| Is it appropriate to ask a guest director at Theatre Calgary what he thinks about the board’s decision to ditch artistic director Ian Prinsloo at the end of his current contract?
Well, if that guest director is also the founding artistic director of Theatre Calgary, one of Canada’s most experienced theatre practitioners and the man who recommended Prinsloo for the job in the first place, the answer is "yes."
And Christopher Newton, never known for suppressing his opinions, has a very strong one about the TC board’s behaviour. He calls it "contemptible."
"I’ve actually written to the individual members of the board on it," says Newton, in town to direct TC’s first production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. "I think it’s very regrettable. They have a right to do these things, of course, but this was handled very badly. It makes the board look ungrateful and mean, and that’s not good. Artists notice that; they notice that the board is not necessarily supporting the art and the person who is providing it."
In the mid-1990s, when Theatre Calgary was struggling for survival after fired artistic director Brian Rintoul had driven the company to the edge of bankruptcy, Newton – at the time still artistic head of Ontario’s Shaw Festival – was one of the TC alumni who helped get the company back on track. He put together a fine production of An Inspector Calls with Shaw company members and brought it to Calgary for TC’s 30th anniversary season in 1997-98. And he suggested to the board a potential candidate for the artistic director’s job – a young, up-and-coming Toronto director who’d apprenticed at Shaw.
At the time, the board’s decision to take Newton’s advice and go with this relative unknown – who’d never directed at a big regional theatre, let alone run one – was surprising. (I referred to him back then as "Ian Prins-who?") But Newton, known for spotting and promoting young talent, believed the 33-year-old Prinsloo had the youthful passion and energy to give TC a shot in the arm.
To some extent, Newton’s faith in his protégé was justified. Prinsloo, unlike Rintoul, reached out to the local theatre community and TC finally became a showcase for Calgary, as opposed to Toronto, talent. At the same time, he used his Shaw connections to bring in festival star Jim Mezon (who is back to play Macbeth in this production) and noted Polish director Tadeusz Bradecki. Prinsloo’s own direction on TC’s Max Bell stage has been uneven, his choice of plays sometimes quaint or unfortunate, but certainly there have been signs of maturity and confidence in his work of recent seasons, notably in his excellent productions of Death of a Salesman and Counsellor-at-Law.
And of course, under Prinsloo, TC has rebuilt its subscriber audience. In the wake of Rintoul’s dismissal, the number of season ticket holders had dipped below 4,000. The season Prinsloo took the wheel (1997-98), it was 5,098. By the 2002-03 season, the theatre had climbed to 8,582 subscriptions. This season, the numbers currently stand at 8,060.
After eight years, it may be time for Prinsloo to move on to other challenges, and Newton doesn’t dispute that. But he finds the board’s handling of its decision shameful.
"Ian has done a very good job for eight years. He’s increased the number of people, the reputation of this theatre is good again – and it wasn’t for a long time," he says. "There should be plaudits, there should be thanks for what he’s done for the theatre; to dismiss Ian’s time with, ‘He’s had a good run,’ I find contemptible."
The 68-year-old Newton, who ran the Vancouver Playhouse for six years and the Shaw Festival for 23, has had plenty of experience with theatre boards. And while he sometimes crossed swords with them, he says the relationships were ultimately supportive and he was the one who decided when he was ready to leave.
"If you put it in very commercial terms, a theatre company has only one product – plays – and usually one sole person in charge of choosing the plays – the artistic director. And once you show some contempt for the work of the person who is providing you with your sole product, you could find yourself in a difficult position," he says. "I don’t know who has been advising this board. That’s what disturbs me."
Like Prinsloo, Newton was just a young upstart when he was hired to run the newly formed Theatre Calgary in 1968. Born in England to Welsh parents, he’d come to Canada as an actor and spent three seasons at the Stratford Festival, but he’d never even directed a professional theatre production, much less run a company. TC gave him a chance and he, in turn, got it off to a flying start. From there, he went on to run the Vancouver Playhouse with great success during the ’70s, before taking over a debt-ridden Shaw Festival in 1980 and turning it into a world-class company famous for its stylish and irreverent approach to the work of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries.
Newton retired from Shaw in 2002, handing the reins to Jackie Maxwell, but continues to direct there annually as well as do occasional work elsewhere. After two decades of staging plays by Shaw and other modern writers, he’s enjoying the opportunity to finally get back to Shakespeare. He recently played Friar Laurence in a Vancouver Playhouse production of Romeo and Juliet and happily accepted Prinsloo’s invitation to direct Macbeth.
"It’s wonderful" to be working on Shakespeare again, he says. "He’s simply the greatest playwright. It’s poetry; it’s rich and it’s true." The difficulty? "The language is 400 years old. You don’t understand it. The normal audience only gets 50 per cent of it. That’s just a simple fact – you can’t pretend otherwise."
So the challenge in directing a Shakespearean play, he says, is to find a framework that tells the story and makes it accessible to the audience.
For this version of the Bard’s tragedy about a military hero turned bloody tyrant, Newton has set the action in the period between the First and Second World Wars. "It’s the era of the dictators: Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Mussolini." He says the tragedy of Macbeth is that "he’s a man who becomes a monster – and he knows that he’s become a monster."
The dictator angle apart, does Newton find anything in the play that is particularly relevant to our own war-blighted times?
"Well, it’s a play about somebody who’s got into something that’s very difficult to get out of," he says with a sly smile. "Macbeth keeps saying, ‘Blood will have blood…. I can go further with this….’ We’re seeing that kind of thing happening now." |
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