Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
✭✭✭✭✩
by Carole Fréchette, translated by John Murrell, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
October 16-November 18, 2001
"Let Elisa Under your Skin"
Carole Fréchette's "Elisa's Skin" ("La Peau d'Elisa") is a delicate and mysterious 65-minute play that seems to be about a woman telling love stories in a café in Brussels is in fact a metaphorical tale about the power of art. In 1995 Fréchette won the Governor General's Award for Drama for "The Four Lives of Marie". Its first Canadian performance was John Murrell's English version at the Tarragon in 1997. The theatre is again the Tarragon, the translator is again Murrell, the title character is again played by Tanja Jacobs and the production is again a great success.
The play is deceptively simple. Jacobs as Elisa sits at her café table and speaks directly to us asking to remind her where she is in her stories and looking for confirmation of their effects. She begins with a story about the wild, insatiable Siegfried, who must have her whenever and wherever he chooses and who cuts the roof off his car to let in more sky. After pausing to check her skin in a compact mirror, she continues but now with a story about the breath-takingly handsome Jan, who contrary to all expectations comes up directly to talk with her one day. We hear more about Siegfreid, then more about Jan interrupted by Elisa's requests to look at the skin of her elbows and of her neck to confirm her fear that it has grown in the time that she has been talking. Then she launches into a story told from a man's point of view about Marguerite, a woman he has always observed but never had the courage to speak to. While we might have mistaken the first two stories as Elisa's own, this clearly is not. As if to mark this change the Young Man, played by Patrick Galligan, appears and we hear him tell the same story directly to Elisa.
While we initially become involved with the play through its central character and her stories of human interactions, it gradually dawns on us that Elisa's telling of stories, her concern with their details and her concern in examining her skin are all related. Her fear, as she tells us, is that her skin is continuing to grow, to double, until she will become such a mound of flesh she will become immobile. It's not much of a leap to see that Elisa's predicament is similar to that of Winnie in Beckett "Happy Days" who is gradually being buried alive in sand. But while Winnie's incessant chatter is a way of distracting herself from her inexorable obliteration by time, Fréchtette offers Elisa a way out of her similarly bizarre situation. The Young Man tells her that through the telling of love stories a mysterious chemical is released in the body that inhibits the growth of skin. He knows because he has tried it. The story-teller knows that the telling is successful if it produced a frisson of recognition in the audience. When Elisa fears that she does not have enough stories of her own to tell, the Young Man tells her to borrow stories from other people.
Thus the telling of stories to the greatest effect-let us call it "art"-keeps the teller young, produces a reaction in the listeners that keeps them young. It is a way if staving off and perhaps even conquering time since the stories will outlast the teller as they are passed on. Elisa tells stories, as she says, "to save my skin"; civilization could be said to do the same.
Tanja Jacobs gives a luminous performance as Elisa. She gives the impression of an unprepossessing woman in the process of trying to conquer her fear. She has the calm of at least knowing there is a solution, but her frequent self-interruptions show she is anxious to know is the Young Man's scheme she accepts, but privately thinks is crazy, is actually working. It's a highly engaging portrait of a diffident woman becoming more courageous as she rallies herself to believe in hope. Patrick Galligan lights up the stage in his various brief appearances. He is suave, magnetic, fully at ease. The Young Man is more expert at telling stories than Elisa, which is as it should be since he has had more experience and is already convinced of the benefit.
Jackie Maxwell has beautifully directed the play. The pacing, the surprise entrance of the Young Man, the subtle growth of Elisa's confidence are all expertly managed. Ken Garnhum's set, like a sketch of a Belgian café, with a large abstract blue painting on one wall at first seems whimsical like Elisa's stories, but in its anti-naturalism it already situates the play in the realm of art. He is aided in this by Andrea Lundy's subtle lighting that changes with the changing moods of the stories and importantly helps us distinguish past from present. Lesley Barber's Satie-like music creates just the right air of wistfulness.
Why are love stories so effective? In one a young man goes to work feeling he has left part of himself with his beloved. In a story about Siegfried the woman feels complete when united in love. Love is the positive doubling of skin. In love a person is less without the other. Elisa's isolation makes her focus on her self and her aging; the stories take her out of her self. For an hour let her take you out of yourselves and plan to eat a small café afterwards to hold on to the regenerative mood of the play for just a bit longer.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Tanja Jacobs.
2001-10-21
Elisa's Skin