A highly personal and idiosyncratic response to “Where the Blood Mixes” by Kevin Loring

This afternoon I had one of the most powerful theatrical experiences of my life in a converted movie theatre at a matinee performance of Kevin Loring’s Where the Blood Mixes.  This isn’t really a review of the play, the production or the performances.  This is more of a gushing forth of the complicated background of my personal response to a powerful, challenging, painful piece of theatre.

My first encounter with Where the Blood Mixes was reading the play in early April, 2011.  I was reading it because it had won the Governor General’s Literary Award and for some years I’ve made it a point to read as many GG winners as I can lay my hands on.  In that Spring of 2011 I was also immersed in some obscure and not so obscure bits of Fraser Valley history and literature.  I was planning a road trip with my daughter down the Valley to retrace as well as possible the walking journey of British Novelist Morley Roberts in the 1880s, shortly before the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.  The setting of Loring’s play – Lytton, B.C., where the Thompson and Fraser Rivers meet – was a pleasant surprise, as Lytton was also the jumping off point for one of the most surreal episodes of Roberts’ trek, an episode which I was to learn sends out historical and literary tendrils which deeply inform Loring’s play for me.

Morley Roberts arrived in Lytton after walking away from his temporary employment laying track in the Kicking Horse Pass.  His plan, which he completed, was to walk to the coast, following what would soon be the Canadian Pacific Railway and what would much later become the Trans-Canada Highway.  I’ll skip over the vast majority of Roberts’s adventure.  If you can find a copy of his The Western Avernus, it’s a fascinating travelogue of a large part of Western North America in the 1880s, well worth discovering.  For the purposes of this reflection on Where the Blood Mixes I’ll just talk about Roberts’s walk from Lytton to what is now Boston Bar.

Roberts set out in the morning along the rough path which eventually would become, in large part, Highway 1, hugging the east slope of the Fraser Canyon.  His description are of a sublimely wild and untamed wilderness.  Throughout this section of his narrative, one has the distinct impression that he is travelling in a sort of mystic solitude.  As I read it I was put in mind of parts of Basho’s Narrow Road into the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi).  Roberts seems to be stumbling along in a timeless and endless primeval forest, forgetting himself whatever reason he might have come here or any goal he may have once had in mind.

But suddenly, Roberts is on the front porch of a nicely kept hotel!  Inside he finds that the house is kept by a clergyman and his assistant with the help of what Roberts describes as “a boy”.  Roberts spends the late afternoon and evening teaching the threesome how to make bread, enjoys a dinner with the two men, and then retires to the drawing room for cigars, fine liquor and a discussion of Latin poetry.  Then, fed, watered, intellectually stimulated, and rested, Roberts bids farewell to the hotel in the woods and walks off into the gather night.  In the utter darkness Roberts finally stumbles into a stopping house at Boston Bar.  The rest of his journey has none of the strangeness of that walk south from Lytton.

In fact, the “Hotel”  was Forty Mile House, now long disappeared, one of the many stopping houses left over from the Caribou Gold Rush.  After a good deal of research, I learned that the clergyman Roberts encountered was Richard Small, the head of the Anglican Mission at Lytton and the subject of a hagiographic little biography called Archdeacon on Horseback. Forty Mile House had recently been taken over by the Mission as a resting place on the Archdeacon’s circuit of his charges over the surrounding area.  Small was also responsible for the establishment of St. George’s Residential School, an act for which he is much praised by the authors of Archdeacon on Horseback.  What a wonderful gift he brought to the poor benighted native children!  Frankly, I gag when I read Archdeacon on Horseback.  St. George’s is the dark evil in the background of Where the Blood Mixes.  As Loring writes in his afterword, when the Band finally got control of the Residential School, they immediately tore it down it was such a painful wound on their community.

Another tendril, this one literary, runs from Roberts’ strange journey through Ethel Wilson’s great Canadian novel Swamp Angel.  Wilson’s protagonist, Maggie, leaves here marriage and flees by bus to Lytton from the south, the opposite direction from Roberts.  And her journey through the area is also a little surreal.  As she travels north, Maggie notices very carefully the changes in the landscape, a landscape eerily devoid of humanity.  But suddenly she sees an old overgrown cemetery with three decaying crosses in it.  When investigating the area on our road trip, at first I thought Wilson might have been describing the recently renovated Lytton Cemetery, but her description seemed to place the three crosses farther from the town.  As my daughter and I drove south, suddenly a small cemetery flashed past us.  At the first opportunity I returned to take a few photos.  I’d been keeping careful note of our odometer reading and later was able to work out that this cemetery, the one most likely described by Maggie in Wilson’s novel, is very near to the location of Forty Mile House, where Roberts spent his nice evening with the founder of the Residential School which is the reason for the generational agony in Where the Blood Mixes.

Do all these details surrounding Forty Mile House have any meaning or, indeed, anything to do with the play? I don’t know about for anyone else, but they add a new, personal depth to the play for me. For me. This is a highly personal (and idiosyncratic) response.

Earlier, as my daughter and I were approaching Lytton from the east, I noticed two aboriginal gentlemen climbing up over the grey boulders from the direction of the Thompson River bank, and I couldn’t help but think with fondness “they could be Floyd and Mooch!”  And it is here that I will come to the production I saw this afternoon.

