How to Fix Stratford
May 25, 2008
John Colbourn - Toronto Sun
In the past few months, one could be forgiven for thinking the
Stratford
Festival had become, in Shakespeare's words, "a tale told
by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, signifying nothing."
After assuring us that the job of artistic director had grown
beyond the scope
of a single person, the festival last year turned over the artistic
reins to a
triumvirate comprising ex-pat theatrical wunderkind Des McAnuff,
international arts administrator Don Shipley and national dream
maker Marti
Maraden.
Today, on the eve of a new season planned by all three of them,
Stratford
finds itself once again in the hands of a single artistic director.
A part-time
artistic director, at that.
On March 15, Shipley and Maraden suddenly submitted their resignations.
There was friction between them and McAnuff. So today, Shipley
is gone,
Maraden is working out her directorial obligations, and sole
survivor McAnuff
is juggling his Stratford duties with those of a theatrical
empire that stretches
from California to Broadway to London's West End.
While everybody else tries to figure out just what the problem
is with
Canada's once-internationally renowned Shakespearean Festival,
director
general Antoni Cimolino, McAnuff and the fest's board of directors
are faced
with steering their listing ship through an ambitious season
-- and beyond --
while the winds of change batter at their sails.
All this suggests they could use a bit of advice from some of
Canada's most
seasoned theatrical navigators. And while Cimolino and company
might not
have the time to ask, what with the 56th edition of the festival
kicking off this
week, we did.
Here's what we found out.
BRIAN MacDONALD'S OPERETTAS and musicals were once the gold
standard for the Stratford Festival. A newly minted winner of
a Governor
General's Award, which he received at just about the same time
he became
an octogenarian, MacDonald remains an interested observer in
the goings-on
at Stratford.
Off the top, he says what the festival faces are many of the
same problems
afflicting most Canadian arts organizations -- a growing reliance
on private
funding, coupled with a widening generation gap. "Government
support and
government approval has shifted to corporate support and approval.
Corporations are now supporting the arts," he says.
That casts culture within the prism of "trade agreements
and arrangements
between banks," MacDonald says, which to young people can
be pretty dead
stuff.
"The anchor between the arts and young people has been
broken. They are
into their culture and they think it has no meaning to the older
culture, and
vice versa," he says.
Stratford does have its unique problems, MacDonald says, and
he is not shy
about naming them.
"I'd probably get a new (governing) board," he says.
"The board has made
some mistakes and hasn't reflected on the history and the need
for Stratford
to go back to its original mandate (of producing great Shakespeare)
-- and
until that is rethought, and until there are members of the
company at the
board meetings, I don't think much will change."
Few people even inside the company know who sits on the governing
board,
or how it operates, MacDonald says.
John Hirsch, artistic director from 1981-85, used to "rail"
against the fact that
the board worked in "anonymity" and was "never
held to accountability,"
MacDonald says.
Most of all, MacDonald thinks Stratford is caught in a vice
between declining
quality and rising prices.
In Stratford's golden days, MacDonald says "you would go
to see something
new by Robin Phillips, because there was quality -- and the
minute you drop
that and it is just another matinee, you lose something."
Mostly, what you lose is a young audience.
"Getting the youngsters there -- whether they're in their
teens, or 20s or early
30s -- it's getting them into the theatre at those prices."
IT SEEMS INEVITABLE that Robin Phillips' name should come up
in a
discussion of Stratford. It was under his often colourful stewardship
(1975-
80) that many feel the festival came of age.
Although Phillips never returned to Stratford during the just-completed
tenure
of artistic director Richard Monette (1993-2007), he has kept
a close eye on
things. While Phillips doesn't want to get into what he describes
as "the
horrors of the politics," he's got some pretty firm ideas
about the future of
Stratford and, indeed, the future of theatre.
"First of all, I believe in this thing called Shakespeare,"
Phillips says. "I think
he's one of the great thinkers and observers of humanity --
and he leads us,
in a very complex way, to an understanding of who and what we
are."
(Monette's most vocal critics complained that he neglected Shakespeare's
plays in raising the profile given to more commercial fare,
such as Broadway
musicals.)
In looking at Stratford's problems, Phillips points out that
theatre, in its
earliest forms, grew from the marketplace and insists that it
should still be
"an integral part of the barter and bargaining of daily
life," but he's concerned
that commerce and theatre have become uneasy bedmates.
