Richard Monette is wrapping up his final season as the Stratford Festival's longest-serving artistic director. (David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada)
By rights, this should be a golden summer for Richard Monette. The longest-serving artistic director of the Stratford Festival is retiring after 14 seasons, leaving behind a legacy that includes a fourth theatre (the 260-seat Studio), an acting school and a financially profitable operation. He’s being feted at a gala in September featuring such Stratford alumni as Christopher Plummer and Brent Carver, his memoir is coming out and his final season is doing bang-up business at the box office.
Yet reviews for the two plays he’s directed to end his tenure – Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband – have been brutal, the critics adopting a weary tone that suggests they can’t wait for him to shove off. Nor has his health been kind to him. Arriving for a lunch interview at a popular Stratford café, he moves slowly and stiffly, tortured by back pain, and he strikes one as much older than his 63 years: grey and tired, his voluptuous actor’s baritone – a voice tailor-made for Shakespeare – sounding, at least on this occasion, gruff and strained.
However, once he begins talking, his discomfort seems to dissipate and his soft grey eyes flash with the mischief that has marked (and, according to his critics, marred) his directing style at the festival. It becomes clear that he has no use for the professional journalists who comment on his work, nor is he about to apologize for his love of the cheap laugh. At one point in his over-the-top staging of The Comedy of Errors, an incongruous penguin waddles across the Avon Theatre’s stage, wearing a sandwich-board sign that says “For the critics” – Monette’s way of figuratively flipping the bird at his detractors before they’ve even filed their reviews.
It was, ironically, that same broad comic touch, in his hit Fellini-esque version of The Taming of the Shrew in 1988, that first made critics and audiences realize that Monette, already an established festival actor, was also a talented director. Two years later, his delightful production of As You Like It, starring Lucy Peacock and set in 18th-century New France, confirmed for many that Monette had the fresh blood and fresh ideas Stratford was in dire need of. It was also about time that a Canadian who’d risen through the ranks of the festival took over the top job, which in the past had gone mostly to expatriate Brits.
Today, however, there seems to be a critical consensus that Monette has overstayed his time. And as he spoke, he appeared more than ready to, in the words of King Lear, “shake all cares and business” and confer them “on younger strengths.”
Q: What made you decide that it was time to leave Stratford?
Brian Bedford stars in King Lear, one of four Shakespeare plays at this year's Stratford Festival. (David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada)
A: Well, I’ve done everything that I set out to do. There are always some regrets, but basically I did what I wanted to do. And I’ve been at it a long time – my back was giving out, I was tired. This is a very difficult job. Very. It’s 24-7. And strangely, for a public service job, you’re attacked by the critics, you’re attacked by the [arts] councils if you make money, you’re attacked by the community if you don’t. You have to be real tough.
A: …new-play development, and the Family Experience [a program for families emphasizing child-accessible plays like this year’s To Kill a Mockingbird] – for which we have been much maligned. But I’ll tell you, if you don’t take care of your future audiences, you won’t have any.
Q: Of all these achievements, is there one you’re especially proud of?
A: I think what I’m most proud of is the Birmingham Conservatory. It allows us to train new actors, and directors – the young ones. And they’re the future of this place as much as the audience.
A: I can tell you that the ones I’m genuinely most fond of are the ones the critics disliked. That was invariably true. So, go figure.
A: Camelot, The Miser, Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV.
A: I do [theatre] for people, so I don’t see what’s wrong with having a populist touch. You certainly can’t do it for a critic – you don’t know what he’s eaten for supper and how that’s going to affect what he writes. You never do anything for the critics.
A: Yes, but there was also a practical reason for it. In that scene, the character of the abbess appears at the top of the set and I wanted her to reappear instantly down below. I needed a gag [to cover that transition]. I wracked my brains. Then I thought of the penguin – because there are so many famous penguin films right now, and I have a goddaughter who collects plush penguins. So I thought, I’ll do this for her, and it’ll be very surprising at the end of the play to find a penguin in Ephesus [the ancient Roman city where the play is set]. It got a laugh [in previews], but it didn’t get a huge laugh, so then I pinned that sign on it. It will be remembered, because all the critics hated it. When all the critics hate something, you know that that’s what the audience will remember.
Q: The fact that the festival was recently renamed the Stratford Shakespeare Festival suggests a perception that Shakespeare has been playing second fiddle to the big musicals and other types of plays here.
Nora McLellan and Barrie Wood co-star in Oklahoma!, this summer's big musical at Stratford. (David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada)
A: I don’t understand that. We’ve done seven [Shakespeares] a year some times – you can’t do more than that. Five is a more reasonable number. And they always say I brought the musical to Stratford. Well, in fact, year after year, I’ve talked to people of your ilk and said, “Look, the full-blown musical came to Stratford at the Avon Theatre in 1960, by Tyrone Guthrie, our founding director.” And I didn’t move the musical from the Avon to the [larger] Festival Theatre, it was [predecessor] John Neville who did that – and a brilliant economic choice it was, too.
A: Well, we’ll see. Antoni Cimolino [the festival’s new general director] tells me that it’s going very well. And it’s Antoni who’s going to hang on to the [administrative] stuff. I wish them well. It’s a huge job; I can’t imagine who would really want to do it, actually.
A: I had two things going for me as an artistic director: one was my love for the Stratford Festival, and the other was that I sort of grew up here. I’d been in the company for years, so I understood a lot of the ropes.
A: There are many of us that do. They’re usually not critics. [Laughing.] The audiences come back year after year. My first experience here was when I was 15. I was overcome by the shape of the [Festival] theatre – it was very new, revolutionary back then. I was just in awe of the space itself, and then at the acting and how good everything was – the props, the costumes. I was determined to become an actor in this company. I loved the whole idea behind it: doing repertory, Shakespeare and the classics. And I believe, as a Canadian, because we’re a new country, you need to know the old stories. And nobody else does the classics like this [in Canada]. I think it’s a very important – a great theatre.
Q: But were there times while running the festival when you just wanted to get away from it?
Richard Monette's production of The Comedy of Errors stars, from left, Brigit Wilson, Tom McCamus and Allegra Fulton. (David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada)
A: Yes – about every 20 minutes. Because there are so many moments of crisis in a day. At first, of course, I wasn’t used to problem solving. The first time one came up, I remember thinking, “Oh my God, what are we going to do about this?” And then I realized: this was going to happen every day.
A: The answer is “yes.” Every artistic director would like our work to be seen elsewhere. But it’s so expensive to tour. The actors are expensive, the unions are expensive. And we don’t get any funding. We get the smallest portion of funding, equivalent to our budget, of any arts group in Canada. [The festival, which has a budget of about $53 million, receives $2.2 million in government grants.] I’m amazed that we’re still going.
A: I’ve written a book with David Prosser, our literary manager, called This Rough Magic – which is a quote from The Tempest. So I’ll try and flog that.
A: Oh, I guess I’ll be remembered as the person who made the festival artistically and economically sound for a period of time. That is, if I’m remembered at all.
A gala honouring Richard Monette takes place Sept. 17 at Stratford’s Festival Theatre. Monette’s memoir, This Rough Magic, is available at the theatre’s store and online.
The Stratford Festival’s 2007 season continues through Nov. 4.
Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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