Jonathan Church, incoming artistic director of Stratford Festival, on Sept. 29.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The Stratford Festival has announced that British theatre director and producer Jonathan Church will be the company’s next artistic director.
Church, 58, is perhaps best known for his work at the Chichester Festival Theatre in England, where he served as artistic director from 2006 until 2015. (His contributions to British theatre while at Chichester were honoured in 2015 when he was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.)
Outside of Chichester, Church, a dual citizen of the U.K. and Canada via his Toronto-born mother, has built a successful portfolio of commercial and touring shows under his companies Jonathan Church Productions and, more recently, Jonathan Church Theatre Productions. Mirvish Productions in Toronto has presented a number of works either directed by Church or affiliated with his production companies, including Singin’ in the Rain in 2022, In Dreams in 2023 and 42nd Street during the 2023-24 holiday season.
While at Chichester, Church programmed Shakespeare several times, including an acclaimed Macbeth directed by Rupert Goold and starring Patrick Stewart. The production moved to the West End in 2007 and eventually Broadway in 2008.
Church’s initial term with the Stratford Festival will be five years, and he will program the 2027 season. Over the next year, Church, a self-described “producer who directs,” will serve alongside departing artistic director Antoni Cimolino as artistic director designate, learning the festival while “disentangling” himself from projects still to come in the Jonathan Church Theatre Productions pipeline. His work as the festival’s sole artistic director will officially commence on Nov. 1, 2026.
“I’ll be coming over here every month to start.” he said, “then it’ll reverse, and I’ll be based in Stratford.”
Church will program the 2027 Stratford season. His initial term will be five years.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The appointment seems like a somewhat natural next step in Church’s career: The Chichester Festival Theatre’s thrust stage, around which audiences sit on three sides of the performance space, bears striking resemblance to that of Stratford’s Festival Theatre. In fact, the two are sister theatres, a detail Church highlighted repeatedly when we spoke on Monday.
“If you were appointing directors without the technical skill or imagination to tackle the thrust stage, I think it affected the quality of the work being presented,” said Church of programming the Chichester space during his time there. “I made mistakes under my tenure. I think that knowledge is helpful here – there are things I can say and do in terms of nurturing others who don’t know the thrust stage as well.”
The Stratford Festival has three thrust stages: the 2,192-seat Festival Theatre, the 600-seat Tom Patterson Theatre and the 250-seat Studio Theatre, as well as the 1,010-seat proscenium Avon Theatre.
Church shared that Cimolino has shown him infrastructure upgrades the festival will soon need, particularly inside the aging Festival Theatre. “My knowledge from refurbishing Chichester, my knowledge of these spaces and their geometry, I think might be helpful to the company,” he said. (Church oversaw an approximately $41-million renovation in Chichester during his time as artistic director.)
According to board chair David L. Adams, the festival conducted a global search for the artistic director position, with a recruiter in Canada and a consultant in the U.K. In total, 101 people applied for the job. Thirteen were interviewed in the first round, which the search committee reduced to seven – one of whom dropped out owing to family obligations – then three.
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While Adams cited confidentiality concerns around sharing specific details about the shortlist, he did divulge that of the final three candidates, two were Canadian citizens – including Church – while the last was another Brit.
The nine-person search committee was “diverse in terms of gender and other factors,” he said, but notably, no artists were included in the committee. The festival instead sent out an online survey to 150 participants, including artists, donors and staff, and a “senior artist” without current ties to the festival was brought in as a consultant.
Adams called the process “a very difficult search” owing to the high quality of the shortlisted candidates. Ultimately, though, Church was successful for his “wide range of international connections and experience,” coupled with his time managing large, complex organizations that deal in repertory theatre.
Both Church and Adams recognize there may be strong reactions to hiring a candidate whose Canadian experience has largely been limited to short presentations in Toronto. But Adams sees Church’s international ties as a selling point for the appointment.
“There’s this blend of attracting internationally renowned talent and continuing to develop Canadian artists and Canadian directors,” Adams said. “And it’s not like he hasn’t had any exposure to Stratford – he’s been coming here for 20 years, and he and Antoni have a very close relationship.”
Church says becoming artistic director at Stratford Festival feels ‘a bit like coming home.’Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
One blip on Church’s résumé that Adams said the search committee considered was a nine-month stint at Sydney Theatre Company in Australia. Church was appointed to the role soon after departing Chichester in 2015, and was back in the U.K. less than a year later.
“We took a good look at that experience and talked to a number of people surrounding it,” said Adams, who suggested Church was “set up to fail” by leadership at Sydney.
“My cultural connection with Sydney and those artists felt far less ingrained and significant than the one I have with Canada,” said Church, adding that his time in Australia gave him “a new perspective on how one engages with an organization.”
This time around, Church is all-in, he said. He’s “ready to embed in the country and community,” he continued, volatile weather and all.
“Stratford feels not unlike Chichester in that it’s a small community,” he said, “where everybody knows you very well, and where your life interweaves with your work.” He has an affinity for Ontario’s “glorious extremes” of “marvellous summers and cold winters,” he said, and he’s looking forward to engaging with his family’s history in Canada.
“It feels a bit like coming home,” he said. “I’m quite properly excited … there are very few companies in the world that can do what Stratford does, as well as it does. To have the opportunity to be part of that is mind-blowing.”