Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✩✩✩
by Alon Nashman, directed by Paul Thompson
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
July 12-September 14, 2012
“Philosopher king or tyrannical dictator?”
Hirsch by Alon Nashman is an oddly conceived play. It isn’t the first time the Stratford Festival has presented a play about one of its Artistic Directors. That would be Colin Fox’s Guthrie on Guthrie in 1989. Fox’s play was not so much about Tyrone Guthrie as it was about the challenges he faced as the Festival’s first Artistic Director and his task of founding a professional repertory theatre company in the middle of nowhere. Nashman’s play takes on the more difficult subject of attempting to relate John Hirsch’s life to his choice and approach to plays as a director. The difficulty is that biography never provides an adequate explanation for creativity. J.S. Bach produced great music and had a happy and satisfying private life. Beethoven produced great music had a tortuous personal life. David Young’s Glenn (1992), which divided the title role among four actors, told us all about Glenn Gould’s eccentric dressing habits and piano stool requirements and how many pills he took every day, but none of that provided an explanation for his genius in playing the piano.
Nashman seems to recognize this and that results in the play’s peculiar structure. Nashman begins the 85-minute play as himself and explains how seeing The Dybbuk (1974), adapted and directed from S. Ansky’s 1914 Yiddish play by Hirsch, changed his life and made him want to be an actor. Nashman plays himself, the heavily accented Hungarian-born Hirsch and members of Hirsch’s family but Nashman-as-Hirsch accuses Nashman-as-Nashman of exploiting his life for his own gain and storms off. This is a rather bold move on Nashman’s part and strangely enough we tend to sympathize with Nashman-as-Hirsch on this point.
Nashman’s play is based on the biography A Fiery Soul: The Theatrical Life and Times of John Hirsch by Fraidie Martz and Andrew Wilson (2011). If you really wanted to know about John Hirsch would you buy the 328-page book for $15.88 or spend $35.00-$75.01 for a seat to an 85-minute play about Hirsch that can at most hope only to provide a quick sketch of the man? Nashman claims as justification for his play that Hirsch is a man who should not be forgotten. Does he assume his impersonation of Hirsch and survey of his life history will be more memorable than the biography it is based on?
After Nashman-as-Hirsch storms out, Nashman-as-Nashman tells us he is now free to tell Hirsch’s story the way he wants to and proceeds to preface each scene of Hirsch’s life with doggerel verse where every rhyming word has to be crushed to rhyme with “Hirsch”, e.g. “conversh”-”Hirsch”. All this rigamarole is meant to underscore Nashman’s play as a play in true postmodern style, but playful metatheacricality is the exactly opposite of the style Nashman uses when he plays the scenes of Hirsch’s life. The notion “it’s only a play” just doesn’t sit well with Nashman-as-Nashman’s comments or the earnest aura with which he surrounds his subject.
If clash of styles is one problem, the second is how Hirsch’s life is portrayed. Nashman’s general through-line is that the horrors that Hirsch experienced as a child are what made him such a great director. Hirsch’s production of The Cherry Orchard is so great because Hirsch knew people just like that back in Hungary. Hirsch’s production of The Tempest is so great because Hirsch knew, like Prospero, what it meant to acknowledge a “thing of darkness”. Hirsch’s production of The Dybbuk is so great because he finally brought something from his Jewish heritage to the stage.
This point of view basically applies the notion behind method acting to directing and is flawed for the same reason. Would a hump-backed mass murderer make the best Richard III because he could draw on his experiences? Should Shakespeare be performed with all-male companies because that’s how Shakespeare imagined them? Nashman keeps gravitating to only a handful of plays Hirsch directed because the insight-through-personal-experience doesn’t quite work with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968), The Three Musketeers (1968), As You Like It (1983) or the large number of musicals he directed at the Manitoba Theatre Centre.
From the play we learn that Hirsch, born János Hirsch in Siófok, Hungary in 1930, was a survivor of the Holocaust that claimed his parents and younger brother. He was orphaned at age 13, the only survivor of his village, and wandered Hungary until 1947 when through the War Orphans Project he came to Canada choosing to settle with a family in Winnipeg because he thought it safer than being on either coast. Only 11 years later he co-founded the Manitoba Theatre Centre and became its Artistic Director. He was co-Artistic Director at the Stratford Festival from 1967 to 1969, head of drama for CBC television from 1974 to 1978 and Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival from 1981 to 1985. He died of AIDS in 1989.
Nashman is so focussed on the notion that Hirsch’s European experiences are what made him a great director that he neglects many questions even the basic facts of Hirsch’s biography suggests. He acknowledges that Hirsch was gay and mentions Hirsch’s partner Bryan Trottier several times. One wonders if Hirsch’s past is so important, how did his gay sensibilities reflect themselves in his work? On this point Nashman says nothing even though he does mention the Satyricon Hirsch directed in 1969. Not every gay man who lived through the 1970s and ‘80s died of AIDS. Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart (1985) shows how many gay men regarded promiscuity as a sign of freedom from the mores of straight society even when it was known how AIDS was spread. Did Hirsch share that view? And, if so, is it reflected in his depictions of straight society?
The same telling of partial truths informs much of the play. Nashman gives us Hirsch’s fiery speech to the Board of the Stratford Festival when it terminates his contract, but he never shows us what sort of strife Hirsch stirred up to cause the Board and Hirsch to be so angry. Nashman tells us that as a director Hirsch would begin as a “philosopher king” by end as a “tyrannical dictator” who left his actors’ nerves in shreds but he never depicts this happening nor explains the psychology behind this transformation. The description for the biography that Nashman uses states, “Notorious for his fiery temper, ... he had a stormy four years as CBC’s head of TV drama in the 1970s ... and an even stormier tenure as Artistic Director at the Stratford Festival”, yet Nashman gives us no glimpse of the causes of the “storminess”. In fact, Nashman says while depicts one of Hirsch’s rehearsals, that at this point Hirsch would launch into one of his famous tirades, but then says that he won’t show us that.
Nashman’s passion for his subject is undeniable and he throws himself completely into his performance. He plays about 20 characters from Hirsch’s life although doesn’t really command 20 voices to keep them all distinct. Bob White, the dramaturge for the play, says, “The creators of Hirsch are not claiming to be presenting an exhaustive portrait but using the form of this biography to attempt to discover just what it is about the theatre that drives some of us to create it.” In reality, we find out only some of what may have driven one man to create theatre. Nashman-as-Hirsch, preaching to the choir in the Studio Theatre, keeps speaking about how vitally important theatre is to society. The play itself, however, reveals the more intriguing issue of how vitally important theatre is to Hirsch as a source of power over a fictional world in compensation for the power he lacked over the real world outside.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Alon Nashman as John Hirsch. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2012-08-19
Hirsch