I found the set to be brilliant.  Not minimalist but efficient.  Everything is of the river: the grey stones such as I noticed “Floyd and Mooch” climbing over as we approached Lytton; the riverworn logs which serve as bridge and bar; the crushed oil drum and old tire, the detritus of the Shum’mas, and the bit of railroad that brought the Shum’mas to the Place in the Heart Where the Blood Mixes.  The stage is lit before the play starts with a submarine blue: from the moment one enters the theatre, it is clear that this play is about what lies beneath the surface.  The sound design is all water and wind and the sounds of nature with at least one train whistle reminding us whence comes the pain.  And, of course, the skeletal sturgeon and eagle, water and wind,  which preside over the play must be mentioned in their ominousness.

Something that really caught my eye was the subtle detail of George (Robert Benz) mopping the floor as the cast sang Ashe’ Mashe’. The stage directions simply read: “GEORGE mops up the mess of the evening throughout”.  Read, it’s a detail easy to miss.  But in performance, as the five characters sing their individual songs of – of what? Regret? Redemption? Transformation? George’s mopping tells us, whether we know N’laka’pamuxtsn or not, that they each are singing a song of mopping up the mess.

The performances were all impressive.  I found it interesting to watch Lorne Cardinal, whom I remember from his time at the University of Alberta, now the almost-elder Canadian actor he has become.  His Floyd is at the opposite end of the dramatic spectrum from his Davis on Corner Gas.  Cardinal pulls off amazing work with emotionally difficult material.  “Emotionally difficult material” is an absurd understatement: Cardinal has dedicated his performance to his parents, both survivors of the Residential Schools genocide. Years ago I met Cardinal’s late father briefly at a wedding.  It was eerily startling to watch Cardinal fils becoming on stage the damaged man is own father so easily could have become.  For a moment I saw the father on stage, the father who had been peaceful and happy on the one occasion I ever saw him, for a moment I saw that calm man tormented and twisted in the trauma of survival and memory.

Craig Lauzon as Mooch also achieves the transition from the comic to the tragic between the beginning and end of the play with painful conviction.  There was just one brief moment near the beginning where I thought Lauzon might have zoned out and just recited a line or two rather than being Mooch, but then, maybe I zoned out.  Sera-Lys McArthur as Christine (and Anna) was beautifully ethereal in the dream sequences and beautifully urban in the real world. Her solo singing was dreamy and her “spoken word artist” Christine stuck in the Lytton Hotel bar was spot on.  Michaela Washburn as June was suitably terrifying in rage and achingly tender in vulnerability.  And Robert Benz as the Shum’ma barkeep, George was perfect as the jolly friend to all these damaged characters – as long as they kept their damage out of his bar unless it was being drowned.

But it feels a little stupid to be talking about the quality of the performances: I can’t imagine acting this painful material a single time, let alone night after night. This cast not only gets through it, they make it look, if not easy — it could never be easy — absolutely real.  That in itself is a theatrical miracle.

The facts of the Residential Schools catastrophe must be made known to all Canadians, of that I am firmly convinced.  Where the Blood Mixes in a production such as the one I saw this afternoon, makes the experience of the Residential Schools catastrophe just almost tangible to a Shum’ma like me.  And that touch is terrifying and unforgettable.

See Where the Blood Mixes. And buy the play: it’s published by Talon Books. And lobby your local school board to have it placed on the English curriculum in high school.  And the Social Studies curriculum.

Where the Blood Mixes by Kevin Loring is being presented by Theatre Network at the Roxy Theatre until March 3, 2013.

Please see it, for the children who were taken, and that none will ever be taken again.

Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest”

Watching Felicity Jones as Miranda running through the forest on Prospera’s Island in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest I can’t help but think of Helen Mirren in her first major role in Michael Powell’s 1969 film Age of Consent.  Apart from Mirren’s presence in both films and a few momentary visual similarities and a caressing devotion to images in both, I don’t think there are any great meaningful parallels to be drawn between the two films.  Perhaps one could massage some plot parallels between Age of Consent and The Tempest, but that seems a stretch.  I just couldn’t help feeling an association in my own mind.

A personal bias to be disclosed immediately:  Helen Mirren can do no wrong.  That out of the way, what to make of Taymor’s Tempest?

The obvious place to start would be the change of Prospero to Prospera, which Taymor and Mirren have acheived marvellously seamlessly.  The change works and works well, bringing new emphasis to issues of the play that often are submerged and causing a bit of a paradigm shift by making the central relationship mother/daughter rather than father/daughter.  As well, the parallel between Sycorax, exiled to the Island with her son, Caliban and Prospera exiled with Miranda is made so very obvious by the change, and the questions surrounding Caliban’s early companionship with Miranda, his slavery, the old issue of colonization, the contrast between black and white magic . . . so much is brought to the fore by the change of an “o” to an “a”.

As well as making the adjustments to backstory in Act I, scene 2 necessary to the sex change, Taymor has excised a large number of phrases and lines as well as splitting Act II, scene 2.  I expect these decissions were made to make the project more accessible to modern audiences (and the project more palatable to the studio).  On the whole, the changes and excisions are either seamless or improvements for the new medium.  Certainly the splitting of the long conversation of the court figures into two scenes makes for a more punchy effect.

