Published Spring 2024
No record of Shakespeare directing his own plays exists, but he clearly understood the deep importance of the role to a successful production. The actors in the play within the play of A Midsummer Night's Dream would clearly be lost without their director Peter Quince, and Shakespeare has Hamlet mouth advice he probably passed on to the actors in his own company: "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines."
Speech, music, staging, choreography, lighting, sets—with so many elements and artists at work in every performance, the director's importance cannot be understated. Tyrone Guthrie, the Stratford Festival's founding artistic director and the visionary behind its inaugural production of Richard III in 1953, described his role as a kind of "chairman of the proceedings." Like Shakespeare (by way of Hamlet), Guthrie was not above criticizing his actors in rehearsal; even still, he believed a director's key attribute was flexibility: "All the collaborators in a production must feel that they are partners and not servants. Everything hangs on everybody. Hence the need for a flexible attitude."
Stratford's current crop of inspired directors embody Guthrie's spirit of leadership, passion for collaboration and devotion to the craft. Here, they share their insights on the role of a director as they have experienced and envision it.
Seana McKenna, Director of Twelfth Night
Over four decades in theatre, as a celebrated actor and director, have taught Seana McKenna that it really does take a village to raise a curtain. "A play comes off the page into its true form—a production—with the collaboration of many players, designers, stage managers, crew and, finally, the audience. Which is why I am somewhat skeptical of the word 'vision': it is not mine alone, and it will shift." That sense of communal experience extends, for McKenna, to audiences across the ages, to anyone who has ever sat down—or stood, in Shakespeare's time—for a performance of Twelfth Night. That is the power of great theatre. "For me," she says, "good plays of any age are contemporary—and that annoying word 'relevant'&mdsah;because they are just that: plays. They are being performed live by and for people living right now, who have entered the same theatre, read the same headlines that day, endured or enjoyed the same weather. There are many stories being revisited in the theatre: the stories of the play, and all the stories that come in with each audience member. They connect in the theatre."
Donna Feore, Director of Something Rotten!
Donna Feore's decision to direct the Broadway hit Something Rotten! at Stratford just might be the perfect marriage of artist and material. Feore has choreographed, directed, acted and danced in dozens of musicals and plays at the Festival: what better use of her multiple talents than a song-and-dance satire of all things Shakespeare and musical theatre? Mounting the production on the Festival Theatre's thrust stage, which faces the audience on three sides, is especially intriguing to Feore. "Whenever I direct/choreograph a show for the Festival stage, I always have to reimagine the work. The unique qualities of the thrust stage demand it and offers the audience exceptional intimacy. Something Rotten! will have all new staging and choreography, and we have an incredible cast, creative team and orchestra to bring it to life." She assures audiences that the show is as in love with Shakespeare and musical theatre as they are. "I see this show as an affectionate take on musicals and Shakespeare and the collision of the two. The writers aren't afraid to have fun and irreverently send up both!"
Antoni Cimolino, Director of London Assurance
Antoni Cimolino's 36-year association with the Stratford Festival—including 13 as artistic director—have trained his eye and ear for the nuances of language, movement, choreography and comedy. Who better than him to helm a revival of London Assurance, a blistering, boisterous comedy of manners? "The play has a wonderful sense of movement," Cimolino enthuses, "including the potential for dance. The lyricism of the language is mirrored in the body language and in the line of the costumes." Cimolino notes that, although the best comedy is specific to its time and place, particularly to a society's laws at the time of writing, the genre remains "the most enduring art form of all. Fashions and laws change over time but human folly endures, and character-based comedy has been popular since the dawn of human consciousness. So long as we focus on the behaviours of these amazing characters, laughter will follow."
Sam White, Director of Romeo and Juliet
As a veteran director and the founding artistic director of the Shakespeare in Detroit theatre, Sam White has helmed many an innovative Shakespeare interpretation, including a version of Twelfth Night set in 1920s Harlem. For Romeo and Juliet, her first Shakespeare production at Stratford, White is going in a different direction: "Hyper classical Italian Renaissance. Folks may be surprised to see actors in tights!" White knows she is bucking the trend to recast Shakespeare's works in innovative times and settings, but she is up to the challenge. "I haven't seen a hyper classical play in a long time and, I'm really looking forward to creating a story—with my collaborators—that feels resonant today but looks like candy with beautiful textures, colours and silhouettes and movement. The discord, violence and death in the play only matters if it is juxtaposed with art and beauty and music and life." The heart of the play is its brief and tragic love affair, which unfolds in less than a week. "Life comes at you fast," White says. "I know from personal experience that tragedy doesn't forewarn you and life can be altered in the blink of an eye. I show up for the work, the artists and the characters with compassion because I know Shakespeare understood life and how quickly it can change."
Thom Allison, Director of La Cage aux Folles
The enduring appeal of La Cage aux Folles is easy to sum up for director Thom Allison: "It's a gloriously funny and entertaining show, with composer Jerry Herman, of Hello, Dolly! fame, at his very best. Hit song after hit song." After bringing Rent, also a Broadway smash, to Stratford in 2023, Allison feels ready to meet the challenges of mounting another complex work of musical theatre. "It's always a juggling act," he says. "I think if you strive to keep your attention on telling the story, you'll be closer to success than not." For his latest production, the story is anchored in familial love and the need for forgiveness. "It's important to me that the audience understands the true nature of what it means to forgive when we are deeply hurt by one who is deeply hurting. And how, when we can understand and forgive, the love that's left is clearer."
Thomas Morgan Jones, Director of Wendy and Peter Pan
Every play, every production, every performance presents a bevy of challenges to the director. Family-oriented theatre is no exception. Wendy and Peter Pan director Thomas Morgan Jones knows he has his work cut out for him. "Making plays for children is an act of honouring their many capacities: emotional, intellectual, imaginative," he says. "This type of playmaking demands that we as artists create the most joyful and also the most sophisticated theatre we possibly can. Full of heart, intelligence and wonder. The greatest invitation is to wonder." That invitation is especially important in an age in which children's imaginations are so thoroughly captured by digital screens. Live theatre, Jones insists, "is unlike anything children can experience through a screen. That liveness is, I think, both inspiring and empowering to children. It shows them that this play, this experience, was made and is being made only for them in real time. Because they are special."
Esther Jun, Director of Cymbeline
For all of its pageantry, fantasy and romance, Cymbeline stands out as one of Shakespeare's most complex character studies. Director Esther Jun is especially fascinated by Posthumus and Imogen, the young lovers who are swept up in the court intrigue and war unleashed by Cymbeline's actions. "Imogen is a complex character who makes her own choices. But the play is not so much about whether these people make the right choices, it's about how they navigate the choices they make." It would be easy, Jun notes, to label Posthumus as a villain, considering his treatment of Imogen. Not so, says Jun. "With Posthumus, Shakespeare has created a compelling male character, full of contradictions, but entirely human and a product of this society and upbringing. Posthumus is one of the only male characters in the canon who regrets his decisions before he finds out that he was wrong. I find that fascinating and somewhat the crux of the play."