Unlike biographies of Canadian authors or visual artists, those dealing seriously, in a non-showbiz way, with Canadian theatre personalities are actually quite rare. In A Fiery Soul: The Life and Theatrical Times of John Hirsch, Fraidie Martz and Andrew Wilson give us a monotonously written but thorough and level-headed picture of a figure who, a generation ago, was celebrated as a bearded whirlwind of a theatre director and administrator – co-founder of the Manitoba Theatre Centre, artistic director of the Stratford Festival from 1981 to 1985, and head of CBC television drama. Hirsch did at least as much as anyone else of his time to create and then elevate a professional Canadian theatre.

Hirsch was a Hungarian Jew, born János Hirsch in 1930 in the town of Siófok, where “he first saw theatre in religion and religion in theatre” while also acquiring a discriminating taste for kitsch. After the Nazi invasion of Hungary left him an orphan, he found himself in Paris, hoping to join the relatively small number of lucky Jewish children selected for new homes in the Americas. He was rejected by Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, and the U.S. “There finally came a day when he joined a long line-up he thought was for free shoes but which turned out to be for immigration to Canada. His luck had finally turned.”

He found safety and freedom with an adoptive family in Winnipeg. He chose that city, he said much later, because it was in the centre of the country, “remembering my mother’s words to avoid extremes – the middle being the safest.” It was there he began his long collaboration with the playwright Tom Hendry. In his Canadian career, Hirsch was known for drawing “on his visual imagination and sense of history [to] populate and dress his productions.”

Marking the book like an indellible tattoo is the way such talented Canadians are so often forced to stitch together a patchwork living, including, in Hirsch’s case, overseeing sitcoms and teaching at Yale and Southern Methodist University in Dallas. But the authors make informed choices about giving each part of Hirsch’s career, which ended in 1989 with his death from complications due to AIDS, the proper emphasis.