✭✭✭✭✩
<b>by Sharon Pollock, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 21-Nov 30, 2003
</b>
"Whacking Good Mystery"
Filling the traditional mystery slot at the Shaw Festival this year is a play about a real murder and a real mystery. Sharon Pollock's most popular play "Blood Relations" (1980) deals with the axe murders of Andrew Borden and his second wife Abigail on August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew Borden's younger daughter Lizzie was accused of the crime, but a jury found her not guilty. Nevertheless, suspicion regarding her guilt made a pariah of her for the rest of her life.
"Did she do it or didn't she?" "And if she did what drove her to it?" These are questions the plays examines. To the second question it provides very clear motives. To the first it follows history and suggests why we will never know. The Shaw Festival gives the play the best production one could ever hope for.
Drawing on Lizzie's known close friendship with the actress Nance O'Neil, Pollock imagines a day in 1902 when the Actress, as she is known, visits Lizzie and asks her yet again, "Did you do it?" To answer the question Lizzie agrees to fill in the background and have the Actress take her part while Lizzie plays the Bordens' maid Bridget. As their acting takes shape Borden family and friends appear allowing the Actress and Lizzie sometimes to observe their actions, sometimes to participate in them. The game of role-playing allows Lizzie to place the Actress in her position ten years earlier so that the Actress will discover if she, the Actress, would have done it if faced with the same conditions.
Pollock paints a feminist portrait of a woman living in a time when her individuality and freedom are stifled. Forbidden to work, Lizzie's only way of escaping her family is to marry, something she has no desire to do. Her father insists she marry their neighbour, a widower with three children. Meanwhile, he has been signing over money and property to Lizzie's step-mother Abigail and Abigail's unsavoury brother. Since Mr. Borden has not made a will, on his death everything will go to his wife, whom Lizzie despises.
As the Actress who plays the 1892 Lizzie through most of the play, Laurie Paton gives an electrifying performance. She shows us a highly complex woman in whom vulnerability and steely resolve, despair and cunning, continually contend until a moment of terrifying calm arrives when she sees what she believes is the only way out of her dilemma. This is the first role at the Shaw for Paton that has allowed her to show so full and complex a range of emotion. It is marvelous to see her meet the challenges so fearlessly and succeed with such triumph.
As is usual at the Shaw Festival the role of the Actress is not portrayed as a star turn but is fully integrated with the rest of the ensemble. And that ensemble is cast from strength. Jane Perry in one of her best performances plays the 1902 Lizzie as a likable, unassertive woman who has clearly suffered a devastating experience in the past. Clare Coulter in the Tarragon's 1981 production presented Lizzie as more than slightly deranged. While this added the theme of madness to the play, it did not really suit the text that insists on the difference between Lizzie's demeanour and the savagery she is accused of. To present Lizzie a seemingly "normal" makes much more sense. Perry's adoption of a firm Irish accent as Bridget ensures that we are never in doubt about what role she plays or whether it is 1892 or 1902.
All the other roles similarly gain through understatement. It is too easy to portray Andrew and Abigail Borden as outright villains. This cheapens the play by removing much of its ambiguity. Nora McLellan never lives up to Lizzie's negative description of her as simply a "fat cow". Rather, McLellan makes Abigail seem justly uncomfortable with her combative step-daughter. Michael Ball makes Andrew earnest and weak-willed. They may be conspiring to disinherit Lizzie, but their very drabness seems incommensurate with the violence they inspire in her.
Lorne Kennedy shows Harry, Abigail's brother, to be rough and scornful, the only character whose behaviour is overtly suspicious. Sharry Flett gives a fine performance as Emma, Lizzie's sister, whose weakness of character makes her flee not confront the difficulties in the house both in 1892 and in 1902. Anthony Bekenn has a firmer grip on his accent as Lizzie's Boston defense lawyer than as the Irish Dr. Patrick, but he, too, reveals the weakness of character underlying the married doctor's continual flirting.
Director Eda Holmes's superb pacing causes an atmosphere of menace to build inexorably through the play. She increases the volatile atmosphere by treating Pollock as if she were Pinter so that even some of the otherwise banal exchanges become charges with repressed emotion.
William Schmuck's design fittingly combines realistic and non-realistic modes. At the beginning we see through the outlined shuttered outer walls of the Borden home. When the action begins these slide a way to reveal a detailed realistic interior where the wall to the side hallway is missing. At the end the walls shut the house up again reinforcing the theme of the house as cage and of the past events as sealed off from any final appraisal. Andrea Lundy's highly nuanced lighting is instrumental in making the switches from 1902 to 1892 and back absolutely clear and in underscoring the increasing mood of threat.
The performances, direction and design are so insightful and on such a high level, it's impossible to imagine a better production of this Canadian classic. The play does not finally tell you "whodunit" but challenges you to consider the greater mystery of what actually can be known about another person or an historical event. And it does so in a way that will have you on the edge of your seat.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Jane Perry and Laurie Paton. ©2003 David Cooper.
<b>2003-06-27</b>
<b>Blood Relations</b>