Theatre Review: the Stratford Festival’s Hirsch

One-man-shows have never been my cup of tea. That goes for one-woman-shows as well. Dialogue between two or more characters is such an essential part of live theatre that I find it glaring when it’s missing.

As the solid Toronto actor Alon Nashman jokes to the audience at the opening of Hirsch, “This production is the only one-man-show at the Stratford Festival this summer.” And while the production is impressively creative and well-performed overall, it never fully captures the life of John Hirsch; neither his horrific childhood nor his often remarkable career. 

The former saw his entire family murdered before his eyes during the Holocaust, and the latter saw this highly-gifted man create one of Canada’s longest-lasting and admired theatre companies (the Manitoba Theatre Centre) and later run both the Stratford Festival and CBC television drama for several years, so we are not talking about an uneventful life here.

Nashman, as noted, is a fine performer, and to have co-written a play like Hirsch with one of Canada’s best directors (Paul Thompson, who also directed the show), is no mean feat. And there are dozens of vignettes that capture one’s heart, eyes and ears, such as seeing Nashman (as Hirsch) pulling the famous cart of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children — a fitting, powerful image of what the pre-teen, starving, Hungarian-born future director must have carried in his mind and soul through his entire 59 years on earth.

Probably all artistic directors find it tedious to have to deal with impatient businessmen and petty money concerns while they are forever striving to create great art, so it must have been maddening for a fine and creative mind such as Hirsch’s to have struggled with the monied, often theatrically-illiterate supporters in Winnipeg, Stratford and eventually CBC television in Toronto, in order to get things done.

Hirsch is really a series of brief scenes from one man’s tumultuous life, and unless you saw a few of his seminal productions (as I had the honour of doing), or knew him personally (as I also did; I was a writer for King of Kensington, the long-running sitcom that Hirsch helped develop), too much of Hirsch will fly past even the most open and knowledgeable ears of its audience.

And too much of John Hirsch’s story is vague, such as his being in touch with someone named Bryan, whom we never discover was his lover. Some of the staging is surprisingly awkward, and bringing in stagehands so frequently to set up the jagged scenes can be confusing.

I am certainly not sorry to have seen Hirsch, and I applaud the powers that be at Stratford for backing this play and its production. But when you compare it with, say, the deeply moving and powerful The Little Years, written by the inspired local playwright John Mighton, which thrilled and broke hearts of audiences last year on the same stage (and which, I am thrilled to report, will be gracing a stage in the GTA within the next few weeks), this competent but unsatisfying one-man-show is just not worth the 90-minute drive to Stratford.

Hirsch, Stratford Shakespeare Festival, till Sept. 14

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