"I think so much now is to do with getting it wrong, in
the sense of the
benefactors," he says. "Benefactors who lead you to
this devotion to the
bottom line. You can't just be interested in the bottom line.
There is a danger
to being given money and bailed out ... You get blinded by the
largesse."
That's why Phillips says so many theatres, Stratford included,
have lost sight
of the most important thing.
"The hard thing is, who are you doing it for?" Phillips
says. "It's very hard
when you run a place like Stratford to know for whom you are
doing it."
His answer, viewed through the prism of a Stratford board of
directors that
seems clearly besotted with McAnuff's Broadway credentials,
is both simple
and complex. "(Do it for) the school kid from Southwestern
Ontario," he says.
"The truth we do for him will reverberate for everyone."
AFTER RUNNING THE Shaw Festival -- Stratford Festival's principal
competition -- from 1979 to 2002, Christopher Newton has some
insights into
Stratford, and the ways it works and doesn't work well.
"I learned things when I was at Stratford," Newton
says. "(There were) things
that they were doing wrong that I could do right (at the Shaw)."
Back then and even more so today, Newton sees Stratford as a
victim of its
own success in many ways.
It has become a big company, he observes, "and these big
companies
become machines, and people get lost in the machine. There are,
and there
always have been, fantastic artists at Stratford, but more care
has been
taken of the machine than of the artists. And if artists are
lost, the ideas are
lost."
Like Phillips, Newton feels it is important to identify an audience
and play to
it. And he, too, feels that the audience is close to home.
"People have got the idea that art is for tourists,"
Newton says, in clear
bemusement. "Art is for ourselves."
THAT'S A THEME writ large in the thinking of Tony Nardi, who
lately has
been stirring things up in theatre with three monologues whose
questions go
to the very heart of the challenges Nardi sees facing Canadian
culture.
A highly respected actor, Nardi has been recast in the role
of cultural prophet
-- and he knows first hand that a prophet is often without honour
in his own
land.
Nardi sees the problems at Stratford, where he once served as
an
apprentice, as part of a national malaise.
Nardi recalls an incident during his apprenticeship, when established
members of the company objected to apprentices presenting their
audition
pieces on the stage of the Festival Theatre.
"They wanted to treat that Stratford stage like a sacred
place, forgetting that
in order to earn that, you had to be doing something (damned)
magical on
that stage."
And he says that snobbish attitude is still weighing things
down at Stratford.
"The ornamentation of that place speaks louder than the
human voice," Nardi
says. "It's become an infrastructure that doesn't allow
things to grow from the ground up."
Nardi sees the classics as just a starting point. "We won't
leave Shakespeare
behind, but we can add to that landscape with our own colours.
"The problem is that, as Canada, we have not personalized
the function of
theatre. What we've taken is blueprints from someone else's
work."
Nardi has no patience for those who say we are expecting too
much from
Canadian artists who are just finding their way.
"We don't say, 'Don't be too hard on these doctors, because
we are a young
country,' " he counters. "The problem here is that
we are just playing around.
If we took our work as seriously as doctors take theirs, we'd
have much
better theatre."
And if we aren't seeing our own colours represented on the Stratford
stage,
or any other, Nardi thinks we all have not just a right, but
a duty, to speak
out on Canadian theatre -- just like him.
"I'm not a pessimist. I'm an optimist," he insists,
counter-intuitively. "The
people who see a car without a wheel and mention it, are optimists.
A person
that says: 'Okay, have a good trip,' is a pessimist.
"The act of theatre should be one of the most sacred things,"
he says in
conclusion -- and it's clear he's talking about everybody in
the theatre, from
the guy in the lighting booth to the actors to the kid in the
cheap seats.
"Theatre should be as important as food or shelter, something
that people
can't live without."
IN ESSENCE, WHAT all of these greatly talented artists seem
to be saying
is this: When it comes to theatre, the wisdom of the ages isn't
rocket
science, nor should it be -- and anyone who tries turning it
into a science
risks losing sight of what it's all about.
Because, finally, theatre isn't about comfort, or profit or
even culture. It's
about bringing art, artist and audience together in a way that
challenges
them all, even while it renews them.
The rest signifies nothing.
