Shakespeare Theatre Association of American
2008 Conference

Keynote Address by Antoni Cimolino
General Director, Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Listen to an Audio File of the Keynote

In briefing me for this speech, Robert Barr asked me to talk about my personal journey, my relationship with Shakespeare’s art, and how my current job has been affected by that relationship. And vice versa.

I’ll try to do that, but in the process you’ll find me wandering off down a side road of speculation regarding Shakespeare’s own relationship with his art.

I make no apologies for this: it is the business of the artist to explore, and we can’t always be expected to know in advance where our explorations might lead.

I suppose there may be some people who just drift into a career in Shakespearean theatre. In fact, without naming names, I can think of more than a few people I’ve encountered over the years whom I might uncharitably suspect of having done just that.

But most of us, I imagine, chose this course in life because we had some kind of road-to-Damascus experience. Something happened to us in a theatre: something that so enthralled us that we cast aside any lingering doubts we might have had about the wisdom of trying to make a living by dressing up and playing games of “let’s pretend.”

For me, that moment came in 1979. I was a teenager with a few high-school plays under my belt, and I was making my first visit to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

When the lights went down, my life changed forever. It was a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by the Festival’s then artistic director, Robin Phillips.

Now, in retrospect, thinking about it rationally, there were probably a number of reasons why that production so profoundly affected me. In the first place, the play's story spoke to me, as it would probably have done to any Catholic teenager: four young men, in thrall to their hormones, make a rash vow of abstinence and then find that they can't live up to it. I could relate to that.

I was also captivated by the language of the piece: its wit and the clarity and immediacy with which it came across. Berowne in that production was played by Richard Monette, who would later become the Festival’s longest-serving artistic director. And he was phenomenal. He was so clear and so witty, he made that 400-year-old play seem like it had been written on the very afternoon that I saw it.

The whole thing was ravishingly beautiful, very funny and full of life. It was also immensely poignant. It was set, as so many of Robin’s productions were, in the Edwardian era—to be precise, in the year 1914.

This brought an enormous emotional payoff at the end of the play. When the scene began to cloud, it did so to the distant thunder of artillery, leaving us to wonder how many, if any, of those four young men would be coming back to claim their loves at the end of their year’s penance.

On that day I felt for the first time a deep connection to the rest of humanity beginning with the people in that room and stretching back in time. Here was a play written long ago which seemed to anticipate my thoughts and feelings. It made me laugh, and I wasn’t alone: 2,200 people were with me that afternoon, and we were reacting as one.

It was a powerful moment for a young person.

It was that production of that play that made me realize that I wanted above all else to be a Shakespearean actor, and that I wanted to work at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the first theatre I’d encountered that could create such magic.

So I went home and told my parents that I wasn’t going to law school but instead was going to become an actor. Now my parents were Italian immigrants, so you can imagine how well this decision went over. I will never forget my father’s response: “Voi diventare artista?” The way he said artista made it sound like a combination of “pimp” and “car thief.”

My background hadn’t exactly prepared me for such a momentous decision. I grew up in Sudbury, a rocky, windswept mining town in northern Ontario. Some would call it bleak. The city’s idea of public art was a giant coin called the Big Nickel.

There wasn’t much theatre there, and my parents wouldn’t have had much time for it anyway. You see, from the time I was very small, I knew that my parents had worked very hard to provide my sister and me with choices in life. As I got older, however, I realized that the choices really boiled down to two.
The first: go to university, become a professional and make something of yourself. Or the second: death.

But for some reason, I’d always been fascinated by the power of spoken language. Collections of famous speeches by great men—Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill—were among my favourite reading materials. They still are.

This interest in rhetoric had led me to join my high-school debating club. One of the priests at our school used to enter us in debating contests and public-speaking contests all over North America. It turned out that I had a flair for this, and went on to captain the Ontario team in the national competition. Which we won.

That was where the idea of me becoming a lawyer came from. But by the time I got to Grade 11, I found I’d come to the end of that particular journey. Although I still enjoyed the performing aspect of it, I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life coming up with arguments for debate.

