August 4, 1926- February 25, 1985
Director Hastings Saltus was a major figure in Bermuda theatre for more than three decades.
He has been called the godfather of black theatre in Bermuda because he staged often provocative plays by influential African American playwrights during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
While it became his mission to direct such plays as In White America, Raisin in the Sun and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf—works which he said black Bermudian audiences could identify with—he did not restrict himself to black productions.
All told, he directed more than 25 plays, including works by Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Terence Rattigan and Gilbert and Sullivan.
Saltus, who founded Studio Theatre Company in 1960 and Theatre Associates Bermuda in 1972, also mined previously untapped acting talent.
Ruth Thomas is perhaps his best-known example. She made her debut in 1965 in the Studio’s first production, In White America, and went on to become one of the Island’s most versatile amateur actresses. Patricia Pogson Nesbitt has also credited him with encouraging her to become a director.
Saltus was the son of Frederick and Julia Saltus. His father was a harness maker and a storyteller while his mother was an amateur actress who did dramatic poetry readings. He was the second of three children. His siblings were Frederick Saltus and Barbara Lightbourne.
He attended Northlands School, The Berkeley Institute and won a government scholarship to attend Howard University in Washington DC, where he studied to became an English and history teacher.
At Howard, his passion for the theatre emerged after he became involved with drama to overcome his shyness.
He told the Mid-Ocean News in an interview in 1980: “I soon discovered that I could roar. I could direct people. I could organise.”
On his return to Bermuda, he wanted to join a drama group, but the only established organization in then segregated Bermuda was the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society.
He teamed up with Berkeley Institute teacher Merle Brock Swan Williams to establish the Companion Theatre in 1956, and staged plays such as Hamlet, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version to enthusiastic reviews. Williams was producer, Saltus was usually director, and sometimes he acted as well.
In 1960, he founded the Studio Theatre Company (and Studio Foundation for the Arts as the parent organization) and put on The Cocktail Party and Lady Windermere’s Fan the following year.
Subsequent productions included In White America in 1965—the play in which Ruth Thomas made her debut—A Raisin in the Sun, which he directed for the Berkeley Educational Society in 1969, The Amen Corner in 1970, and Ceremonies in Dark Old Men in 1971.
In the late 1960s, Saltus began an association with the BMDS. He acted in The Room in 1967 and was production manager of The Crucible and the Christmas pantomime Dick Whittington and his Cat the following year. Also in 1968, he directed a workshop production of What Shall We Tell Caroline?
He parted company with the BMDS, however, because he did not get the opportunity to direct a major production.
Having directed several African American plays by then, he discovered that they filled an important niche, because black Bermudians “were seeing plays that related to them.”
He also found there was no shortage of acting talent.
“There is more talent than in an average American city but there is a lack of respect for ethnic artistic culture,” he told the Mid-Ocean News. “Everything is white culture oriented.”
Still, Saltus spread his theatrical wings wide. In 1970, he was production manager for Galileo, a play directed by the now famous English film director Mike Leigh for a Summer Arts Festival at City Hall. The play starred Bermudian film star Earl Cameron and Saltus’ protégé Ruth Thomas.
In 1972, Saltus established a new company Theatre Associates Bermuda under whose banner he directed Boesman and Lena, Sty of the Blind Pig, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Diary of Anne Frank.
In 1980, he directed Showboat for the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. The musical, which had a cast of 90 and was set in the American South, dealt with racial strife and had an interracial cast. Patricia Calnan, in her review for the Mid-Ocean News, wrote: “… Hastings Saltus has attained what might forgivably have been considered the impossible, bringing the whole production together to give the audience a moving and visually attractive version of this now classic show.”
While theatre was his first love, Saltus earned his living as a teacher. He taught at Purvis and Central School. In his later years, he worked in retail at Gibbons Company, as a freelance writer and a proofreader at The Royal Gazette.
He married fellow teacher the former Solange Maxwell, with whom he had three children John, Julia and Roiyah Saltus-Hendrickson, although the two later divorced.
In 1981, he was appointed artistic director of the US Navy Theatre at the US Naval Base, St. David’s and directed Witness for the Prosecution that year.
Saltus’ life revolved around the arts and intellectual pursuits. He was a member of the Bermuda Writers Club, the Bermuda Philosophical Society and served on the Bermuda Arts Council. He completed courses in arts administration and arts marketing from Harvard University during the 1970s.
He also worked with the Bermuda Youth Theatre 1975 summer programme, directing Wine In the Wilderness. The same year, he was invited to serve as a Western Hemisphere administrator for the second World Festival for African and Black Culture, held in Lagos, Nigeria.
From time to time, he brought in professional productions from overseas. They included Les Ballets Africains, a dance troupe from Guinea, which performed in 1971 to sold-out audiences, and the award-winning Home, which played in Bermuda in the 1980s with its original Broadway cast.
Saltus did not live to see his final production Nevis Mountain Dew performed. The show was in rehearsals in February 1985. On February 25, he was travelling home on the bus when he had a fatal heart attack. He was 58 years old.
Theatre Associates Bermuda went on with the show, presenting Nevis Mountain Dew in May in his memory.
Along with Louise Jackson, Byllee Lang and Joseph Richards, Saltus was an inaugural recipient of a Founders Award from the Bermuda Arts Council in 2001.
