Speranza
Matthew Jocelyn: A man of many, many ghosts
The head of Canadian Stage is set
to challenge Toronto audiences and subscribers with his first show
By courtesy of SARAH DEA
Matthew Jocelyn is the artistic and general director of The Canadian Stage
Company.
By courtesy of R. Ouzounian Theatre Critic.
“Death, where is thy sting?”
The famous line may not exactly
be Matthew Jocelyn’s mantra, but the phrase has haunted him for much of his
life.
And on this spectacularly sunny late summer morning, he’s prepared to
face the ghosts of his past, no matter how much pain it causes.
This comes at
a time when, as the new head (artistic and general director) of Canadian Stage,
he’s also getting ready to reveal his artistic vision to Toronto with his very
first show, Fernando Knapp Wrote Me This Letter: An Attempt at the Truth, which
opens at the Bluma Appel Theatre on Sept. 23.
Jocelyn’s view of theatre as a
globally-based, barrier-shattering experience will undoubtedly come as a bit of
a wake-up call to CanStage subscribers, who’ve grown used to more tranquil stuff
over the past decade, but it’s the man himself who’s really the intriguing
subject.
Bald, bespectacled and placidly smiling, Jocelyn
has, since he was appointed general director of Toronto’s largest not-for-profit
theatre in February of 2009, been certainly taking the measure of this city and
its theatre practitioners — although no one has had much of a chance to repay
the favour.
He’s been quietly charming, unfailingly polite and personally
guarded — so much so, in fact, that one actor quipped, “I think he’s a
clone.”
Not so.
Put the correct key in the proper lock, turn with care and
the door opens on a complex, sensitive man with a shattering personal
history.
It didn’t start out that way.
Matthew Jocelyn was born in "The Beaches"
neighbourhood of Toronto in 1958 to Gordon Jocelyn and Joy Jocelyn, the youngest of
their four children.
Leaning back in the lobby of the Bluma Appel Theatre,
Jocelyn expansively describes his father as
“a prodigious English teacher, a man
profoundly interested in transmitting the art form of literature, but a feisty
father, fairly disciplinarian.”
His mother, Joy Jocelyn, was “the very first paid employee
of Planned Parenthood Canada."
Her office was a room in the house.
This was when
abortion was illegal in Canada and any kind of birth control was difficult to
get.
“I remember my mother dealing with hysterical calls from women about to
plunge coat hangers up their uteruses, calming them down and planning trips to
England where they could have it done safely and legally.”
As you can
imagine, it wasn’t a conventional household.
“There was a radicality of
thought process he grew up in.
His father sent him to a Unitarian church, but just for
a while, so he could have an understanding of the Bible, which he felt his son needed
to grasp Western literature.
For someone who can now seem like the loftiest
of intellectuals, Jocelyn laughingly recalls that he was “the least articulate
kid in the family."
His brother and sisters were all reading and discussing and he
said ‘F--- you, I want to play hockey on the street.’”
And that is what he
did, “using a tennis ball and a hockey stick in the winter and a lacrosse stick
made out of a Javex bottle in the summer.”
Life went on, “with no sense of
God but a kind of reigning agnosticism.
We did have one tradition, a Quaker
tradition.
Every night before dinner, we held hands and said a silent
prayer.”
That tight circle was first broken, then shattered.
When Jocelyn
was 18, his mother developed ovarian cancer and died.
The next year, he went off
to France with his older sister, Paula Jocelyn, to study in Aix-en-Provence.
“One
day we were out hitchhiking, Paula went to cross the road and was hit by a
car.”
Jocelyn’s normally cool, placid voice starts to tremble.
“She spent
four, five months in a coma.
I sat there, holding her hand, singing to her,
trying to give her some desire to come back to life.
Those were very profound
months for me.
“Then she started to wake up and they sent her back to Canada,
where she slowly began to recuperate.”
But the unforgiving gods weren’t
through with the Jocelyn family.