A quibble I can’t help feeling concerns the masque.  Taymor has constructed a magical effects scene in which Prospera suddenly remembers Caliban’s plot and ends it.  This is all proper, except it is absurdly short, completely without words, and only with a hint of the conjugal meaning of Shakespeare’s masque scene.  It seems so odd that Taymor, the absolute Queen of Masks on stage and screen, should choose to pass over the opportunity the nuptial masque offers.    In the Experts’ Commentary track on the DVD someone mentions that many today feel that the masque is “unplayable”.  In my opinion, The Freewill Company this past summer put the lie to that assumption: the masque is absolutely playable today and it can be accessible and beautiful.  I wish Taymor had put more/some effort into her vision of the masque.

Ben Wishaw is exquisite as Ariel.  Although his major manifestations (the nymph and the harpy, the latter an absolutely rivetting scene) are distinctly female, a male Ariel (as Shakespeare wrote him) produces a fascinating sexual tension with Mirren’s Prospera, a tension often produced in modern productions by making Ariel female.  But the power relationship between a male master and a female slave is much different than that between a female master and a male slave, something which also affects the relationship between Prospera and Caliban (Djimon Hounsou).  The physically powerful Caliban would have no trouble overwhelming Prospera were it not for her magic, but Prospero the man might be more of a challenge.  Prospera’s power is magnified by her being a female master to male servants.

The cast is fairly uniformly tremendous with a few small issues. I find Reeve Carney’s Ferdinand quite dull, and Felicity Jones as Miranda is appealling, but I have trouble seeing her physically as Helen Mirren’s daughter.  The Court characters are perfect.  Tom Conti’s Gonzalo is marvelous, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Conti.  David Strathern is marvelously, and to me, surprisingly noble as Alonso, the King of Naples.  Alan Cumming nails the maleability of Sebastian and Chris Cooper as Antonio does a wonderful job, particularly in some of the backchat bits while Gonzalo and Alonso are speaking.  And he is physically very belivable as Mirren’s brother.

The clowns are thankfully absolutely not “Disney.”  Alfred Molina is brilliant as Stephano.  No surprise there.  Despite my unaccountable antipathy to Russel Brand, he does a workmanlike job of Trinculo. The Gabardine Scene is aranged much like every other production, and the scene where the fancy cloths are found is much like the same scene in Mazursky’s remarkable Tempest, but never do the three sink to the disgrace of Disney clowns. Please, please, please, all companies considering Shakespeare, go to school on Taymor’s clowns and shun everything of Disney.  There is so much more in these “minor” characters.

Djimon Hounsou is incomparable as Caliban, so evocative of so very much!  He is so grounded in the soil of the island, so physical and graceful, his voice so rich, both in tone and accent.  Somehow the use of drunkenness to control Caliban is a more real referance to colonialism than it is in most productions I’ve seen.  Seeing Hounsou’s very beautiful African face being plied with liquor by a fat drunken white guy is so depressingly terrifying to me.  Caliban has so much more nobility than any of the European characters, including Prospera.  Hounsou’s cries of “Freedom! at the end of the Gabardine scene, although tragically misplaced, should finally expunge any filmic memory of an unmentionable other blue-faced cinematic cry of “Freedom”.

The costume design and makeup are everything we might expect from Taymor.  The Court characters are dressed in a fascinating combination of Elizabethan cut, black leather, and zippers.  They are a biker gang pretending to be Lords.  Nicely done.  Prospera is all earth and organic, a sort of Gaia figure.  I am not sure, however, that her magic cloak works — it looks like a collection of melted plastic bottles.  Miranda is a virginal Diana, or, more appropriate to the tempest, Virgil’s Camilla, daughter of Metabus the original exiled single-father, running barefoot over the tops of the grain in the fields.  Her short, disheveled homespun dress is perfect.  And Caliban:  a foot in two worlds, white/Black, nature/civilization.  But, is Nature dominant? Wait for the end.

There is no party as ends Mazursky’s Tempest (a scene later lifted entire by Mamma Mia, by the way).  Although still still to come are the release of Ariel, the destruction of Prospera’s staff and books, and the epilogue (as a pop song over the end credits — couldn’t Taymor have found Matthew Broderick to do it Ferris Bueller style?), here is how the film ends for me:

Caliban’s last line is left out.  He leaves Prospera’s cell alone, in charge at last.  No more magic.  No more politics.  Just life. Nature.

The Freewill Shakespeare Tempest: a wonderful evening of Shakespeare in the rain

As I sit down to write the rain, which began as an epic thunderstorm, has been falling for twenty-four hours.  How could there be a better evening for an outdoor performance of  The Tempest, the Shakespeare play I love the most, and to follow up my enjoyable time at Julius Caesar a while ago?  The Freewill Shakespeare Company’s production and performances were wonderful — at times glorious — and the weather was perfect.

I’ve read other reviews which have highly praised the opening scene of the titular Tempest and that praise has been appropriate.  The use of the turntable and the stairs at left and right is tremendous, as is the coordinated Star Trek battle-lean of the cast.  But there is more magic on Prospero’s Island than just the opening weather tricks.  The dual-duty-doing set design by Cory Sincennes is remarkable in it’s beauty, in it’s appropriateness to both plays it serves, in it’s variability, and in its functionality.  The sound design from the opening maritime, vaguely foghornish drone is marvelous.  And Narda McCarroll’s costume design ranges from startlingly appropriate (the Court of Naples as a biker gang) to absolutely stunning (Ariel and the sprites).

Again I have my quibbles:  as is Julius Caesar, The Tempest is shortened; Ariel as written is male, not Amber Borotsik’s very clear female spirit; Miranda’s stern (and empowering) lecture to Caliban in Act I, scene 2  is partly given to Prospero, disappointingly; and in Act 4, Scene 1, Ferdinand is given the lines

so rare a wondered father and a wife
Makes this place paradise.

instead of the more strongly attested

so rare a wondered father and a wise
Makes this place paradise.

