largest of its kind in North America, but helped establish similar summer Fringe Theatre Festivals at Victoria, Vancouver, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal. In the early 1990s, he returned to British Columbia to pursue a career in teaching, writing and producing for film, television, and theatre.

Honours have included honorary doctorates from Athabasca University (1990) and the University of Alberta (2023). He also received the Sterling Award for Outstanding Contribution to Edmonton Theatre (1991), Edmonton's City of Excellence Award (1991) and was inducted into Edmonton Cultural hall of Fame (2001). He also received the Confederation of Canada medal (1993), Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal (2012) and the Order of Canada (2010) which honoured him as a "cultural visionary who has left an indelible mark on Canadian theatre."

Those of us who grew up with the Edmonton Fringe Festival have an indelible memory of Brian's tall, lanky, bearded figure as a perpetual vortex of chaotic energy, passion, and creativity percolating out to every inch of the Festival site. My favorite memory of Brian is of an interview I did with him at Chinook theatre on July 31st, 1987. When I arrived to talk to him about the Fringe, there was a tremendous thunderstorm building up as I entered the theatre - in fact, the clouds had a strange greenish tinge and were circling in an odd way as we went downstairs to talk. The storm broke shortly afterwards, but we continued on with our interview, Brian expounding on the topic of all things Fringe with his usual gusto and eloquence, adjusted to a slightly higher volume, as hail, rain and winds pounded loudly away at the theatre outside (you can probably hear them as well as Brian on the tape.) It was sunny again when we went outside, but things looked "odd" - huge hailstones, broken branches, and grain blown in from farmer's fields, many kilometres out of town. It was only when I got home that I realized that the "thunderstorm" had actually been a F4 tornado.

That was Brian Paisley in a nutshell. It wasn't a thunderstorm that blew into Edmonton in the early 1980s; it was a creative tornado that swept well beyond the Chinook Theatre building to radically change the theatrical landscape outside it - arguably a revolution that is still unfolding.

Brian will be missed, but his legacy as "Father Fringe" lives on in the expanding whirlwind of the Fringe Theatre movement he founded, and the new stages and opportunities he built for so many others with his vision and hard work. The Fringe in Edmonton continues to post his words in their office: “Be curious. Be tenacious. Be ready. Be kind – be as human as you can be."

Surely words to live by, even now.

Moira

Dr. MOIRA DAY
Professor Emerita
Department of Drama
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, SK
S7N 5E2

780 466 8957 (message)
moira.day at usask.ca

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