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It was only last Saturday that Stratford actor Diane D'Aquila had enjoyed a pleasant dinner and evening with her friend Richard Monette.
“I cooked lamb meatballs with penne in spicy tomato sauce and brought it over,” D'Aquila said on Wednesday. “And he was fantastic. Clear of spirit, clear of mind. Walking without any support, up and about. We talked about theatre. He looked 15 years younger.”
But early Wednesday, a friend phoned with terrible news. The man who had reigned for 14 seasons over the country's most important theatre had died Tuesday night of a reported pulmonary embolism. He was 64.
“This is a huge shock,” said D'Aquila, who played 11 seasons at the Stratford Festival under Monette's tenure as artistic director. “I've lost a huge friend, a gigantic influence in my life, in my heart, in my career.”
Monette, as everyone who knew him would attest, was an oversized personality: flamboyant, outrageous, wickedly funny, usually gregarious, sometimes painfully shy, but an irrepressible life force. On one occasion, when someone complained about what constructing a new bosom support for an actress would cost, Monette went out and bought a bag of birdseed and stuffed it into her corset, thus providing the needed lift, and said, “Here, take that.”
Since his departure from the festival two years ago, he had been in physical decline – stricken, first, with prostate cancer, and then other ailments, including severe peripheral vascular disease. He had been seriously ill for months, and was admitted to hospital for tests as recently as last month.
But then, it happily seemed, he had begun to make a modest recovery. “I thought he was getting better,” said Martha Henry, an old friend and director of the Birmingham Conservatory for young actors, which Monette had started. “I talked to him last Friday, and he sounded better than I'd heard him in a long time, cogent and clear.”
For Henry, Monette's death constitutes a double loss, since he had agreed to direct a Conservatory production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona early next year. “Richard had a real pulse on the public and an ear to the ground, a trait often used against him in the press,” she said. “I never quite understood that. What did they want him to be – an elitist thinker? He had a popular touch and taste, along with an enormous love of Shakespeare and the classics. But it's too soon to say what his legacy will be. I don't think we'll know that for another five or 10 years.”
Monette's personal work ethic was legendary. “He lasted longer than anyone, in a job that just destroys you,” Henry said. “He was here all the time, or until he was no longer allowed to smoke in the buildings.”
“Richard didn't really have a partner,” Stratford veteran James Blendick said. “The theatre was his partner. He was married to it. And when he left it, he lost his partner. That can be very difficult on people, the stress of all that, the coming down. I think he felt rather alone and in despair, wondering what his future might be.”
Despite the emphasis on commercial fare during his tenure, Monette was also willing to take artistic risks, director Peter Hinton observed. “My trilogy, The Swanne, mounted over three seasons, would never have happened without Richard. He was dedicated to new work as much as he was to the classics.”
Hinton, now running the English-theatre division of the National Arts Centre, said he would “remember Richard's faith, his excitement, his belief that verse and poetry still had a legitimate dramatic voice. He faced a lot of criticism for that, but he saw it through.”
Actor Tom McCamus, who had visited Monette in the hospital in Stratford, Ont., a few weeks ago, also said he thought he was improving. “It's a very sad day,” McCamus said. “He's the reason I went to Stratford and stayed all that time.”
D'Aquila said she would remember Monette “for his love of Canadian theatre, his passion for it. His life was the theatre – to the detriment of his own personal life – and he gave 150 per cent. He was not nearly appreciated enough for what he did. He took it over when it was not doing well, and he turned it around and brought it to a place where they can now take it to another level. I don't think what they're doing now would have succeeded 15 years ago.”
Indeed, as theatre impresario David Mirvish noted Wednesday, Monette had taken the reins at the festival “when it was not in good financial shape, and [he] saw government support slip to something like 4 per cent of his budget, and had rebuilt it, left a substantial endowment [of $50-million] and handed it off to the next generation with the opportunity to take some risks. He gave Shakespeare a home, kept his eye on the audience and on the art. To my mind, he ran a brilliant balancing act.”
Mirvish said he would often bump into Monette in New York and have wonderful chats with him, the two often commiserating about the obtuseness of theatre critics.
Blendick, who had known Monette for 40 years, recalled meeting him for the first time in a production of Antony and Cleopatra, starring Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell. “He played Eros and I played the eunuch,” he said. “He was a wonderful boy, full of enthusiasm, very kind, very talented, the life of the party.”
D'Aquila said it was important to remember that Monette had not only served his audiences with respect, but also “had treated his actors with honour, and given us an opportunity to have a life in the theatre. Now, he's up in heaven and there are a lot of greats with him.
“I'm sure Bill Hutt [who died last year] will be meeting him at the gates and telling him what parts he wants to play next season. Something about Richard was bigger than life. He spoke his mind and did not care if it ruffled a few feathers. His death is the end of an era. There weren't many like Richard, not many cut from the same cloth, and there aren't many like him left.”