But these are quibbles, particularly the last:  Such a charming Ferdinand as Mat Simpson would definitely list in paradise such a charming Miranda as Caley Thomas-Haug.

Simpson nails Ferdinand as the gangly wide-eyed teenager suddenly alone in a very strange and magical world.  And Thomas-Haug, whose performance in Julius Caesar so struck me, doesn’t disappoint, seeming to spend much of the play joyfully building to the most joyous wonder of her “Brave new world” moment.  In the scenes with John Wright’s Prospero, father and daughter play off each other with great — at times painful — realism.  Wright’s Prospero is everything it should be:  undoubtedly powerful, at times fickle, at others forgetful, in the end generous and forgiving — except toward Caliban, to the discomfort of this and generations of audiences.

Nathan Cuckow as Caliban is stinkingly reptilian — is that right hand he waves behind him meant to be a tail?  Or is he waving away a constant fart?  When joined by Kevin Corey’s Stephano and Troy O’Donnell’s Trinculo, these three are the epitome of the Shakespearean clowns and thankfully manage to completely avoid Disney.  So refreshing (despite the smell)!

Something I had wondered while rereading the play earlier today was what director John Kirkpatrick would do with the masque, a sort of theatre very foreign to modern audiences.  To avoid at least one spoiler, I’ll just say that it’s tremendous!

And now, the best, which I’ve saved for last . . .

Amber Borotsik’s Ariel.

From the opening storm scene, in which she bounces about the tempest tossed ship, calling down the lightening, to her final departure when Prospero sets her free, her eyes flash across the stage, watching everything, and her smile shines with glee as she uses her magic.  In her first scene with Prospero, she convinces that she is fawningly in love with the old Magus, but in an instant Borotsik transforms and is at first is enraged that her freedom is not yet, and then a moment later is grovelling, broken at Prospero’s feet.  She flits about the stage, appearing and disappearing, singing and dancing, and then terrifyingly transforming into a Fury, wings flapping above the trembling Alonso (Chris Bullough) and his courtiers.

I found my gaze drawn back to Borotsik in many scenes where she sat silent in the background:  her eyes — no doubt aided by the makeup — continuously flashed around at the others on the stage.  Ariel is clearly attentive to everything around her, taking everything in, drawing everything in.  I can’t help but think that Borotsik has in some sense made Ariel the centre of the play, more than Ferdinand and Miranda (although Simpson and Thomas-Haug take a good shot at that bull’s-eye) and certainly more than Wright’s exquisite Prospero.

Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the Freewill Tempest.  There’s only about a week left in the festival.  Please, hurry out to Julius Caesar or The Tempest, or both, at the Heritage Amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park.

Freewill Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

I come not to bury Freewill, but to praise it . . .

so . . .

I’ll get my complaints about this year’s Julius Caesar out of the way right off the bat:

The play is cut.  Parts of speeches are missing. Whole scenes are missing. At least two characters are conflated. And the conspiracy is short one conspirator.  These are purist quibbles.  I understand and accept that a single small company doing two plays on alternate nights have an extraordinary burden on them and I understand that it was necessary to get us out of the park before the gates closed at eleven. . . .

Which leads me to the feeling that some of the company were in a race at times to deliver their lines — “festina lente!” Octavius Caesar used to admonish.  The haste agravated the one really important complaint I have . . . .

In some parts of the amphitheatre the vocal sound system really sucked!  I have to ask, what ever happened to the unamplified production?  How did actors do it in the old days?  Actually, I remember how they did it in the old days:  They Projected!

Okay, now that that’s out of the way:

The music/sound design by Dave Clarke is tremendous: regal at the right time, ominous at the right time.  The very first thing I wrote in my notebook after “Curtain” was “like the music.”

The next thing I noted immediately was the costume/makeup design, which is, quite simply, striking.  Modern dress military, Fascist Italy meets Godfather Sicily with skeletal faces all around.  I truly loved the costumes and makeup, from the tattered ‘Nam veteran’s uniform of the Soothsayer (John Write), through the grey 1984 plebians even to the red track suit Marc Antony (Nathan Cuckow) wore at the beginning, but I couldn’t help but wonder a bit about Caesar (Kevin Sutley) in his white pajamas, long blond hair and beard.  Was that supposed to be Sir Richard Branson up there?  I did notice that Portia (Belinda Cornish), who’s suicide death is also in some sense due to Brutus (Chris Bullough), is dressed in similar white pajamas.  The costuming was for the most part wonderfully evocative of a period on the edge of civil war.

And the set by Cory Sincennes.  A quite traditional layout done up with the very appropriate feel of ruined wartime concrete.  The jagged metal bits in the second half were used very aptly in the scenes at Philipi.  All in all a very versatile set.  It will be interesting to see how it is explored in The Tempest.

Now, to the meat of the thing:  the performances.

Chris Bullough as Brutus does an impressive, understated job. In the first meeting of the conspirators in Act II, scene 1 he brings out Brutus’ doubts and vacillation — his goodness, in fact –  beautifully:  “Why an oath?!”  The scene itself is impressively gothic and reeks the whole time of Fascism.  Earlier, when Brutus and Cassius (Kevin Corey)  meet in Act I, Scene 2, I felt that a homoerotic subtext was being worked.  As they prepared to part, I couldn’t help think that they were a couple as much as Brutus and Portia or Caesar and Calphurnia (Cayley Thomas-Haug).

