Review: (Vancouver / Theatre) Hirsch

(photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

With Heart and Chutzpah

One of our great Canadians is part of Vancouver's Chutzpah Festival

by David C. Jones

John Hirsch was a remarkable Canadian. A Hungarian Jew orphaned by the Holocaust finds a new home in Canadian Theatre where he gains a reputation for his talent and drive as well as his stormy temperament and corrosive demeanour.

The play Hirsch was created and conceived by Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson, starring the former, directed by the latter. The one-person show was a smash hit at The Stratford Festival. It is as frenetic, engaging and heartfelt as the person at the heart of it.

Told with crisscrossing snippets from his highly tragic life, the stage is filled with magical stagecraft. Curtains and sheets disappear and befitting a theatrical legend a stagehand wanders in from stage left or right bringing costume and set pieces.

Review: (Winnipeg) Hirsch

The Master and MetaTheatre
by Edgar Governo

It's always hard to speak ill of the ones you care about. Even when you know you're right, even when you feel you're speaking truth to power, there is an element of pain to it, and a part of you wishes you had kept things to yourself.

Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson have clearly struggled with those feelings in their biographical play based on the life of John Hirsch, well-known enough in Canadian theatre but a legend in Winnipeg theatre.

Bringing their work to the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre (RMTC)  Warehouse -- that is to say, The Tom Hendry Theatre, named after the man who co-founded RMTC along with Hirsch, whose own namesake theatre is just down the street -- is fraught with potential tensions they wouldn't have had to deal with when it premiered at the Stratford Festival or when it played at the Edinburgh Fringe. For one thing, neither of those runs had to contend with a bronze statue of the man in question practically within earshot.