Reinventing Ottawa’s National

Peter Hinton is the new director of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Theatre. “A new artistic director should be an opportunity for a theatre to look at itself, to re-examine what it’s doing. My appointment to the place begged a lot of questions about what kind of future there would be.” Since it opened in 1969, the NAC has never done an all-Canadian season, notes Hinton. “That’s really interesting to me. It speaks to the brevity of our history and the way new-play development has grown and reached its own ceiling.”