Back to the Future

Thoughts on shakespeare
the stratford Festival
The National Post

Earlier this year. I chaired a panel, all of whose members have ended up pursuing careers different from, but related to, those they had originally envisaged. One of its members was Antoni Cimolino, general director of the Stratford Festival Theatre. Most of his working-life has been spent at Stratford, and in the early '90s he was an actor there, scoring some notable roles: Romeo to Megan Follows's Juliet and Laertes to Stephen Ouimette's Hamlet. But then he found that while onstage, his concentration was wandering. This is not a desirable quality in an actor; given the propensity of both Romeo and Laertes to engage in duels, it could even have been a physically dangerous one.

So Cimolino turned to directing, which both permits and demands a wider view of the whole process, and from there increasingly into administration. He was the right-hand man of Stratford's late artistic director, Richard Monette, and when Monette retired, he was promoted to the newly created position he holds now. The initial plan was that he would work in concert with a trio of artistic directors; after last year's well-publicized (though still largely mysterious) disagreements, the three were reduced to one, Des McAnuff.

"Des," said Cimolino, when I spoke to him recently over dinner and, later, by phone, "chooses the plays, the actors, the directors." But it isn't as if Cimolino has renounced all artistic interests. He says he doesn't miss acting but does miss directing; and this season, after abstaining for a year, he's returning to that role with Batholomew Fair, by Shakespeare's critic, eulogist, rival and drinking buddy, Ben Jonson.

It's a bold choice. This will apparently be the 400-year-old play's professional premiere; when the British director William Gaskill, an old mentor of Cimolino's, was told about it, his reaction was "good luck." It's a detailed, sprawling down-and-dirty realistic comedy of a kind far removed from Shakespeare. For one thing, as Cimolino notes, it tells you far more about Puritans -- the progressives, however uncomfortable, of their time. Speaking of "the brilliance in Jonson," he says what a thrill and a challenge it's been for the actors to "immerse themselves in the language, and in a very different view of London." It's almost a Jacobean documentary, so it's encouraging that Cimolino, unlike some recent British directors, is doing it in period.

The plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are an obvious way for Stratford to extend its repertoire, and since I've been saying so for years, I'm obviously pleased to find Cimolino, with McAnuff's encouragement, going that route. The plays don't even have to be English; one of the treats of last season was the Spanish classic Fuente Ovejuna, which some customers, when placing their orders, referred to as "that play with all the vowels" but which they enjoyed when they got there.

"People were extremely moved by that play," says Cimolino. "In terms of Western thought, it's an important defence of average people. There's a direct line to Beaumarchais" -- the French playwright whose Marriage of Figaro prefigured the Revolution. Cimolino has an impressively wide range of cultural reference; Monette once divided Stratford's directors into the showmen and the intellectuals, and Cimolino, despite his image as an organization man, is one of the intellectuals. He envisages "more work from Shakespeare's contemporaries, from the Greeks, a broader range of European classics, work from non-Western culture," naming, as an example, the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore. "We're the national theatre of a diverse population."

That kind of exploration involves risk, of course, and therefore money: Stratford this year is visibly drawing in its horns. There are only three Shakespeares this season, one of them at the Avon. Cimolino points out that this isn't unprecedented: "In 2000, we only did two." (He has the dates at his fingertips.) But the fact remains: Last year, when Stratford put "Shakespeare" back in its title, it made a great fuss over having five of his plays on the Festival stage and banishing musicals to the Avon. This year, West Side Story is in the main house. That may be good, bad or indifferent, but it's a change.

Of course, it's about funding. Stratford, battered by its own economy, and the world's, announced at one point that it was cancelling eight performances. These have now been restored, thanks to a $3-million grant from the federal government, and another $500,000 from Ontario. "Our forecast," says Cimolino, sounding cautious, "is pointing towards break-even." All this welcome money, though, comes out of tourism budgets; it's meant for marketing productions, not for creating them.

Support for that comes from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council. Their combined contribution is $2.5-million, amounting to 4% of total revenue, which, Cimilino says, is "with the greatest respect, highly inadequate." This isn't just compared to the subsidized companies in the U. K. "Canadian Stage receives more support than we do, with a much smaller operation. We're the largest theatre in North America, and -- in percentage terms -- the least funded." He sees the arts councils' attitude as "how little funding can we give them, and still have them survive?" He's probably right.

He's also right that, whatever the vagaries of particular seasons, the festival is "a precious asset -- we should be making the most of it. We attract hundreds of thousands of audiences from all over the world." It's a myth, apparently, that American audiences ("half of them from Michigan") only support the musicals: "They can see those at home. They come for the classics."

They even, he says, enjoy Canadian plays. With more financial security, Stratford could do more new plays, more unfamiliar classics, extend rehearsal periods, tour productions (even to Toronto), and expand its educational programs, which include "teaching Shakespeare to teachers."

Above all, it can preserve and nurture its acting company, "the single greatest resource for acting of Shakespeare in the world," with the kind of continuity that has long since ceased to exist in the U. K. Seeing an actor like the late William Hutt "changes a young actor's idea of what the possibilities are. If there isn't a place for a Bill Hutt to work, then we're all the poorer for that."

And on a final inspirational note: "I don't think actors are as good as they can be, unless they tackle Shakespeare. He beggars our best talents but exalts them as well."