This Rough Magic: The Making of an Artistic Director (review)

Richard Monette is a controversial figure. After establishing himself as an actor and director, he became the eighth artistic director of the Stratford Festival in 1992 and continued in that post for fourteen years. When he took over, the festival was deeply in debt and in danger of losing the Patterson theatre, its third stage. His first season not only balanced the books but also made a profit, and this continued every year of his long tenure, with surpluses growing steadily each season. This enabled him not only to revamp existing theatres but also to open a fourth stage, a small Studio Theatre for experimental work. He also founded the Birmingham Conservatory to train young actors for the classical repertory, launched an endowment campaign, established a program for new play development, and managed to present the full Shakespeare canon as well as many other plays and a series of very popular musicals.

These achievements were accompanied by growing criticism, however, summed up in the punning title of an article by Urjo Kareda: ‘Sold Out.’ Many of the plays with which Monette filled seats were standard Broadway fare; Shakespeare was often relegated to the Avon and Patterson theatres, while the festival’s beautiful main stage was occupied by musicals; and mounting so many plays in a single season over-stretched his company so that their work on the classical part of the repertoire suffered noticeably.

Rough Magic deals with this contradiction only briefly, however, in one section of its final chapter. Its main concern is to tell ‘how the shy, lonely French- and Italian-speaking child of non-artistic parents came to be a Shakespearean actor and director and, ultimately, the head of North America’s largest classical theatre company.’ And Monette’s rags-to-riches career is certainly worth the telling. His bizarrely dysfunctional family was plagued by illiteracy, alcoholism, insanity, and plate-throwing, knife-wielding quarrels, which Monette exploits to the full. After education by the Jesuits and voice lessons from Eleanor Stewart, he sprang to instant notoriety by starring in Hamlet at the age of nineteen. In England he was involved in such questionable endeavours as Kenneth Tynan’s sexually provocative Oh! Calcutta! and the ‘Open Stage’ experiments of Charles Marowitz that rearranged Shakespeare’s texts like mosaics. His big breakthrough as an actor came as the transvestite lead in Michel Tremblay’s Hosannah, after which his career at Stratford expanded to include leading roles under Robin Phillips, then again achieved notoriety at a board meeting after the debacle of Phillips’s successors, the ‘Gang of Four,’ when he addressed the chairman as ‘You pig!’ A horrible case of stage-fright then kept him from acting for ten years, but John Neville’s invitation for him to direct The Taming of the Shrew (which he says he based on his own family) launched him as a director, as Hosannah had kick-started him as an actor.

It all rolls out, with many a juicy anecdote, in Monette’s characteristic mix of deep emotion, raucous humour, and baffling sentimentality – as in his laments for Pom-pom, a stuffed doll his mother made him burn when he was six, which he later equates (outrageously but I am sure sincerely) with the actress Susan Wright’s terrible death by fire. In other words, the Memoir accurately reflects Monette’s own contradictions; and his amanuensis, David Prosser, deserves a purple heart for bringing so much together so successfully.