Jackie Maxwell named to Order of Canada

When she moved on from her 14-year tenure as Shaw Festival’s artistic director in 2016, Jackie Maxwell had recently been appointed to the Order of Ontario.

When she returns to NIagara-on-the-Lake to direct J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in May, she can add Order of Canada to her name.  

Maxwell is one of 99 new appointees for the prestigious title for 2022, along with the likes of hockey legend Sydney Crosby, music producer Bob Ezrin and author and historian Ted Barris.

The announcement was made Dec. 29 by Governor General Mary Simon.

“I was absolutely gobsmacked,” says the Belfast-born Maxwell on the phone from her Toronto home. “I found out just a few weeks before the announcement. It wasn’t something I had been expecting or thinking about. It came out of nowhere.”

Like a theatre-goer might while watching one of the many plays she has directed over the years, Maxwell says she went through a range of emotions.

“At first I was surprised,” she explains, “then I was very moved. And then I felt proud. It means a lot.”

The press release from the Governor General’s office says she earned the honour for “her contributions to Canadian theatre as an artistic director, director, dramaturge and teacher, and for her advocacy of women in the field.”

Maxwell began her tenure as Shaw artistic director in November, 2002, following Christopher Newton, who had retired from the role following that season. Prior to Shaw she had been the head of new play development at the  Charlottetown Festival and had staged plays for Mirvish Production, Tarragon Theatre, Opera Ontario, Centaur Theatre, Factory Theatre, the Canadian Stage Company and others.

Maxwell made waves immediately in her first year as artistic director. That 2003 season included Quebecois playwright Michel Marc Bouchard’s play The Coronation Voyage, performed on the festival’s main stage. It marked the first time in Shaw’s history that a living playwright’s work was presented at the festival.

Much of what is expected today from current Shaw playbills began under Maxwell. Today’s festival audiences expect to see big-budget musicals, newly commissioned works and contemporary plays that echo Shaw’s ideals. As well, it was under Maxwell that Shaw began to integrate female, Canadian and diverse voices into the festival’s programming and casting.

The Shaw Festival website says, “During Ms. Maxwell’s tenure she began producing works by modern writers who embody the spirit of the Festival’s namesake – writers whose work continues to question the status quo in new and different ways.”

“In any position of responsibility,” Maxwell says, “it’s your job to encourage and bring on people in different situations, to bring them along with you. I’ve always believed that from my first days in Canada when I was working at the National Arts Centre.”

Maxwell knows her work with the Shaw went a long way to her recognition from the government of Canada.

“I was very clear when I was at the Shaw,” she adds, “that I wanted to encourage female artists, directors and playwrights, and to look at work by women in the past that had been buried.”

When she returns this spring to direct Synge’s play she’ll be doing so at the studio theatre that has borne her name since 2017.

Maxwell arrived at Shaw when the campaign to build the Donald and Elaine Triggs Production Centre was already underway. The facility was originally slated to include three rehearsal-only spaces. It was Maxwell who suggested that the largest of the three would be ideal to host some of those off-the-beaten-path productions.

“That’s a big memory for me, the idea of creating that theatre,” she says. “I thought we could develop a new kind of programming there, bring in more contemporary pieces of work that have a Shavian nature. T.C. (current artistic director Tim Carroll) has continued to do wonderful work out of that space.”

Maxwell was back this summer to see both Everybody and Gem of the Ocean in the Jackie Maxwell Theatre, two plays that worked perfectly in the smaller space.

“My dream was always that you could bring in a younger, more contemporary audience base,” she adds. “I thought, who knows? You might be able to get them across the courtyard to come and see something else.”

Since moving on from Shaw in 2016, Maxwell has continued to direct and to mentor playwrights.

In 2019, she helmed the world premiere of Ken Ludwig’s Second World War romantic drama Dear Jack, Dear Louise at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. And she is on the playwright faculty at Montreal’s National Theatre School of Canada.

“I absolutely love teaching there,” she says. “I keep in contact with students. I have great conversations with wonderful students. I see them later in different theatres. That whole generational contact is something I really love.”

She was supposed to helm The Playboy of the Western World, a story set in a pub in her native Ireland, in 2020. In fact, she was two weeks into preparations for the production when COVID-19 shut down live performances.

So Maxwell was overjoyed when Carroll reached out to tell her it was time to get back at it.

“I’ve always loved Synge,” she says. “He did such a lot of research and developed a language that is really authentic. He so beautifully played with the language. It’s poetic, it’s funny, it’s dark. It’s really something to dive into.”

“It means a lot to me to get in there and do something in that space,” she adds about directing the play in the eponymous theatre. “And I’m looking forward to getting back to my walks in the common and visiting all the vegetable stands at the farmer’s market.”