I started putting more and more energy into acting, directing and writing for the theatre. I liked the fact that the theatre, like debating, could make people stop and think, make them confront issues. But it also had the power to move. It could make people laugh, it could make people cry. It could fill them with joy. And I found that intoxicating.

Above all, I was enthralled by theatre’s power to transform: to take raw experience and abstract it into something beautiful and true. When I say beautiful, I don’t mean pretty sets and costumes. To me, a play is beautiful when it’s elegant in a scientific sense: when everything adds up, and you can hear it adding up.

I think of the inevitability of a play like Oedipus Rex: the way the action just keeps moving forward as it must, as naturally as an object caught in a gravitational field.

Brilliant lies that somehow tell the truth.

But though I’d been captivated by the magic of the theatre, I didn’t really understand at that point what it entailed. I felt the effect of that Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I didn’t realize why it had been so good. I didn’t realize what had gone into making that connection with me.

It wasn’t till I had finished theatre school and was auditioning for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival that I began to get an inkling of it.

My audition was for John Hirsch, the artistic director at the time, and I was doing Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy, “How all occasions do inform against me.” John kept interrupting me, telling me to go back and do it again, but do it differently. It was very unsettling: in fact, I started to wonder whether I had any business being there at all.

And then I came to the word unused. “To fust in us unused.” And he stopped me. He said, “Unused. . . . Unused. . . . Do you think you have a talent?” I hesitated, because by that point I wasn’t sure if I did or not.
Then something inside became hard. I had a talent—a good one—and it was worth fighting for. Defiant I replied, “Yes, I do.”

“Good,” he said. “So what if you didn’t work in the theatre for the next 40 years?” He looked into my eyes. “That’s unused. Say it again.”

I said it again but I felt it as never before. John turned his back and walked away. As he got to the table I heard him say to a colleague, “Now we’re starting to get somewhere.”

It was then that I began to understand what it takes to be an artist: the commitment to detailed work, to ensuring that everything has been thought about, to going beyond the superficial and, most importantly, the need to put oneself on the line. Our art is personal or it is nothing.

I didn’t get into the Festival company at that audition—it would be a few more years before that happened—but I learned an important lesson in that moment.
All my experiences with Shakespeare in the years since have reinforced that lesson. Detailed exploration is the key to Shakespearean production. Whenever I’ve been in a production that wasn’t very good, it was because that exploration hadn’t been undertaken. Not just the exploration of particular words or phrases, but the larger exploration of what the play is about. And most importantly what the play meant to each of us on a personal level.

To present a worthwhile production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, you need to look in detail at how it pits the male force against the female force, how it sets up a tension between the aggression, the mischief and even the malice of the male characters, and the greater sense of integrity, fairness and rootedness shown by the female characters.

And you need to consider the vital energy unleashed by that tension, and how it can be very positive, fun and sexually potent on the one hand, and quite black and destructive on the other.
At least, that’s what I would need to consider. Another director might explore in quite a different direction.

But without that kind of investigation, without looking at the play’s themes, its structure, its text—everything about it—and asking yourself what you think it’s really about and why you’re interested in doing it in the first place, you’re never going to get beyond the level of, “OK, so what kind of gags are we going to do with the Wall?”

Shakespeare rewards that kind of examination like no other playwright. And it seemed to me that when the Stratford Shakespeare Festival was at its best, nobody did it better.

I was immensely grateful and proud to be an actor at Stratford. At the same time, I was taking a growing interest in the bigger picture. As an actor, you’re focused on your thoughts and feelings in the moment; whereas as a director or a designer, you’re essentially shaping and creating a universe.
And I was finding myself being drawn more and more toward the construction of the whole: to working with others to create productions.

In the late ’80s I was asked by then artistic director David William to work as an assistant director to the great British director Bill Gaskill, who was to direct Pirandello’s Rules of the Game. Over the next few years I continued to work as an apprentice director as well as an actor. In addition, I began to work on special projects with our director of marketing, helping to transfer stage productions to radio and film.

There was a particular moment when I realized that I had crossed some sort of line. It came when I was playing Laertes in Richard Monette’s 1994 production of Hamlet.

