Winnipeg’s Sacred Monster

While the story of Canadian theatre is well served by a wide array of biographies and autobiographies, there has been one daunting topic hitherto left untouched: John Hirsch (1930–89). Born into an affluent family in Hungary, Hirsch came to Canada as a teenage war refugee; a decade later he famously co-founded Canada’s first civic professional theatre company—the Manitoba Theatre Centre—and went on to become one of North America’s foremost stage directors. In the relatively staid anglophile landscape of post-war Canadian theatre, Hirsch was an exotic and commanding figure, like a gaudy East European abstract in a gallery of polite English watercolours.

Fraidie Martz and Andrew Wilson, the authors of A Fiery Soul: The Life and Theatrical Times of John Hirsch, came to their topic, not through a study of Canadian theatre, but through Martz’s earlier book, Open Your Hearts: The...