Shaw Festival's Neil Munro – 1947-2009
Canadian Acting / Directing Visionary Passes Away at age 62
Scottish-born Neil Munro, Resident Director at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario (Canada) for the last 20 years, was the kind of director that liked to make the audience sit up and think about what they were seeing, always trying to "get at the immediacy of the emotional moment."
Be it the plays of Shaw contemporary Harley Granville Barker (The Voysey Inheritance, Waste, The Madras House) or dusting off Shakespeare's Hamlet and "putting it in modern dress" in Theatre Plus Toronto's Hamlet's Room, Neil Munro was often described as one of Canada's most controverisal directors.
The following is an excerpt from a 1995 interview as Neil Munro describes his creative process with his actors and his reasons behind the 1993 Shaw Festival production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.
How do you work with your actors on a production?
Neil Munro: "Well, I guess the way we work at it is that we spend as much time around the table as possible as time will permit. Slowly, we read the play through over and over and break the characters down, and talk about the world they are living in, and talk about the circumstances that are affecting them, that has sort of forced them into being the kind of characters that they are.
It’s through discussions of that nature, by the time we actually get ready to put it up on its feet, more or less, that all the characters are living in the same world by that time. We do a lot of talking.
"I also do a lot of research so that there’s always things to talk about in terms to the world they were in, as opposed to the world we are in.
"Then, once the actors have got it firmly embedded in their mind, that this is the world that they are coming from, it is really just a question of sitting back and helping them form ... helping them go a little deeper into where they want to go. That’s basically my job, to encourage people to go further, and to dig deeper, once we have all decided where it is we want these characters to live, and what kind of world we want them to live in.
1993's Shaw Festival production of Saint Joan with Mary Haney comes to mind ...
Neil Munro: "It was wonderful. Mary was terrific and I knew she would be. Half the battle,really, in directing, is casting. If you cast well then, you are three quarters of the way there and ultimately no matter what you do, sooner or later it comes down to the focus on the performer, and if that performance isn’t there, well... it doesn’t matter how clever you are."
This was a very unique interpretation of Saint Joan. Why all the monitors?
Neil Munro: "This is part of our lives. I put the TV screens in Saint Joan because I was in Toronto watching TV one day. There was an Anglican priest that was up on charges because he had a lover. There was video footage of him in this trial that was being held within the Anglican church.
"And I thought Jesus Christ, this is exactly what Saint Joan was about - in camera, judiciary deciding who this person is, and how long they should live, and I suddenly realized that this is what we should do with Joan, seeing as how we had already moved this into the 20th century anyway. I think one of Shaw’s big points in that play was that if Joan did come back, we’d burn her all over again."
Mary Haney told me, they would have raped her as well..
Neil Munro: "Yes, and then just tossed her in the heap. So it was vitally important for me to ground that character and that story into the 20th century consciousness, and not give the audience the medieval kind of out where they park their 20th century brains and sit down and pretend to be 17th century or something. Trying to get at the immediacy of the emotional moment, is really all I ever I try to do."
Director Neil Munro
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