It was a stellar cast: Stephen Ouimette was playing the title role, with William Hutt, Douglas Rain, Peter Donaldson, Tom McCamus, Janet Wright and Roly Hewgill.
And as it happened, my mother, whom I loved dearly, was terminally ill at the time, so there was plenty for me to connect with in a character whose father is killed and whose sister commits suicide.

In other words, the circumstances couldn’t have been more conducive to my total absorption in the role. There couldn’t have been a better text, there couldn’t have been a better cast, and there couldn’t have been a more appropriate role for me.

And yet one night, as I stood on stage raging at Hamlet with my sword in my hand I suddenly thought, “Did I return that call?” Not the best way to begin a duel.

In that moment, I realized that my imagination was now being pulled away from the subjectivity of "I am a colour in the canvas," to "Where should the color go in the canvas? What colour should it be?”

My satisfaction was no longer coming from playing a role on stage; it was coming from helping choose a cast of actors, working with them and with the designer to envision the world that the play would take place in, working with the composer and the lighting designer and everyone else involved. And none of that is exclusively about the way you feel. It’s also about what others feel, and what’s in the text for you to discover together.

And really, that’s now what I’m doing with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as a whole. There wasn’t any further moment of epiphany when I realized I wanted to be an administrator; rather that role evolved naturally out of that growing desire to orchestrate the theatre experience for people, rather than participate in it directly myself.

Leading a company is very much like directing a production. It’s all about interpretation, forming a vision, charting a direction, getting people excited about that direction and working with them to get there.

All those things are essential to mounting a good production, and they’re no less essential to running a successful organization. And to run an organization well, you need to do the same kind of detailed exploration of all its functions as you would of a Shakespeare text.

In fact, exploring Shakespearean text can itself be helpful to the leader of an organization. At the risk of sounding like one of those management-skills seminars that offer Business Tips from the Bard, it’s nonetheless true that I’ve learned a lot about leadership from Shakespeare. I don’t think I could have done this job at all if I hadn’t spent so much time on stage speaking and listening to Shakespeare’s language. It has taught me something about how people can behave successfully or not. It has taught me a certain sensibility, a certain sensitivity that makes my job much easier than it would have been otherwise. The work of an actor or a director accustoms you to the process of trying to get underneath, to recognize patterns, to understand things that consistently happen. It attunes your ears to the music of life, to its ironies.

In 1989 I played the Dauphin in Henry V. So I spent a six-month season watching the title character at work. At every performance, I’d watch him analyze, assess and act. I’d see him deal with dissention and disloyalty; I’d hear him use language brilliantly to rally support; I’d observe him going out into the rank and file to learn what they really think.

I’d be reminded over and over of the difference, in terms of seriousness of purpose, between him and my character: the difference between a mere braggart and someone, who, whatever you think of him ethically and morally, unquestionably possesses resolve.

Whether any of this would have helped me if I’d worked in another field—if, for instance, I’d been the president of a life-insurance firm—I’m not at all sure. Maybe it was only helpful because I was already an artist. And in fact I do think that artists see the world in a different way from everyone else. It’s because we’re in some ways geeks.

It begins in high school, when we of artistic temperament discover that our expressiveness and interests make us different. We discover how remote our chances are of becoming captain of the football team. We find that we’re outsiders; we don’t quite fit in. If we could fit in, if we could be captain of the football team, then perhaps we wouldn’t be artists.

Ironically, that sense of not being fully accepted then drives us further to escape who we are, to create something gorgeous outside ourselves and get lost in it. Also, working on plays together enables all us outsiders to form a social unit where we do fit in, if only with each other.

At any rate, we compensate for our sense of alienation by embracing the role of outsider, and playing it up. We seem to go out of our way, in the way we dress and the way we behave, to get up the noses of the jocks.

And then we grow up, and we become the critics of society.

We stand outside the social mainstream, observing and commenting—knowing that we’re above the rat race, that we’re more interested in the integrity of our work than with the grubby business of getting money that so preoccupies the unimaginative.

And then, when we don’t get any government funding, we wonder why we’re so misunderstood and hated.

