It's Curtains for Actors' Director; The Stratford Festival Bids Farewell to Richard Monette

THoughts on Shakespeare: This Rough Magic
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The Stratford Festival said semi-official farewells to Richard Monette in a gala performance on Sept. 17. I call them semi-official because, obviously, Monette's 14-year term of office as Stratford's artistic director doesn't come to an end until the current season does, at the beginning of November. But there are new shows to open, so the Monette regime has had its say.

No one attending that gala could have been left in any doubt that it was, whatever its ups and downs, an engaging and successful say. Its conclusion has been further marked by the publication of Monette's memoir, This Rough Magic (Stratford Festival, $39.95), "as told to" David Prosser, Stratford's director of literary services. (Prosser has done an excellent job; the book reads fluently, and sounds like Monette talking.) The book officially stops short when Monette gets the top job—it's supposed to be the story of how he got there, not what he did there—but in fact the preceding chapters are littered with flashes-forward, as when an incident from the past, or a play previously directed or acted in, reminds him of one that cropped up again during his own reign. Each chapter has as its title a phrase from Shakespeare: "Poor naked wretches" headlines Monette's fascinating account of his stint in the London cast of Oh! Calcutta!.

He describes, with retrospective sour amusement, the sudden crippling stage fright that overtook him while appearing in Toronto in 1998 and that effectively put paid to what was then one of the best acting careers in Canada. It has since subsided enough to allow him to make one acting appearance (successfully, in Filumena) during his Stratford reign, but only one. For all that, he has been very much an actors' director—or an actor-as-director—and the gala was, in the way of things, primarily an actors' testimonial. It glowed with laughter and affection.

The main complaint might be that there wasn't much Shakespeare on view for an evening commemorating an era at a Shakespearean theatre and mounted on the Festival Theatre platform stage, which was built for Shakespearean purposes (and which Monette himself has accurately described as the Festival's most vital asset). There were no performances of the big speeches. I suspect this might have been different if Bill Hutt had lived, but, as it was, all we got was a montage of lines from the plays that Monette himself has directed. This kind of thing can be embarrassingly precious, but David Latham arranged these extracts cunningly so that one fed logically into the next, and then seized gleefully on those that might have direct relevance to the dedicatee himself, who was handily seated in a front row, stage left. Scott Wentworth relishingly reeled off Falstaff's unblushing defence of his own moral character. Walter Borden, looking straight at the artistic director who's about to be succeeded by a triumvirate, delivered himself of Lear's intention to divide in three his kingdom.

In fact, the show, directed by Andrey Tarasiuk, was remarkably free of bloat, bombast or unearned sentiment. Christopher Plummer and Martha Henry delivered tributes. Peter Donaldson, shrouded in a parka, announced in stentorian tones "you arrive in the snow, and you leave in the snow," before presiding over a disrespectful conspectus of Monette's rehearsal techniques. Dan Chameroy revealed an unexpected side of his talents with a Monette impersonation that, for a moment, had us all fooled. Lucy Peacock, who has spent her entire career at Stratford and seems in the last couple of years to have entered on a brilliant new chapter of it, sang ‘Before the Parade Passes By’, from Hello, Dolly!, and delivered authentic musical-comedy goosebumps. These were only topped by Brian Bedford and Seana McKenna reprising the balcony scene from Private Lives and providing a virtual master class, not just in the acting of Coward but of emotion-flecked high comedy in general.

Also, a penguin, currently starring in Monette's production of The Comedy of Errors, crossed the stage bearing a sign saying "the critics hated it; the audiences loved it." All good fun on this particular night, but I cling to the belief that the audience might have loved it even more if the laughs had had anything to do with the play that the author wrote. There's a far better defence of Monette's brand of populism in the book, where he remarks that "with few exceptions" (I'm glad he said that) "the critics turned up their noses at my decision, in Henry IV, to explore the comedy inherent in the scenes with Hotspur." As he says, "discontinuity of character, of style, of tone, is one of the hallmarks of Shakespeare's genius." He's far more sensitive to text than most reviewers have given him credit for.

There have been missteps in the Monette regime (some choices in middlebrow modern plays and "family experiences" have been shockers), but the full record has been overwhelmingly positive. Reverting to Henry IV, he says at the book's end (admittedly in parenthesis), "Future artistic directors, take note: I may have a Falstaff in me yet." That's a piece of casting that's occurred to many people in the past few years, contemplating the man's rumbustious voice and personality. (The last, by his own admission, self-created; he grew up shy and troubled.) It's good to know that he agrees. Good, too, that he contemplates more acting. At the end of the evening—just before an appropriate rendition of the title song from Camelot led by Tom McCamus—Antoni Cimilino, Monette's second-in-command and his successor as supremo, stressed that this was not necessarily goodbye; he also remarked on the love that had welled up through the entire night. That is what you would expect on such an occasion, but it was no less moving for that.