British theatre director and producer Jonathan Church has been chosen as the Stratford Festival's next artistic director.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
On Wednesday, the Stratford Festival announced that British theatre director and producer Jonathan Church will serve as the company’s next artistic director, with a five-year agreement that will see him officially step into the role full-time in November, 2026.
The news ended months of speculation about who would take the top job in Canadian theatre, a gig with an advertised salary of up to $475,000 a year. Questions swirled around the festival’s grounds all summer: Would they hire a director from Toronto? An actor with deep roots at the fest?
And, perhaps most importantly: Would the search committee opt for a Canadian or an international hire?
The answer to that last one, as it turns out, is both.
Church, 58, was born and raised in Nottingham, England, but he knows Canada (and particularly Ontario) reasonably well – he’s a dual citizen. His mother, theatre actor Marielaine Douglas, was born in Toronto, and on Monday Church told me he fondly remembers “a big visit” to the province in 1976, a trip that included extended time with family and camping in Algonquin Park.
Church was born and raised in Nottingham, England, but he knows Canada reasonably well because he is a dual citizen.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Church, artistic director of Chichester Festival Theatre from 2006 until 2015 and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, has also spent a considerable amount of time building relationships with Canadian producers, namely Toronto’s Mirvish Productions. Mirvish has presented several shows either directed by or affiliated with Church – recent examples include Singin’ in the Rain in 2022 and 42nd Street during the 2023-24 holiday season.
But a Canadian passport and laundry list of Mirvish credits do not a Canadian director make. “I’m fundamentally British,” Church said when I asked if he thinks his status as an international hire might ruffle any feathers within the Canadian theatre industry.
“Look, if I’ve got a skill, it’s enabling other people’s talent to shine,” he continued, calling himself “a producer who directs.”
“That’s what I think an artistic director and producer does,” he said. “I think the process of doing that isn’t necessarily as culturally specific as those who may be critical may think.”
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Church’s track record as a producer speaks for itself. But the artistic director job is absolutely “culturally specific,” extraordinarily so. The Stratford Festival shapes and is shaped by the Canadian theatre industry, from the actors it attracts from smaller markets to the new plays it commissions and premieres, works that are often reproduced across the country.
It’s fundamentally a Canadian institution – a gem of international renown, to be sure, but one situated in a farmy pocket of Southwestern Ontario and with the power to change this country’s theatrical ecology.
With that in mind, Church has a clear willingness to learn the company and the area as he gets ready to shadow outgoing artistic director Antoni Cimolino for the 2026 season. “These next six months are about meeting and absorbing and getting to know the landscape,” he said. “There are a million artists who have a relationship with the theatre. I’m a huge believer in that artistic directors are just custodians of the theatre for the period of time that they’re there. The people really own it, the audience and the artists.”
It’s worth pointing out that Church’s hire is the most recent in a wave of splashy hires with international résumés at top Canadian cultural institutions: Recent examples include artistic director Hope Muir and executive director Charlotte Geeves at the National Ballet of Canada, as well as artistic directors Tim Carroll and Olivia Ansell at the Shaw Festival and Luminato Festival, respectively.
What does it mean, in this era of elevated elbows, that homegrown Canadians can’t land the top jobs in Canadian performing arts? When Carroll, another Brit, was appointed at Shaw in 2015, former Globe theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck questioned that decision.
“You can’t help but feel that search committees … want to land far-flung candidates in order to justify the time and expense they put into the hunt,” wrote Nestruck, “and that the mostly non-artists on them are more impressed by irrelevant international credits than relevant local ones.”
There’s a sense of history repeating itself here. The Stratford Festival’s nine-person search committee included zero artists – a deliberate choice, board chair David L. Adams said.
“I think it could have compromised artists if they didn’t select somebody who they knew,” he said. Adams added that 150 festival artists, donors and staff members were consulted during the hiring process via an online survey. A “senior artist” not currently involved with the festival was also consulted, but was not a member of the nine-person committee, he said.
In fact, including working artists on a selection committee is considered standard practice at companies similar to Stratford in size and scope. In 2022, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s selection panel included both RSC associate artist Noma Dumezweni and former National Theatre artistic director Nicholas Hytner, for instance. (Cimolino was not one of the nine members of the Stratford Festival’s hiring team.)
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There’s the not-so-small issue, too, of Church’s time at Sydney Theatre Company, one of the largest performing arts institutions in Australia. Church was appointed artistic director in 2015, only to depart just nine months later.
“Sydney was one of those moments where the handover wasn’t quite so elegant,” Church said. “And I think my cultural connection with Sydney and those artists was far less ingrained than the one I have with Canada.
“It was a very different process from this one,” he continued. “In the end, my wife has a wonderful phrase: ‘Are you drawn to something, or are you running away from something?’ I’ve been drawn towards this job. I was definitely running away from something then – the fear of not running a building when I left Chichester, maybe.”
Adams brushed off Church’s time in Sydney. “We obviously took a good look at that experience and we talked to a number of people surrounding it,” he said, adding that the Stratford Festival is taking steps to ensure continuity in its leadership as Church settles into the role: Executive director Anita Gaffney is scheduled to stay on through the end of the festival’s 2028 season, and Adams will stay on as chair emeritus past his official retirement in March.
“We’ve done what we can to set him up for success,” he said.