I wonder if Shakespeare, successful as he was, felt like an outsider too. Yes, he got to write and perform plays for the Queen, and got to rub shoulders with the aristocracy, but how did they really treat him? Did he experience the same kind of contempt that Bottom and his fellow actors receive from the audience at Duke Theseus’s court at the end of the Dream? Surely there are few more despicable actions in Shakespeare than the way those privileged twits heckle those bungling but well-meaning amateurs. And I wonder how much of that scene came from Shakespeare’s own experience.

It’s interesting how seldom Shakespeare uses metaphors drawn from the stage and acting in a positive way. Whenever he wants to say how much of a sham something is, he usually doesn’t look further than the theatre. He seems filled with self-loathing at times, sadly dismissing acting as a kind of prostitution: “Must like a whore unpack my heart with words,” as Hamlet says.

At best, he makes actors sound pathetic. “Life’s a poor player.” “We cry when we are born that we come to this great stage of fools.” His relationship to his art and his fellow artist seems bittersweet. Of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

This is where, as I warned at the beginning, I start to wander off into the realms of speculation. I realize that it’s always dangerous to muse on how Shakespeare “might” or “must” have felt, since he didn’t leave us anything but his plays to know him by. But I do think those plays suggest an ambivalence on the part of their author to the very art he practised.
Now we might say that Shakespeare, like any sensitive individual, discovered the sham and drudgery of life as a whole by what he experienced first-hand through his profession. Perhaps he was railing at life in general and not at the theatre in particular.

However, practitioners of the arts in his plays are certainly not portrayed as being better than society as a whole. The Poet and Painter are among the first flatterers at Timon’s door, among the first to have their pretensions and self-interest lampooned by Shakespeare. Perhaps he expected more from those who claim to be life’s critics and chroniclers.

A startling case in point is articulated at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost. As an artist, Shakespeare used language to manipulate our responses. And we can all agree that he made the world a richer and more interesting place by doing it. His plays bring people together, touch their hearts, open up possibilities for beauty, for joy, for insight, and remind us of our common humanity.
At that performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost I attended 30 years ago, the voice of Shakespeare reached out over 400 years and told me that I was not alone in what I thought and how I felt. This was comforting and strengthening for me.

However, what he did in that play also surprised me enormously and left a lasting mark.

Four young men swear off women, and within moments four young women are at their gates. We know how it will end—or we think we do—and we delight in watching the boy’s resolve melt. But just as we expect marriages all round, he tests his comedy by casting over it the shadow of death. A solemn messenger arrives to impart the news that the Princess’s father has died. It becomes clear within seconds that all courting and marriages must be postponed. Berowne begs his mistress Rosaline to reconsider.

She says to him that he is well known for his use of language:

the world’s large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks,
Full of comparisons and wounding flouts.

She suggests that if he really wants her hand he will use his gifts better by daily for 12 months visiting a hospital and making the sick smile. He protests that this is too great a challenge, too high a standard for comedy. “Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.” She tells him that therein lies his lesson.

Why, that’s the way to choke a gibing spirit,
Whose influence is begot of that loose grace
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools.
                            . . . Then, if sickly ears,
Deafed with the clamours of their own dear groans,
Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,
And I will have you and that fault withal;
But if they will not, throw away that spirit,
And I shall find you empty of that fault,
Right joyful of your reformation.

Shakespeare seems to be calling for a reformation indeed: perhaps of the use and intent of comedy itself. Berowne accepts the challenge but says to the King:

Our wooing doth not end like an old play:
Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.

The King replies:

Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day.
And then ’twill end.

Berowne:

That’s too long for a play.

This moment on stage, to my young mind, was rapturous. It lifted plays beyond mere entertainment to a vocation. How do we use our gifts—our language?
Shakespeare’s plays are full of examples of people who use language—often brilliantly—to perverse and harmful ends. Hamlet tells us that the purpose of playing is to hold the mirror up to nature. To what extent was Shakespeare himself looking in the mirror when he created such master manipulators as Prospero, Prince Hal or even Richard III?