Making the conspirator Decius a women (Nadien Chu), while a pragmatic choice in a small company (like Amber Borotsik’s Lucius), becomes at one moment a most effective choice.  That she will “o’ersway” Caesar carries a different weight and connotation than it would from he lips of a male Decius.  Unless one were to play with the homoerotic subtext.

What I thought was the stand out performance of the evening was actually quite a small role: Cayley Thomas-Haug’s riveting possession — what other term for such a living performance? — by Calphurnia.  She is charmingly overwrought as she begs Caesar to stay home from the Senate.  Her performance shows shattering vulnerability in the domestic time between she and Caesar and wonderfully real nobility in the public moments.  But the nobility crumbles as she flees off stage when the conspirators enter, the weeping being obviously only just held in check even as the exit door closes.  I found it remarkable that Thomas-Haug remained so completely in character through her exit, very much in the background as other things were the focus.  Cayley Thomas-Haug is a young actor to watch carefully.  I’m fascinated to imagine what she does with Miranda — or Miranda does with her –  in The Tempest.

One of the missing scenes is Act II, scene 3, in which Artemidorus explains the content of the warning letter he intends to give to Caesar.  The excision of this scene leads me to mention what I found a very effective use of the amphitheatre space by the company.  As the scene with Caesar, Calphurnia and the conspirators was playing out, my companion whispered to me “who’s that man?” pointing to a grey clad actor walking outside the tent to our left.    Throughout the play I had noticed that the actors moved about, singly or in pairs and sometimes more, around the periphery of the venue.  They moved from exit to their position for next entrance in great circles around the audience, always in character.  In pairs they seemed to be seriously conversing at times.  The man who made this walk this time was Adam Klassen, who would enter as Artemidorus in the next scene.  In fact, his walk at the periphery of the audience’s attention came in relation to the following scene at just about the point where the missing scene would have fallen.  The scene was not completely excised:  rather, it was made silent and moved outside the tent and played parallel to the preceding scene.  Genius? Good fortune?  What say you, Director John Kirkpatrick?

Act III begins with more wonderful music and a beautifully mechanical march of the characters into position, what I describe in my notes as a ballet of the conspirators.  And Caesar enters in scarlet.  Even the shoes.  Very effective.

After Artemidorus’ aborted warning, the Dance continues in the Assassination, Casca (Troy O’Donnell, who bears a disturbing resemblance to Mussolini in this makeup) strikes first and the rest follow in slow motion, with Brutus for the close.  The sound design for the bathing of conspirators’ hands in Caesar’s blood was most effective.  A sort of bestial grunting.  Or was it throat singing?  Or both?

The massing of the mob of Plebians for the funeral oration  was viscerally disturbing.  Although there were only about seven grey clad actors banging pots and pans (a nice, topical touch) it felt like I was trapped in the middle of a raging mob of thousands.  I was so relieved when Antony finally managed to silence his “Friends. Romans. Countrymen”.  Very effective theatre.

And then, the intermission comes.

The stylized fighting of the battle of Philipi was quite effective, as was the battlefield set, a tableau of impaled soldiers.  Havoc has clearly been cried and the dogs of war have definitely been let slip.  But, really, the second “half” seemed quite fast-paced and short, a break-neck winding down of the inevitable to the death of Brutus and entrance of Octavius (Nadien Chu again).   A stroke of ingenious symmetry was the casting of Belinda Cornish, who was Portia earlier in the play, as Strato, the soldier who assists Brutus’ suicide, karmically avenging Portia’s suicide over Brutus .  Nicely done.

I admit I’m a sucker for Shakespeare outside, ever since seeing Northern Light Theatre’s Shakespeare in a Tent productions back around 1980.  Freewill’s 2012 production of Julius Caesar is, on the whole, a very interesting and worthwhile piece of theatre with some very fine performances — extremely fine in the case of Cayley Thomas-Haug — and a number of very intriguing and fresh production and directorial decisions.  In spite of my quibbles,  a very powerful experience for both the audience and for the young cast, I’m sure.

And, it’s outside!

The Freewill Shakespeare Festival runs until July 22, 2012 in the Heritage Amphitheatre in the Park that should still be called Mayfair.

Soon I’ll get to The Tempest.

______________

My references to Act and Scene are to the Arden Second Series Edition of Julius Caesar, T. S. Dorsch, editor.

Oh.  And festina lente means “make haste slowly”.  What do they teach kids in school these days?

The Automatiste Revolution: two brief visits and a reading of “Refus Global”

The first part is a brief visit to the Art Gallery of Alberta.

I dropped by the AGA briefly a few days after the Automatiste Revolution opened. As I waited for my companion’s washroom break to finish, I noticed that the Gallery Shop had copies of The Automatiste Revolution by Nargaard and Ellenwood for sale. I always try to get a copy of the catalogue//book which goes with exhibits in order to read and study them between visits (this has been the one disappointment about the tremendous Janvier show). I leafed through the big book for a moment before we headed up to the second floor. I wasn’t sure what to expect. While I often appreciate abstraction in its various schools and forms, it rarely grabs me (Janvier being a great exception). We went through the doors, my companion making a bee-line for a bench (her ankle becomes painful quickly although the infected sore is almost healed due to the wonderful ministrations of Alberta’s public health care system.) As I remember it, I rounded a bit wall and was riveted. And then I was blown away. That first visit I didn’t know what I was looking at, who the painters were, what the theoretical underpinnings might be, or even where I was actually standing, I learned later. But the paintings – there’s no other verb fit for it – grabbed me. They reached out through my good eye and grabbed my brain/body. A moment later, after consulting one of the guides, I found my disappeared companion standing before Borduas’ Sans Titre (no. 6), somehow paralytically still and yet slowly and smoothly gliding toward the textured field of red. “Don’t touch it,” I said, although I had to resist the urge myself.

