✭✭✭✩✩
<b>by Shelagh Stephenson, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Mirvish Productions, Winter Garden Theatre, Toronto
February 17-April 8, 2000
</b>
“A House Too Big for a Small House”
In 1998 Toronto theatre-goers had the unusual opportunity of seeing a new British play before it opened in London's West End and went on to win the 1999 Olivier award for best new comedy. The play was Shelagh Stephenson’s “The Memory of Water” and Toronto got to see it early because Stephenson had roomed at Manchester University with the play’s future Toronto director, Jackie Maxwell, who simply knew the merit of her friend's first play before anyone else. The play also became the first in what may become a trend of the Mirvishes choosing a successful local production in a smaller theatre and scheduling a remount for their full subscription season at the Royal Alex (1500 seats). Thus, a huge number of people were already signed up to see the play here even before the 1999 Olivier awards were announced. Because of having to reschedule “Enigma Variations”, “The Memory of Water” was moved to the smaller but still grand Winter Garden Theatre (992 seats).
I mention the sizes of the various theatres because that seems to have had a great effect on how the play was performed. At the small 210-seat Tarragon, Stephenson’s black comedy about three sisters reuniting in Yorkshire for their mother’s funeral was seen to its very best advantage. All five actors presented finely detailed characters and the mood was delicately balanced between comedy and pathos. At the remount in the Winter Garden Theatre, with all of the same personnel, the theme was made clearer but the overall effect lost much in subtlety as the comedy in the play veered into farce and the pathos lost impact. Nevertheless, a second viewing confirmed that Stephenson’s is a fresh voice in British drama, able to tell a story both serious and funny, realistic and dreamlike, within a framework of larger philosophical concerns.
It may be that a play like this is best served by an intimate setting where actors do not need to project so forcefully either voices or emotions. The six actors seemed unable to cope in a uniform way with the larger space so that what had been a very balanced, unified production became unbalanced and fissile. My general impression was that instead of merely transplanting the Tarragon production into the Winter Garden, the whole production needed to be rethought since the small gesture 210 can see clearly may not be noticed by 992.
While Sue LePage's set had thrust into the Tarragon audience, suggesting a house described as perched on a cliff soon to crumble into the sea, at the Winter Garden it nestled snugly within the proscenium. The three triangles of fabric that symbolically had linked the set to the Tarragon auditorium were lost up in the Winter Garden ceiling. When the mother’s ghost symbolically steps into the void near the end of the play, she had stepped (shockingly) into the Tarragon audience. In the remount she merely walks down into the orchestra pit. Even scenically, the play confronted us less in the new venue.
Of the six actors, only one was able to scale her performance successfully to fill the larger space with no loss of impact. That was Corinne Koslo as Vi, the ghost of the mother who has died of Alzheimer’s. We have to see why her daughters think of her as vulgar and conventional while at the same time realizing that in rebelling against her they have not really understood her at all. Fixed in the minds of her daughters as she was in the 1950's--in one of Sue LePage's wonderful costumes--Koslo perfectly captured all the nuances of this complex character who, though on stage only a short while, is crucial to our view of the daughters and the play itself. In some ways Koslo brought to her character a greater integrity than she had in the Tarragon production.
Martha Burns was excellent as the middle sister, Mary, who experiences a far wider range of emotion than the other two and who is the only one we see having conversations with her mother’s ghost. She, more than the other two, has to let go of her anger about the past. She is also the only one to see how in denying her influence they have actually repeated her mistakes. Only in her scenes with Peter Cockett, ably playing the married man with whom she is having an affair, did I miss the tension that was so strong in the Tarragon production. Even in their last scene together when she gives him an ultimatum, the crucial tension was missing; but then the director seemed to have speeded up the pace throughout and did not allow the kinds of pauses needed for this tension to develop.
Kristen Thomson reprised her delightful portrayal of the youngest sister, Catherine, with her bad taste in clothes and worse taste in men. Her feeling of being unloved, which she tries to soothe with drugs and sex, creates so great a need for love that it pushes away everyone she tries to be close to. If anything, Thomson was able to make this character seem more vulnerable than in the Tarragon production. Unfortunately, in having to project to a much larger auditorium, her voice lost much of its modulation.
Two otherwise very fine actors fared worst--Nancy Palk as the elder sister, Teresa, and Randy Hughson as her husband, the travelling health food salesman. To my taste, Palk very much overplayed her big drunken scene when she inadvertently reveals a number of family secrets. She gave hardly a glimpse of the unhappiness that underlies her character's desire for control, quite unlike her performance in the smaller theatre. At the Tarragon, the comedy in Hughson's character came from the fact that he is dead tired and never allowed to sleep because of the family bickering surrounding him. At the Winter Garden, he gave almost no hint of this and instead relied on a funny voice and funny delivery to get his laughs. He got laughs but his acting style no longer fit in with the others on stage. Again, the impression was that Jackie Maxwell, who had done such a superb job in directing the Tarragon version of the play, had not sufficiently coached her actors in how to play to a larger space without a loss of subtlety.
Anyone who has seen the Tarragon production will likely be disappointed with this remount. Anyone who has not seen that production will still see a wonderful new play offering both abundant humour and much to think about--the fickle nature of memory, the meaning of loss, the unknowing repetition of the past--but they will see a production that could be much better than it is, a production which, if memory serves, was much better without so much void to fill.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Corrine Koslo, Martha Burns, Kristen Thomson, Nancy Palk, and Randy Hughson. ©2000 Michael Cooper.
<b>2000-03-28</b>
<b>The Memory of Water</b>