Holmes named new director of Centaur
New artistic director’s track record at Shaw Festival is quite impressive
The long wait, the wild speculations and the feverish rumourmongering are all over. The name of Roy Surette’s successor as artistic and executive director of Montreal’s — indeed, Quebec’s — leading anglo theatre has just been revealed. Drum roll … It’s Eda Holmes. Those who were expecting somebody intimately involved with, or even familiar to, the Montreal theatre community might well be asking themselves “Eda who?” But regular visitors to the Shaw Festival, where the U.S.-born Holmes has been associate director since 2010, or to such Toronto venues as Factory Theatre and the Tarragon Theatre, will no doubt be sagely anticipating exciting, or at the very least, interesting times ahead for Centaur Theatre.
Holmes has an impressive track record in contemporary as well as classical plays, having directed and received ringing praise for her productions of works by, for instance, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill and Tony Kushner. Her 2015 Shaw Festival production of Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures was described by the Globe and Mail’s J. Kelly Nestruck as being “as close to perfection as possible.”
Holmes has won Dora Awards for her productions of new Canadian plays, including the English première of Michel Marc Bouchard’s Tom at the Farm and the musical Little Mercy’s First Murder. She also won the Toronto Theatre Critics Award for her Shaw Festival/ Mirvish production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
And there is, in fact, a Montreal connection. Though raised in Texas and Florida, Holmes moved to Montreal after a short-lived ballet career ended with a knee injury. Turning instead to theatre, she enrolled in the National Theatre School of Canada in 1994 and remained in the city until 2003 before moving to Toronto.
“Ironically, the Centaur gave me my first professional job coming out of theatre school,” Holmes said in a telephone conversation with the Montreal Gazette. “I assisted Jackie Maxwell while I was still at theatre school for the Englishlanguage première of The Orphan Muses (Bouchard again) and then the next year Gordon McCall invited me to direct Very Heaven by Ann Lambert, and that was my very first professional gig. So I’ve always had a soft spot for the Centaur.”
Although Surette wasn’t officially part of the search committee, which comprised four board members, he did express to the Montreal Gazette last year that it was perhaps time that the Centaur was headed both by a woman and somebody who was comfortably bilingual (Surette confesses to having struggled with French). Holmes is in fact bilingual, or “somewhat bilingual,” as she modestly puts it.
“I lived in Europe for a long time and my husband’s bilingual,” she says. “I see a lot of French theatre, and I do speak a lot of French. I’m planning to build up those chops.”
Holmes will take up her new job as of Aug. 1, and one of her first tasks will be to fit right into the 2017-18 season which Surette has planned and which will be announced some time in March.
Surette’s final production at Centaur is François Archambault’s You Will Remember Me, which runs from March 7 to April 2. He officially ends his tenure in
June, after which he will take up the position of artistic director at Vancouver’s Touchstone Theatre.
Of Holmes, Surette says: “She is a tremendous director with extensive experience in both the classics
and in developing and directing new work … I know that Eda will thrive in this incredibly supportive, creatively inspirational city, and Centaur audiences are certain to reap the benefits.”