And the brief visit was over after stopping again at the shop to buy a copy of Ellenwood’s translation of Refus Global.

The second part is the reading of Refus Global.

Ray Ellenwood’s translation, particularly of the pieces by Claude Gauvreau, is a wonder and a bit of a mystery. The verbal abstraction of Gauvreau’s dramatic pieces leave one perplexed as to how such a collection of absurd yet evocative non sequiturs and neologisms could ever have been translated between languages.  But Ellenwood has given us something wonderful.

One passage in Paul-Emile Borduas’ “Comments on Some Current Words” seems particularly relevant to the present exhibition at the AGA:

Looking at the pictures in the exhibition your mind will be blank. You won’t even be allowed the idea of a picture. These paintings don’t correspond to a landscape, nor to a still life nor to any scene you’re familiar with, nor even to a geometrical abstraction. Thus, with all your mental habits put to flight, unable to make any kind of visual contact, you will have the uncomfortable feeling of a serious illness, a painful and needless amputation, a frustration.

You’ll want to cry sacrilege, madness, early senility, hoax. If you’re less honest, more cagey, you’ll talk about visual and intellectual clichés and phony drawing-room revolutions. And the more obviously impotent your sensitivities, the louder you’ll shout, despite the clarity of these written forms.   p. 30

“these written forms” is a very important phrase, for these paintings are in a real sense, written pieces, an argument flowing from initial gestures marked on the canvas, through revisions and additions building on what has gone before. Each painting is a record of the development of itself. As well as any illusion of physical space produced by line and colour, there is a real temporal space contained in the fully developed composition.

I find Gauvreau’s dramatic pieces, particularly “In the Heart of the Bulrushes”, to be melancholic to the point of tragedy. I can’t help but think that this (and much of the Automatiste thing) is sort of an early twenties (age, not period of the century) sophomore phenomenon. And the man who escapes down the stream and disappears off stage . . . has he achieved adulthood? Is the poem/play an unconscious acknowledgement of the childishness of the thing? And Gauvreau’s suicide after the suicide of his muse Muriel Guilbault? Did he himself later sink beneath the flow without escaping? I can’t help but feel that Gauvreau is the head in the river, doomed to never escape the absurdist flow past the angel into – what? And “The Good Life”, the next piece by Gauvreau, makes me feel the above even more. Gauvreau’s life followed the sad pattern his art anticipated.

Where Refus Global becomes most coherent – perhaps most compelling – is in Françoise Sullivan’s discussion of dance. Sullivan opens with

More than anything else, dance is a reflex, a spontaneous expression of intense emotion.  p.88

This is no Wordsworthian “strong emotion recollected in tranquility”. Automatism in dance (as in all art) is immediate expression and development of expression.

Sullivan argues that academic dance such as that taught by the ballet schools is a dead language, and she goes on in her densely argued essay to lay the theoretical groundwork for Modern dance. As I read “Dance and Hope” from 1948 the constant image in my mind was Louise Lecavalier circa 1985:

The dancer plays with his weight by falling, leaping, balancing, by the simple fact of standing, by wobbling, by whirling, etc. He can follow his impulse and make himself very heavy or very light, not by tricks designed to escape the laws of nature, but through the harmonious use of those laws.  p. 99.

Two bits I also found most interesting:

Today there are those who believe in a revolution to transform the world. The instrument of change will be instinct, and part of our effort must now be directed to unearthing that instinct so long stifled.

Fortunately, there are the basic needs of life, irresistible forces; there is hope, and there is also science, which is wrong to isolate itself but should instead, take the place it used to have in religion and magic. All our forces must be directed towards liberation, towards a rediscovery of ecstasy and love.   pp. 94-5

and

Art can only flourish if it grows from problems that concern the age, and it is always pushed in the direction of the unknown. Hence the marvelous in it.“p. 100

The third part is a return to the gallery.

The grabber? Borduas’ Abstraction Verte.

But it’s not around the corner. It’s the first painting you see, right at the entrance.

It’s a tiny piece but it reaches out from the wall and grabs again. It is stunning.

Some others I noticed:

Riopelle’s Composition1951 is phenomenal. This is a painting I noticed on the first visit with fascinating knife work in the upper right quadrant in green and blue.

Fernand Leduc’s Napoleon in La Dernière campagne de Napoléon is an hilarious vindication of the Automatist method.

Ferron’s Cerce Nacarat has stunning knife work creating a fascinating feeling of night, of the sea, of a city . . .

Barbeau’s Au château d’Argol has amazing depth, as though looking through a cracked stained glass window at a Mediterranean hill town in a heavy sunshower.

Pierre Gauvreau’s sans titre, 1946 is a tiny, beautiful gem.

Not to be missed are the collages by Jean-Paul Mousseau and the artifacts of Sullivan’s dance.

I found it disconcerting to walk into the gallery and find the first few paintings in different places than I remembered them. Somehow that first encounter truly disoriented me.

