Director and playwright Martin Hunter, who turns 80 this year, pops up almost everywhere in Canadian stage history and frequently in the arts world generally. Readers of Still Hunting, a companion to his 2008 memoir, Young Hunting, will find individuals as diverse as Edward Albee, Scott Symonds, R.H. Thomson, Elspeth Cameron, Stan Bevington, and Mrs. Brooke Astor, the legendary doyenne of New York high society, stumbling in from the wings and traipsing across the stage of the author’s life.

Hunter was a rich kid whose family owned the Buntin Reid Paper Company in Toronto. He neatly sketches the small piece of downtown – which the Great Fire of 1904 had transformed into an area of cheap office space – where most of the city’s book publishers, newspapers, paper suppliers, graphic arts houses, and commercial printers were jumbled together. This community lasted into the mid-1960s, by which time the author had given up a business career – and unwavering heterosexuality – for a life in the professional theatre and the upper reaches of bohemia.

Hunter flourished first as a playwright, but this talent was gradually overshadowed by his skill as a director. A key supporter in this transition was Robertson Davies, whom Hunter returns to several times in the book, often with considerable but careful frankness. “Even in the early ’70s,” Hunter writes, “it was received opinion that his plays were no good.” But while Davies wrote “neo-Shavian comedies, whose characters were sometimes two-dimensional caricatures who expressed too obviously the opinions of the playwright, [they] were at the same time colourful, witty, and representative of the social structure of the day.”

Hunter’s cast is enormous and not always easy to keep straight. The writing is packed with facts but also strangely lyrical (a neat trick). The book is not slavishly chronological, and although the chapters all fit together, some give the suggestion of being set pieces that could easily stand alone. This is especially true of a beautifully written account of 1970s London, a place Hunter and his wife, Judy, eventually abandoned in favour of Toronto. Hunter quotes Judy as saying she would miss “Harrods’s and Fortnum’s and the Café de Paris. But that’s not life. Life’s the kids and school and our parents. Life’s Eaton’s and hockey practices and cast parties and summers at Marshall’s Bay. You know that as well as I do.”