Bio shines light on city theatre legend

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This article was published 07/12/2011 (5394 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the first and best Canadian productions I ever saw was The Dybbuk, directed by John Hirsch. It was in 1974, at the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto, though it had originated at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, of which Hirsch was the artistic director and effectively the creator.

I don’t remember much about the acting, except perhaps for Marilyn Lightstone’s performance, but I do recall the intensity of it all, the atmospherics, the extraordinary visual and vocal evocation of the vanished world of Russian shtetl culture, centred around the synagogue. It was a world of great terrors and great warmth. It was in part a tribute to Hirsch’s own roots, from which he had been forcibly and horrifically torn by the Second World War, and also perhaps to his own temperament. He was also a man who experienced great terrors and great joys, and who both shared and inspired them, on and off the stage.

He used to say that he was “a member of four mafias: Hungarian, Jewish, homosexual and Winnipeg.” I owe that quotation to a new biography entitled A Fiery Soul: The Life and Theatrical Times of John Hirsch, by Fraidie Martz and Andrew Wilson. The rather fanciful title comes from a poem by John Dryden; the book itself does a good, if sometimes too breathlessly catalogued job of chronicling both the life and the work and relating one to the other.

Hirsch died from AIDS in 1989. Seana McKenna, who was directed by him as a young actress after having failed her first audition with him, spoke — enchantingly, hilariously and without notes — about both experiences at a book launch in Toronto this past week. She also remarked that a whole generation of Canadian theatre people, some of them already quite influential, must now have grown up without knowing who he was or what he accomplished. That is unfortunate because his talents were remarkable, his influence vital and his personality unique.

What is clear from the book is that, from the perspective of the Canadian theatre as a whole, his greatest achievements were in Winnipeg. The RMTC, whose origins were in amateur theatre and which he, greatly assisted by the still-feisty Tom Hendry, brilliantly transformed during the 1950s into a wholly professional one, inspired the entire regional theatre movement. That makes its creation second in importance only to that of the Stratford Festival.

That Hirsch found himself in Winnipeg at all was something of an accident. He was a Holocaust survivor who had grown up in Budapest with a heritage that was mostly Jewish but partly Catholic, both strands vital to his later work. None of his family outlived the war, and he did so mainly by scavenging. Given the chance to emigrate to Canada — he happened to be standing in the right visa line on the right day — he chose Winnipeg over Halifax or Vancouver because it seemed safer to be in the middle.

The household on which he was billeted expected to have him for a couple of weeks but got him for life. Nothing in the biography is more touching or telling than his continued loyalty to his adoptive mother and sister whom he continued to phone every week of his life and whom he visited every chance he got. With them, he found the home he had lost.

By the time of The Dybbuk, he was an internationally known director, working regularly in New York. As an occasional visitor to Canada, I didn’t see his work again until 1980 when he directed A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a highly praised production that I didn’t much enjoy; all the same, I liked the fact that he’d done it. He was a gleeful polymath, as ready to mount a musical, or even a cabaret, as a classic.

In 1981, in the wake of a notorious debacle over the post-Robin Phillips succession, he took over Stratford: a stormy regime launched at a stormy time. He was not, it seems, very happy there, any more than he had been when running CBC’s TV drama department, though he did fine work in both places. His 1983 Stratford Tartuffe, overlooked in the book, was exceptionally fine, very tense and intelligent; so, despite some critical damning, was his As You Like It. But he did leave the place in the red.

He’s most celebrated as a director of Chekhov; his Three Sisters, in Phillips’ regime, is legendary. In fact, he only directed two of the plays in Canada, plus an unhappy attempt at The Seagull for the Habimah Theatre in Tel Aviv; his only attempt at directing in a language he didn’t speak.

He could be cruel to actors, though to his credit his bullying seems to have been hot not cold, impulsive not calculated. And the victims seem to have forgiven him. At the launch, Alon Nashman gave us a riotous taste of a one-man play about Hirsch that he’ll be performing at Stratford next year.

By the time I moved to Canada in 1986, Hirsch’s career was largely over: something I regret for my own selfish sake, and for the country’s because he has yet to be replaced. There are directors who are his partial heirs: Peter Hinton and Morris Panych come to mind, and our leading Chekhovian in recent years has been another Hungarian, Laszlo Marton; all of them more equable characters than he was. But there’s nobody who combines his pictorial flair, his intellectual reach, and — perhaps luckily — his tragic inheritance. So far, he’s Canada’s greatest director.

— Postmedia News