The fourth part is a political comment.

The Automatistes in Montreal have not been given the historical notice they deserve. Unlike the roughly contemporary Abstract Expressionists in New York, the Automatistes included designers, dancers, poets as well as painters and sculptors. And, perhaps more important from the Canadian point of view, the Automatistes were the political Avant-Garde, standard bearers of the revolt against the Church and Duplessis which would lead to the Quiet Revolution and the Quebec we know (or, sadly, don’t know) today. The great art of these artists’ manifesto, Refus Global, is that it is a political manifesto. Although few realize it, or are even aware of it today, Refus Global remains a foundation document of contemporary Canadian society.

The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941-1960 is showing at the Art Gallery of Alberta until October 14

Tom Wood’s William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Tom Wood’s William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Playing April 7-29, 2012 (and April 22 – May 21, 2000) in the Citadel’s Maclab Theatre.

 

I went to the Citadel today.

I don’t want to dis things here.  I told myself that if I had nothing good to say about something, I wouldn’t write about it.  So . . .

This production is very prettily designed.  Here’s how I described it in my notes as I waited for the play to begin:

Submarine rather than sylvan in tone.  Bird song sounds help.  The columned and pedimented balcony is a suitable classical touch.

Something Disneyesque faux-stone about the stairway — left over from Beauty and the Beast?

A rope hanging stage right.  There will be swinging, it seems.

To be fair, later the set seemed more nocturnally sylvan.

The performances of the young cast ranged from very good to excellent.  Shannon Taylor as Helena was outstanding and Lora Brovold as Titania was magically charming.  These two gave glorious performances in very different roles.

The Rude Mechanicals, led by Julien Arnold as Bottom, were suitably hammy in the Disney cartoon sidekick way that sadly seems de rigueur these days.  The audience was very appreciative and the louts (on stage) were enjoyable.

To the audience (this is not a toast):

I really appreciated  the synopsis the lady behind us started giving to her companions five minutes before the play began.  I thought she had completely forgotten the young lovers at first.  Imagine my joy when she got to their part sometime after Theseus (Marc R. Bondy) finished his opening lines to Hippolyta (Sochi Fried).  Imagine my further joy as she continued, only petering out somewhere toward the end of scene 1, just in time for the Mechanicals to hold her attention in scene 2.

My first experience of the Citadel was in the old building, a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat staring Brent Carver, during the 1975/76 season.  I also enjoyed the inaugural production of the new Citadel the next season, Romeo and Juliet, staring Carver again.  A wonderful thing.  I went to the Citadel ,regularly for years and I still go when there’s a bit of Shakespeare or Stoppard on the menu.  I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Tom Wood’s Romeo and Juliet, but I don’t remember it.  I’m sure I saw his previous Midsummer Night’s Dream but the only thing I remember is the late Wally McSween as one of the Mechanicals, and I may misremember that.

After all that experience, I was pleased today to see that there is still a large segment of a Citadel audience which rises in ovation whenever a company reaches the end of a script.  Don’t get me wrong, the company did a wonderful job (with a few slips) and some performances were magnificent.  But, I’ve always felt the standing ovation needs to be reserved for a truly outstanding production and performance, which this was not.

On the evening of April 1, 1978 (I still have the ticket stub!) I saw a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, UK.  (One day to be Sir) Patrick Stewart played the role of Oberon.  The only thing I remember of that production is Oberon’s hairline.  The production I saw today at the Citadel was more memorable, more exciting, than the one I saw thirty-four years ago (goodness!) in Stratford.  But, like that RSC production, today’s show took no risks, there are no cutting edges here:  the glory is Shakespeare’s words and some remarkable work  from the young cast.

Apart from a few performances and parts of performances, Tom Wood’s Midsummer is a cheerful, pretty piece of live Shakespeare.  It is a comfortable and reassuring – not challenging – way to spend and afternoon or evening.

I do want to single out for mention again Shannon Taylor as fiery Helena and Lora Brovold as the truly enchanting Titania.  As well, Eric Morin as Lysander really took off in the second half, as did Jonathon Purvis as Puck.

And, a final note about the impression made on me by  Michel Antonakos’ brilliantly understated turn as Oberon  – and it’s not his hairline:  I really want to start a “Draft Jian Ghomeshi to play Oberon at Stratford” Facebook and Twitter campaign.

Seriously, go see a Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Citadel.  It’s a cozy, happy time and succeeds admirably at what little it attempts.  Those shadows have not offended and nothing need be mended.  I give the company my hands and hope that we are friends.  I had a great, fun, comfortable time.

On “Beowulf The King” by Blake William Turner

First, full disclosure.  I have various dogs of various sizes in this fight.  I am by training a scholar of Old English Literature. I have published a number of academic articles on Old English poetry, at times touching on Beowulf. Some years ago I completed (although I wouldn’t call it “finished”) a verse translation of Beowulf.  And, perhaps the most biasing fact:  I briefly tutored Hrothgar (David Ley) in his Old English pronunciation for this production.

I confess, after reading hints about Beowulf the King in the weeks leading up to opening night, I returned in my mind again and again to Richard Bentley’s on-target criticism of Pope’s “translation” of Homer’s Iliad:  “It’s a very pretty poem Mr. Pope, but you must not call it ‘Homer’.”  I worried that my reaction to the play would be similar or worse.