“My brother Tim, a wonderful and very
flamboyant member of the Toronto arts community, learned that he had AIDS.
When
I found out that news, I went into the mountains of Spain for a week long fast.
When I returned, they handed me a telegram.”
Jocelyn expected that it would
have horrible news about his brother, but an even worse surprise was in
store.
“The day before my sister was to be finally released from the
hospital, she was sitting out in the garden in her wheelchair.
A taxi driver who
was taking a patient for dialysis suddenly had a heart attack.
His foot jammed
down on the gas pedal and he smashed into Paula Jocelyn, killing her, himself and
the man he was bringing to the hospital.
Jocelyn returned home and six
months later, his brother Tim Jocelyn died.
“It was like waves of life and death
crashing over me.
I didn’t know what it all meant, I just tried to keep myself
from drowning in it all.”
He wipes away the tears that have flowed
unashamedly down his face.
“I later talked about it to my surviving sister,
Martha Jocelyn.
We realized that we had spent 10 years of our youth, the years most
people spend building their lives, contending with death.
Only with a lot of
hindsight did we realize that we had learned what was important and what
wasn’t.”
After all of this pain, Jocelyn realized he had “to break out and
make my own life.”
He decides to do it in the theatre, fleeing far from Toronto.
First to Mt. Allison in New Brunswick, then McGill in Montreal and finally
further afield to Europe and Asia.
“In retrospect, I guess the theatre was a
natural career choice for me.
My parents’ families were BOTH from Stratford, and
my father was a dresser there during the first two seasons of the festival,
helping Alec Guinness and James Mason.
I started going there when I was
7.”
In 2006, the Stratford Festival invited Jocelyn to direct The Liar by
Corneille, which was the first show he had done in Canada in over 15
years.
“My brother and sister had also been brilliant actors, but I couldn’t
follow in their footsteps, not until I had left home.”
But once out on his
own, his career blossomed.
After some rigorous training, he became known as one
of the true avant-garde creators in modern theatre.
The French government
honours Matthew Jocelyn by appointing him head of the Atelier du Rhin, the national
drama centre, which he ran successfully for a decade as a home for theatre,
opera and contemporary dance. To this day, he is in demand as a director around
the world.
Ask Jocelyn how the turmoil and tragedy of his youth led to the
tranquility and triumph he displays today and his answer reflects the Buddhist
principles he has tried to follow for the past few decades.
“My general
instinct is to learn from whatever experience I’m in.
I learn what the causes of
unhappiness are so that I can keep them at bay.
And I learn the causes of
happiness so that I can be more easily attracted to them.”
The last of the
morning’s tears have dried on his face and he smiles again.
“Yes, I have
many, many ghosts, but they are very warm and very supportive. It’s a lucky
thing in my life.”
FIVE FAVE INFLUENCES IN MATTHEW JOCELYN’S LIFE AND
CAREER
JOY and GORDON JOCELYN:
His mother, Joy Jocelyn, taught him how to be accepting and
welcoming and non-judgmental.
His father, Gordon Jocelyn, taught him how to be rigorous and
difficult and questioning.
Together it was an unbeatable combination.
RENA
MIRECKA: She was the leading actress in Jerzy Grotowski’s company and she opened
my eyes to the potential in performance, the ultimate truth to be sought after.
I learned all the places you can go with actors and all the roads not to get
there.
DAGPO RINPOCHE:
He is a Tibetan lama who taught me how extraordinary
it is to have no separation between the spoken word and the lived experience.
The things I perceive, the relationships I try to engender — everything has been
informed by him.
T
ANAKA MIN:
One of the second generation of Butoh dancers
who taught me physical discipline.
He told me that dancing “is like fishing. You
send a line out into the water, but you never know what is in the water below
you.”
PHILIPPE BOESMANS:
The greatest of all Belgian composers and one of my
closest friends.
He lives on the planet music in the country poetry.
"He is an
ego-free genius with a wicked sense of humour, but the gentlest person I have
ever met."
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