There are countless Shakespearean characters that might be called “artificers”: craftsmen in creating illusion. They’re like actors, or playwrights or directors: they put on performances; they orchestrate events and manipulate emotions.

Some of them—surprisingly few—match good technique with good motives; many more, it seems to me, deliberately use language to tell lies or half-truths, to the detriment or destruction of others.

Examples of the “good” uses of art in the plays include the gulling of Beatrice and Benedick, and Edgar’s use of role-playing to dissuade his blind father from suicide.
And, of course, all those heroines who play male roles to bring abut the happy resolutions of the romantic comedies.

I’d probably also include Prospero in this category: his orchestration of events on his island brings about reconciliation and a blessing for the next generation—though it’s not entirely clear that that’s what he had in mind all along. There’s at least the possibility that he at first intends revenge and softens only when Ariel appeals to his better nature.

Revenge, of course, is uppermost in Hamlet’s mind when he acts the part of a madman, and then commissions the players to perform The Mousetrap, complete with additional material penned by him. He even provides acting lessons. And the ultimate outcome of that particular performance is curtains for poor old Polonius.

So not altogether positive there.

Even more debatable are such people as Marc Antony in Julius Caesar and Henry V. As a performer, Henry is brilliant. But is he a force for good? It’s possible, even without resorting to the kind of wholesale cutting that Olivier went in for, to argue that Henry’s ends justify his means. If the worst thing that can happen to a country is civil war—complete with sons killing fathers and fathers killing sons—and if Henry’s foreign adventures have managed to prevent that, then he could be seen as a hero.

But what are his motives? What’s his integrity? What about that first scene, where he seizes on the excuse of the Salic law as eagerly as if it were dubious intelligence about weapons of mass destruction? And would he in fact have followed through with the threatened spitting of babes on pikes if the Governor of Harfleur had called his bluff? What Henry does is certainly expedient. But it’s less certain that he’s being guided by a moral compass.

Then, of course, there are those who use language for downright evil ends: Richard III, Iago, and Edmund.
Like Henry, they’re master manipulators: perverters of the truth. I think it’s significant that whenever Shakespeare’s villains lie, they always do it by telling some kind of truth, some twisting of actuality, rather than just a bald-faced lie. On the evidence of his plays, Shakespeare seems very suspicious of good actors, because you never know what their motives are.

At the same time, while Shakespeare seems to have had genuine affection for the simpler kind of bad amateur actor, like Bottom—who is, after all, a life force—he was very conscious of the fact that a political player who can’t act is headed for disaster, which usually entails disaster for the state as well. Richard II is a good example. His chief sin, from the audience’s point of view, is that he can’t judge the effect that he’s having on his audience. He’s over the top, melodramatic and self-dramatizing. You want to slap him.

And then you get someone like Bolingbroke, the jock we knew in high school, the absolute non-actor who finds any kind of excess or embellishment contemptible.

Or is Bolingbroke simply a better actor than Richard II, able to hold the mirror up to nature, as Hamlet would suggest, in a more convincing manner? Either way he’s no saint, but his rough directness, contrasted with Richard’s ornate, self-indulgent, self-pitying language, makes him seem, for the moment at any rate, a better option.

There are dangers for non-actors too. Coriolanus also despises acting and refuses to manipulate an audience. He doesn’t realize that the only leaders who survive are the ones who perform well, regardless of their sincerity. Politics is theatre. Both are beneath him.

By now, some of you will be wondering about my own feelings about the art I’m engaged in. Let me assure you that I am by no means trying to suggest that ours is an ethically and morally dubious profession, and that we should get out of it and into something much more respectable, like prostitution or loan-sharking. Or the law.

What I do want to suggest is what I’ve hinted at a bit cheekily in the title of this address; that Shakespeare had the same kind of awe, of dread even, for the power of the word as Einstein had for the power of the atom.

I get the sense that Shakespeare knew he was dealing with something that could be incredibly beautiful (in that sense of scientific elegance I mentioned early), incredibly potent, and incredibly dangerous.

There’s the ambivalence. On the one hand, language can enable moments of the most exquisite connection; on the other, it can deceive and divide. Words can be love tokens or they can be weapons.