I’m very happy to report that Beowulf the King is a very pretty play, and, although it is very different from the poem in so many ways, it is perfectly appropriately titled.  This play is not the Old English poem, but it is certainly a Beowulf for our time.

There, with the academic geekery out of the way, we proceed to the play (and strive to avoid spoilers) . . .

I don’t think I’m giving much away if I mention that the play opens, after a brief musical overture(more about that later), in Old English.   Hrothgar (David Ley) strides onto the stage and declaims the first three lines of the poem and then steps aside to be the chorus to a series of battle scenes which effectively condense the genealogies which open the poem into an exciting little pill for the audience to swallow.  The scene is set:  battle, kingship and honour in Denmark.  But, of course, something is rotten in Hrothgar’s kingdom . . .

But, I don’t want to just paraphrase the play or the poem;  I’d rather you went to the play and read the poem (in translation, I expect).   I’ll comment on things which struck me about the play — problems confronted and solved, felicitous interpretations and satisfying expansions and interpolations.

Grendel (Darren Paul) speaks.  An obvious departure from the poem, Grendel’s monologues transform the monster from being a mute threat of the outside world he would be without speech into something more like the poem’s dark alternate of Beowulf — in the poem, many of the same words are used to describe both the “hero” and the “monster”.  Having Grendel speak forces the investigation of his motivation – only hinted at in the poem – and also allows investigation of religion in a society in religious transition – again, only hinted at in the poem.  The speaking Grendel must make us think of John Gardner’s short novel Grendel – was it an influence on the play or are the similarities the result of drawing on the same source?  And, the gorilla in the mead-hall is Caliban, the cursed wildman of The Tempest, like Grendel, the son of a cursed mother.  Darren Paul’s Grendel in another life could go toe to toe with Prospero.

Another interesting and fundamental addition is the curse Grendel’s Mother (Amber Borotsik) places on Beowulf (Sheldon Elter) just before her death.  Beowulf forevermore will feel a mother’s pain at the loss of her son whenever he kills.  This burden explains the half-century of peace (left unexplained in the poem) the Geats enjoy under Beowulf’s rule.  Beowulf’s struggle to maintain peace – completely absent from the poem, but darn interesting in the play – dominates Act Two and provides an interesting twist at the very end.  In the poem, Beowulf’s retainers (except for one), turn cowardly, following his orders to stay out of the fight with the dragon although honour would require them to rush in to his defence.  In the play, the cowardly abandonment is more than just leaving Beowulf to fight alone.  The real abandonment is the Geats’ return to warfare after their king’s death.  Beowulf the King argues that easy cowardice is to do battle, while  actual heroism is to take the difficult road of making peace.

Some things that concerned me anticipating the play:

All those fights!

I’d read that each of the six actors had at least five death scenes, but I was pretty sure there aren’t anything like thirty deaths described in the poem.  I couldn’t help but expect a whole lot of gratuitous fighting, but . . .

. . . the fights are dramaturgically functional things, not extraneous at all.  They make connections for the audience between characters and between narrative elements.  They are actually narrative bridges in dance.  When one considers the battles mentioned in passing in the poem, one of which – the Frisian war — is expanded to a vitally important scene of Beowulf’s character development, thirty-some deaths seem a low figure.  I came dreading a silly blood-bath but was given a stylized battle-dance vitally necessary to the structure and message of the play.

When considering a staging of Beowulf it’s hard to imagine what will be done with the monsters.  Grendel and his Mother are the least of the problem — they’re basically human and imaginative costumes take care of them.  The Dragon is the obvious challenge, but when I heard that Beowulf’s swimming match with Breca (Bryan Web) was going to be staged, I thought “that’s it.  It can’t be done.”

But, they did it! and it is magnificently done!  I’ll say nothing more than the swimming match and the underwater fight with the monsters is a little dramaturgical tour de force worth the price of admission (okay, I had comps, but still) in itself.

The play, like the poem, ends with the dragon fight.  The dragon (David Ley, in the biggest mask in theatre history) also speaks, unlike in the poem, but it is so right!  And again, the representation of the dragon is brilliant, his paws and claws ingeniously so!

But, the dragon’s fire . . .

hmmmm.

Somehow it just doesn’t quite do it.  The smoke seems to be well represented/suggested by the two fabric flags/banners at each side of the dragon, but the lights and sound don’t quite have the lethal materiality the dragon’s flaming breath might need.  But, that shortcoming is minor in what is a stunning execution of what would seem a staging impossibility.

The music by Joel Crichton struck me as a very appropriate blending of faux-Wagner and urban techno-something-or-other.  The beatboxing in the overture gave the exactly right hint of gangsta which was picked up in the touches of inner-city gang in the design of set and costume.  There are Jets and Sharks in the wings.  I’ve long thought that the best modern analogy to the culture of war, honour and allegiance of Beowulf is the twentieth-century urban youth gang.  I was pleased to see the analogy drawn in the play.

Beowulf The King really is, despite the rough edges of a preview performance (and the rough edges of a preview audience) a quite startlingly good and fascinating grapple with the monster that is Beowulf.

Finally, I strongly recommend Anna Dow’s brief essay “Whose Side Are You On, Anyway” on pages 26 and 27 of the program. It succinctly presents some difficulties of the poem and is very insightful about the play.  As well, the “Playwright’s Notes” by Blake William Turner on page 9 contain a few gems.

Workshop West’s production of Beowulf the King is playing in the beautiful theatre space of La Cité francophone until April 29th.