Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✩✩✩
by Beverley Cross, directed by Dennis Garnhum
Avon Theatre, Stratford
May 30-November 2, 2002
"Damned Elusive is Right"
“Is he in heaven, Is he in hell, That damned elusive Pimpernel”. So runs the poem foppish Sir Percy Blakeney makes up about his secret alter-ego, the Scarlet Pimpernel. “Damned elusive” pretty much sums up my feelings about the Stratford Festival’s production of the work. It’s a lavishly accoutred bit of fluff that managed to be not even vaguely entertaining. One leaves depressed by the waste of it all—the waste of talent, the waste of money and the waste of time.
Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s potboiler of 1905 is one of those works like George Du Maurier’s “Trilby” that has created a famous character without itself being a great book. The story strains credulity. During the Reign of Terror in France in 1792, an English master of disguise calling himself the Scarlet Pimpernel has with his loyal band of followers been rescuing French aristocrats from the guillotine. Robespierre is so angered he sends his agent Chauvelin to England to discover his identity. Chauvelin finds an unwilling assistant in the form of Marguerite Blakeney, a Frenchwoman, now married to Sir Percy Blakeney, the most fashionable man in England. She is distressed by the continuing coldness of her husband. Only after Chauvelin has blackmailed her into helping him, does it dawn on Marguerite that her own self-confessed idiot of a husband may be the heroic Pimpernel, upon which she sets off to warn him of the danger he is in.
The story itself is implausible in many ways. Why should English aristocrats help French aristocrats to escape execution? How do they choose which of the hundreds slated to die they should rescue? How is Sir Percy able to keep his own wife so long in the dark about his exploits? And how much sense does it make for anyone to chose to live a life as a brainless dandy and to be known by everyone in England as such solely as a cover when his exploits are always performed in disguise?
The way to make such drivel work in adaptation is to patch up as many holes in the plot as possible and in production to play the piece with as straight a face as possible so that an audience will be swept up by the action and ask questions later. This is exactly what the screenplay for the classic 1934 movie does. This exactly the opposite of what adaptor Beverley Cross does. In fact, he omits precisely the information that would make the characters and plot clearer. Without knowing the past of Sir Percy and Marguerite it’s unfathomable how they should come to be married. He does not tell us why Marguerite’s brother goes back to France when everyone tells him it’s too dangerous. And his only answer as to why the English should help save French aristocrats is “Sport” and that’s it. He adds three songs to Act 1 and none to Act 2 making the show feel like an abortive musical. He changes the Brogard the innkeeper into a one-eyed hunchback so we can have the “fun” of seeing Chauvelin take off his eye-patch and try to remove his hump. For a swashbuckler there is very little physical action and for wit all he gives us are long stretches of very lame dialogue. Did no one read this script before it was chosen for the season?
Dennis Garnhum, otherwise an excellent director, clearly doesn’t know what to do with a play of such nonexistent intellectual content and entertainment value. He begins the work as if it were deadly serious and he can do nothing to lighten the dullness of the dialogue. By Act 2 he has decided that the show is really a spoof like “Carry On Pimpernel” so that the Pimpernel’s band disguised as nuns twirl their rosaries as a threat and Brogard the hunchback chops up rats to make a stew. Cross’s adaptation does not catch the tone of the work and Garnhum can’t restore it.
It’s not a surprise then that Garnhum draws such poor performances from so many fine actors. Peter Donaldson is miscast since he makes Sir Percy more a befuddled windbag than a dandy and the Scarlet Pimpernel more earnest than dashing. Sheila McCarthy does what she can as Marguerite, but since Cross has omitted crucial information about her character’s past, it’s impossible to understand her present situation or motivation. Peter Hutt starts his portrayal of Chauvelin at such a high pitch of villainy there’s nowhere for him to go. His Chauvelin seethes with evil so much that it seems stupid of the English not to see through him. And whose dumb idea was it that the only words he speaks with a French accent are “The Scarlet Pimpernel”?
Many of the secondary roles are better played. Ian Deakin suddenly lights up the show as the Prince of Wales, playing the brainless fop with more panache than Donaldson. Sara Topham as Suzanne de Tournai gives the kind of committed performance needed to make this kind of fluff actually work. Keith Dinicol gives a Dickensian geniality to the innkeeper Jellyband. Scott Wentworth shows the unhinged malevolence of Robespierre making one wish he were playing this role in a serious play about the French Revolution like “Danton’s Death”. And Karen Skidmore has a hilarious turn as the egotistical opera singer Signora Bosca.
The others are either completely wasted in their roles (Graham Abbey unrecognizable as Chauvelin’s henchman Lambert, Wayne Best as the Comte de Tournai, Brian Tree as Lord Grenville and Stephen Russell ridiculous as the hunchback Brogard), bland at best (David Snelgrove as Marguerite’s brother Armand and Tim Campbell at Lord Anthony Dewhurst) or ineffective due to poor diction and inflection (Aaron Olney as the Executioner and Roger Shank As Sir Andrew Ffoulkes).
In the worst Stratford tradition the real stars of the show are the sets and costumes. Cameron Porteous has designed an ingenious set wherein the central guillotine placed on a tilted revolve can quickly be transformed, say, into the masts of a ship. Elements flown or rolled in allow quick changes from Jellyband’s cozy tavern to the glittering ballroom of Lord Grenville to the Brogard’s rat-infested inn. Kelly Wolf has created multiple period costumes, all quite gorgeous, for the large cast. All is dramatically lit by John Munro, especially the scenes of execution. It’s good that Gregg Coffin has composed such a cinematic score for the show, because without it we wouldn’t know what scenes were intended to be exciting. John Stead has choreographed fights which for a supposed swashbuckler are more bizarre than effective. In Act 2 the Pimpernel and his men disguised as nuns seem to be fighting each other instead of the French. And the last fight between Chauvelin and the Pimpernel is executed so methodically by Donaldson and Hutt it has no tension.
Stratford has billed this show as part of their “Family Experience” though many families will not wish their children to see the five minutes of graphic guillotining that open the show. And if you want your children to have a good experience of the theatre why bring them to a show that is both tedious and nonsensical. It would be far better to bring children to “My Fair Lady” of if they are older to “Romeo and Juliet”, where at least the works are great and there are issues to discuss. But, if you’re set on having them see an adaptation of “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, then go for the best adaptation of it and rent the 1934 movie.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Peter Donaldson and Sheila McCarthy. ©2002 Stratford Festival.
2002-06-30
The Scarlet Pimpernel