Théâtre du Nouveau Monde looks back on 60 years of drama

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Three days before the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde's 60th birthday – and just two weeks after her own 60th – Lorraine Pintal is sitting in one of her theatre's 830 brand-new, red seats and taking the long view on the theatre's recent starring role in an international controversy involving three Greek tragedies and a French convicted killer.

"For 60 years, the TNM has been a theatre where there have been scandals," says Pintal, the actor and director who is now beginning her 20th season as artistic and general director of Montreal's second-oldest professional theatre. "Its life has been punctuated with them."

The TNM's latest one – surrounding a production scheduled for next spring called Des Femmes – was a bit more than punctuation, however. In fact, it completely punctured what was supposed to be a festive launch of the anniversary season last April.

Indeed, after the dust settled, Pintal had to hold a relaunch in August to draw attention to the rest of the lineup, which includes internationally acclaimed director Denis Marleau's video-infused take on King Lear and a revival of Réjean Ducharme's 1982 Governor-General's Award winner, Ha ha!... "I don't think there was one person who remembered the rest of the season," she says.

To recap: Des Femmes, a tour of a trilogy of tragedies by Sophocles directed by the provocative playwright Wajdi Mouawad, ignited a firestorm due to the planned musical participation of Bertrand Cantat, a rock star who spent four years in jail for the 2003 "murder with indirect intent" of his girlfriend, the French actress Marie Trintignant.

Though the production was to be performed at dozens of theatres in Europe and at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, TNM was the first theatre to announce the project and, in the absence of immediate comment from Mouawad, Pintal was left to deal with the reactions of women's groups and politicians – not to mention journalists from both sides of the Atlantic.

"We were not prepared at all for how the media would react," says Pintal now. "It snowballed.… There was a lot of sensationalism in the way it was covered."

In the end, the ensuing debate over art, rehabilitation and violence against women – which drew in Conservative and Bloc Québécois candidates in the middle of a federal election campaign – was cut short. According to a little-known Canadian law, Cantat was technically not allowed to enter Canada until five years after his full eight-year sentence had elapsed – though he had been in the country for rehearsals just weeks before. He won't appear on stage in Montreal or Ottawa in Des Femmes, after all.

Pintal can't or won't say what she would have done if that law wasn't on the books, but for her the issue revolved around supporting her artistic teams.

"I was asked to retry [Cantat] but I can't be a judge – I'm an artistic director who believes in an artistic project," says Pintal, who went to see Des Femmes with the rock star performing in Athens this summer. "I said yes to Wajdi – and as soon as I said yes for the trilogy, I gave him my confidence."

Looking back over the TNM's history, there is a certain irony about the home of "the classics of yesterday and tomorrow" being protested by women's groups. The theatre's biggest previous scandal involved Denise Boucher's 1978 one-act feminist play Les Fées sont soif ( The Fairies Are Thirsty), which featured a statue of the Virgin Mary as one of its characters and resulted in attempts to suppress the play in performance and publication. "Then, there were Catholic groups outside the theatre trying to prevent people from entering because the play was judged impertinent," Pintal says.

The TNM made headlines regularly in the turbulent 1970s under revered artistic director Jean-Louis Roux. During the October Crisis, the actors in a production of Ionesco's Jeux de massacre circulated a petition against the War Measures Act, while the 1972 premiere of Claude Gauvreau's surrealistic Les oranges sont vertes caused a Hair-sized controversy due to nudity.

Perhaps surprisingly given recent events, Pintal's 20-year reign at the TNM – which has seen her retire the company's deficit, triple the subscriber base and undertake a $13-million renovation in the mid-1990s – has been criticized on occasion for comparative artistic conservatism. With the theatre's devotion to Molière – whose L'École des femmes opened the 60th season on Oct. 8 – the TNM can be seen as a cousin of sorts to Ontario's 59-year-old Stratford Shakespeare Festival, an institution which other theatres often react against.

Indeed, they have an intertwined history. Jean Gascon, the founding artistic director of the TNM, left the theatre to be Stratford's first Canadian-born artistic director in 1968, while his successor Roux, who is now the last founder still living, has performed at Stratford numerous times – notably in 1956 in a famous bilingual production of Henry V starring Christopher Plummer and most recently in 2006 in Molière's Dom Juan opposite Colm Feore.

But Pintal's TNM was not free of controversy before L'Affaire Cantat. It wasn't even her first scandal involving Mouawad. Back in 2001, the Lebanese-Québécois playwright of Incendies (which was turned into an Oscar-nominated film last year) protested the placards of corporate sponsors that appeared on stage before his adaptation of Don Quichotte. In the accompanying program, he argued against this corporate intrusion on his art, while Pintal defended her sponsors as important partners.

"Yes, he causes problems," Pintal says in the warm radio voice she used to host a literary program on Radio-Canada for three years. "He's a real artist, very independent, stubborn sometimes, but he has a vision that is very clear of what he wants – and he doesn't make compromises."

L'École des femmes runs in Montreal until Oct. 29; Ha Ha!... opens on Nov. 15.