The 'Insider' Deal With Stratford's New Director

thoughts on shakespeare
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

On Sunday it was announced that Antoni Cimolino will be the next artistic director of the Stratford Festival. This was not a surprise. What was surprising, or at least unexpected, is that his regime will commence next season. It had previously been thought that 2013 would be a transitional year with the current director, Des McAnuff, working alongside his successor and formally handing over at the end of the season.

In a speech on Saturday at Stratford's annual general meeting, McAnuff outlined the reasons for speeding up the process: Cimolino "is an insider. He doesn't require an extended period - the way an outsider would."

He expanded on this when I spoke with both men on the phone on Sunday: "Antoni, besides being politically very astute and creative, has what I call institutional memory."

Indeed Cimolino, who has been at Stratford for 25 years - first as an actor, then as both a director and an administrator - has a better claim than almost anyone else to having the Festival in his bones.

It's both a good and a threatening time to be taking over Canada's biggest institutional theatre. Stratford finished this past season with a surplus of just under $53,000, which is more than most theatres could claim but is still not that much money in the real world. It certainly pales in comparison to the million-dollar debt that has just led the Vancouver Playhouse to close its doors: an event that has shocked the whole tightly knit network of Canadian theatre.

McAnuff remarked that "our brilliant Chris Newton" who makes a long-overdue directorial debut at Stratford this year with Much Ado About Nothing, "grew up at the Playhouse. The main problem is the recession. A lot of institutions are in danger. There are things we probably would have done at Stratford if we'd been working together in flush times."

"A lot of care has been taken on every side with budgeting and so on," Cimolino added, "but then I'm sure Max [Reimer] in Vancouver has done the same. The lion's share of our revenue comes from the box office - which works well in good times, less well in bad. The whole level of support, both private and public, needs re- examining. Our donors have been amazing - but they've been inspired by the quality of our work."

Stratford's accumulated prestige - 60 years' worth - probably doesn't hurt either. Or, as Cimolino puts it, "we're standing on the shoulders of many artists before us."

Those artists would include Michael Langham and John Hirsch, the two earlier artistic directors whom McAnuff names as inspirations and who indirectly caused "the idea of this job to cross my mind way back when - in the late '70s, early '80s."

So when the job came up for McAnuff six years ago, "I didn't have a choice. I had to do it. I continue to enjoy every moment I've had at Stratford." And there is still, apparently, a "very exciting" though undisclosed project that he'll be doing there in 2013.

The biggest hit of his tenure has undoubtedly been his production of Jesus Christ Superstar, about to reopen in New York. Even if you find it ironic that a self-described Shakespeare festival should make its greatest splash with a revival of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, it's impossible not to feel a thrill of pride when McAnuff speaks of "28 Canadians creating beacons of light on 52nd Street."

"The company," Cimolino says, "is the great strength we have here. We perform Shakespeare like no other company in the world. I don't see the same skills in England or in New York."

I'd agree, and when you consider that every year in Toronto I see a dozen more actors who ought to be at Stratford, the only problem would seem to be that of finding roles for all the talent. Directors are another matter. Stratford in the past few years has employed some of our best younger directors, but not in Shakespeare. There are directors around who should be given the chance, at the Tom Patterson or in the Studio if not immediately on the main stage; some of them are training in the new Michael Langham workshop, which Cimolino cites as an example of "enhancement and growth" under McAnuff.

Cimolino himself has a solid record as a director of Shakespeare, stretching back to Stratford's last Twelfth Night. He also took Stratford on one of its too-rare excursions into the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries with a remarkably lucid account of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, and last year surpassed himself with an unsparing staging of The Grapes of Wrath.

His Calgary production of Lucy Prebble's Enron was, by all accounts, equally strong; which sounds like a good omen for a director who wants, he says, "to do new ambitious plays of a classic scope."

There's certainly room at Stratford for expanding the repertoire, old and new. The first thing Cimolino said when I asked him his plans for the future was that he was that he wanted to "continue and build our momentum in classics. The spoken word is at the heart of what we do."