Shakespeare at Stratford, Ontario: The John Hirsch years

Summary

My previous report on the Canadian Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario for Shakespeare Survey covered the 1980 season, the final year of Robin Phillips's regime. The extraordinary series of confusions and intrigues which followed almost wrecked the festival altogether;2 and the first task facing John Hirsch, Artistic Director 1981-5, was to keep the festival going at all. But he did much more than that. He created a young company within the main ensemble to work at the Third Stage, a small-scale replica of the Festival Stage, where promising young actors are trained to cope with the arduous demands of the main theatre; and he offered some striking interpretations of Shakespearian comedy and romance.

John Hirsch is particularly interested in the late plays, and expressed frustration that his dream of staging all four in one season was impossible for box office reasons. After his remarkable production of The Tempest in 1982 I share his frustration, for this was the first coherent version of the play I have seen, the only one to weld the disparate elements of the play into a unity. In the process, it provided solutions to areas of the play which often prove intractable in performance, particularly the masque and the so-called clowns' scenes.