And that may be the most important career lesson that I’ve learned from Shakespeare. If Shakespeare was the Einstein of the spoken word, perhaps people like us are its Robert Oppenheimers. As Shakespeare practitioners, we can, if we get it right, unleash an incredible power on the world. And with that comes an enormous responsibility to get it right.
The analogy breaks down, of course, because when our bombs go off, they make the world a much better, more beautiful, more exciting place in which to live. It’s when they don’t explode—when they just fizzle and sputter—that we do harm. When we fail to captivate people, when we make them turn away in boredom and disdain, and lose them for Shakespeare, then we make it seem as if the jocks were right, and what we do has no value at all. And that makes the world a poorer place.

It’s infinitely easier harder to explode bombs for evil that it is to explode them for good, and maybe that’s why Shakespeare seems to have been so fascinated by the perversion of his art, as practised by so many of his characters.

And that’s why we have to be as aware as he was of the power of words, and to handle their explosive power wisely, well and boldly. We have to have the insight, the wisdom and the courage to recognize that power, assess its possibilities and harness it for revolutionary ends.
The greatest danger that faces any large classical theatre like ours is that it can become too polite. There’s a temptation in well-established cultural organizations to present the classics as a kind of received wisdom, as holy script, and to overlook how truly startling and rude and downright dangerous so many of them are.

People look to us for reassurance and familiarity—“Give us something pretty in pumpkin pants that will take away the nasty taste of that tattooed and pierced travesty of Hamlet we just saw in that sordid little black-box theatre”—and we have to be very careful not to oblige. We have to have the courage to shock people, for their own good, as well as awe them. We are—or ought to be—Shiva, destroyer of worlds. We can’t afford to become mere purveyors of quality entertainment to the carriage trade.

That’s not the kind of theatre I want the Stratford Festival to be, and that’s one reason why I wanted us to reintroduce the word “Shakespeare” into our name: the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
I thought it vital that we reaffirm our blood relationship with this most dangerous of geniuses. Our Festival was founded to perform Shakespeare, and Shakespeare remains the beating heart of our mandate. Therefore, I and our new team of co-artistic directors wanted his name to be central to ours.

When I came to this job, I asked myself, “What qualities did we have in 1953, the year we began?” A sense of innovation, of surprise, of reaching out nationally and internationally, and putting our faith in Shakespeare and the classics: those are some of the intertwining strands that make up our DNA. And a sense of danger, the most thrilling quality you can have in any theatrical performance.

So my question then became, “How do we reconnect with that? How do we create a Stratford Shakespeare Festival that is more open, more available to take risks, that breaks new ground artistically and reaffirms its importance in the international theatre community?”
That’s a challenge, because we’re not in an urban centre where new currents swirl around us and where it’s easy to stay connected.

So we have to try a lot harder. We have to reach out, nationally and internationally, to attract the very best actors; the hottest, most creative young directors; the best senior directors. We have to provide even more training opportunities, so our people can grow and become the next generation of the first rank.

That means embracing difficulty and danger. My experience at the Festival has taught me that when the place is not at its best, it’s when it has settled for what was safe and convenient.

Conversely, we’ve been at our best when the artists involved are uncompromising in their vision, when they drive toward the exceptional and don’t settle for the mediocre—even if that means they’re a pain in the ass to work with.
Perhaps that’s the most important bit of advice I can give you, if advice from me is anything you’re interested in. Don’t be afraid to hire a pain in the ass. Don’t be afraid to be a pain in the ass. It’s hard to be an artist otherwise.

As artists, as Shakespeareans, we are not peacekeepers. We’re arms dealers. We use shock and awe to shake up the societies we live in—not to force them into submission but to awaken them, energize them, exhilarate them, open their minds and hearts to what it really means to be human.

Words, the weapons we trade in, are enormously potent, and can be used to evil ends. That’s one of the most important lessons Shakespeare has to teach us. But his other and far more important lesson is that if those same weapons are wielded with truth, honesty and integrity, they become instruments not of death but of life; not of darkness, cynicism and despair, but of illumination, humanity and hope.

Thank you.