Sir Christopher Ondaatje died on the morning of 20 July 2026, at the age of 93. There is no version of the Chester Playhouse that exists without him.
He gave on a scale that put his name on a wing of the National Portrait Gallery in London and on a gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum. He could have chosen anywhere. He chose, again and again, to come back here.
In the fall of 1987 he bought the building that had opened in 1938 as a movie house and later gave it a new name: the Chester Playhouse. Five years later he did the more unusual thing. He gave it away, handing the building outright to the Chester Theatre Council, the volunteer led charity that still runs it today. He could have put his own name on it. He named it for the village instead.
He funded renovations across three decades, including the rebuild that brought us back after the fire in 2021. The Sir Christopher Ondaatje Theatre Foundation, which bears his name, quietly steadies everything we do.
This week the Playhouse is full of children. Campers are rehearsing The Reluctant Dragon, a play about how there is nothing more fearsome than being who you are. Others are learning to belt a Broadway number, make movie magic, or play a very persuasive cat. Some are here on our No Financial Barriers funding, which is housed in his Foundation. Every one of them is doing it in a building he bought and handed to this community.
On our outside wall hangs a bronze plaque bearing a poem he wrote, called Daydream. In it he runs through every place a man of his means might have chosen, a Highland estate, Bermuda, Bay Street, England, all of Europe, and turns each one down, until he arrives at the only place he actually wanted to be: down to Chester, Nova Scotia, by the sea. He spent a lifetime being told what a man like him ought to want, and wrote a poem about wanting something smaller and truer instead. Our campers are working on that same lesson in rehearsal right now.
Thank you, Sir Christopher. We wouldn’t be who we are without you.
