Eye for Actors and a Nose for the Text

Thoughts on Shakespeare: Remembering Richard Monette
Obituary
The National Post

I wish I'd seen Richard Monette's Hamlet or his Prince Hal, or the performance in Hosanna that made him a star. A giant picture of him as that sad, funny drag queen hangs in the lobby of Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, and it makes a wonderful mental contrast to the image of the orotund actor-manager who directed the Stratford Festival for a record-setting 14 years. The latter was a mask that grew pretty close to his face but one that he wore, I suspect, with a mischievous self-awareness. Nobody, despite the sculpted tones, would ever have called him pompous.

I knew Monette mostly as a director: of the Festival and of many of its plays. (I also knew him as a genial, generous and encouraging friend.) In both these directorial guises, he became to an extent the victim of his own publicity and his own success. Because his first successful production was of The Taming of the Shrew, he became typed as a director not just of comedy but of farce, and accused of loading every play with irrelevant business. There was some occasional truth to that; in his final Shakespeare production, The Comedy of Errors, he seemed, perversely, to be going out of his way to prove the accusations true. Most of the time, though, his detractors were seeing in his work what they had programmed themselves to see.

He wasn't a director for concepts. He was one with a keen and sympathetic eye for actors, as you might expect, and with a keen nose for the text, as perhaps you wouldn't. In recent years, he did a fine exploratory job on Troilus and Cressida, and an especially accurate and entertaining one on Henry IV, Part 1; the latter was attacked for not keeping the "serious" scenes serious and the "comic" scenes comic, as if it were not the genius of that play not just to alternate those genres but to fuse them.

Some of his best productions weren't comedies at all; he may even have been better off when he didn't have those skills to fall back on. I remember his atmospheric Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his rowdy Inherit the Wind, and the more-than-stage-filling extravagance of The Three Musketeers. (All right, that was a kind of comedy, certainly an entertainment.) His King Lear was most memorable for William Hutt's great performance, but it was a fine account of the play in its own right. The first of the two Tempests he did with Hutt (Richard himself preferred the second, but he was wrong) was one of the best-balanced productions of that minefield of a play that I have seen. And it wasn't just, or even principally, the clown scenes.

The administrative achievement of Monette's that nobody denied was that he balanced the theatre's books. The corresponding accusation was that he did it at too high a price, watering down the repertoire with populist choices. I could have done myself without some of the middle-brow "family experience" plays; I also wish, much as I love musicals, that the festival hadn't become enslaved to them -- though that didn't start with the Monette regime and hasn't ended with it. What seems to have been forgotten is the canniness with which he balanced the predictable with the truly adventurous. Considering the praise Stratford has received for staging a Greek play, it's worth remembering that Monette mounted a whole season of them. Or that a few years ago he programmed five Shakespeares in a season, including some of the most obscure. Or that in the Studio, which he founded, he presided three seasons in a row over the premieres of Peter Hinton's insanely ambitious trilogy The Swanne.

I'm glad that he got to play a part in the current season as "interim director" of Michael Langham's beautiful production of Love's Labour's Lost, working on the text with young actors from the Conservatory that was another of his cherished innovations. I'm grieved that he never got to play the Falstaff that he and many others knew he had in him. (That would have been quite a comeback.) The farewell gala that the company mounted for him last year on the Festival stage left no doubt how much he was loved. He is certainly going to be mourned. And he was still young.

'WE CARE ABOUT ART, NOT ABOUT MONEY':

Robert Cushman discussed Richard Monette's ascension to Stratford's top artistic position in his 2002 book Fifty Seasons at Stratford (McClelland &Stewart/Madison Press):

The Canadian theatre -- more than the American, and far more than the British -- has smiled on the actor- director. Most of Stratford's artistic directors have been established professional actors. None of them, though, had quite the thespian credentials of Richard Monette.

Monette is the only Stratford chief to have worked his way steadily up within the organization. Between 1965 and 1987 he had acted in 15 different seasons, progressing from walk-ons to leads. He had won additional fame, or notoriety, at the tempestuous general meeting that followed the dismissal of the Gang of Four in 1979; as the chairman of the [Stratford Festival] board of governors wound up the proceedings, leaving many questions still unanswered, Monette had screamed at him: "You pig! We have spent our life in this theatre. We have given our time, and we care about art, not about money all the time. You have no morals. I don't know how you can sleep."

For all the nerve that he had demonstrated, on-and offstage, Monette gradually developed a crippling stage fright that turned him from acting to directing; and after his first Stratford success with the 1988 Taming of the Shrew, he became the Festival's most frequent and reliable guest director. Obviously, he was being groomed for the top position. As was by now the custom, Monette spent the 1993 season shadowing and working with the outgoing director, David William, but in truth he had been serving a 30-year apprenticeship.