Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✩✩
by John Murrell, directed by Linda Moore
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 19-October 9, 2004
"A Slight Play Well Acted"
The Shaw Festival’s expanded mandate now allows it to produce not only plays written during Shaw’s lifetime (1856-1950) but also modern plays set during that period. Last year and this new Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell has used the new mandate to add more Canadian content to the Festival with two Canadian plays each year. One unintended but unavoidable effect it that one tends to compare the new plays with those of the period and not always to the advantage of the Canadian plays no matter how highly acclaimed they might once have been. Last year some plays like Sharon Pollack’s “Blood Relations” withstand the comparison. Others, like Michel Marc Bouchard’s “The Coronation Voyage” look weak, simplistic and melodramatic compared with “Misalliance” or Three Sisters” with which it played in repertory on the Festival stage.
John Murrell’s 1977 Chalmers Award-winning play “Waiting for the Parade” falls into the second category. It’s a slight but well-crafted work about five women in Calgary waiting from 1939 to 1945 for their men to return after World War II and shows their varied responses to the stress of loneliness and uncertainty. Sadly, it comes off as relentlessly middle-brow, always happy to spell out rather than imply what it means. The play doesn’t really escape the banality it describes.
One only has to think of it in comparison with J.M. Barrie’s “The Old Lady Shows Her Medals” from 1917 that played at the Royal George in 2002 to realize how much more Barrie accomplished in a play on the same theme. In half the time as Murrell’s, Barrie’s play covers the same range of responses more deftly and achieves a greater emotional impact and a more piquant sense of irony. Murrell’s mixture of some laughs, some sadness, some songs, some dances and lots of period detail seems afraid to explore fully the implications of the topics he raises with characters about as idealized as Barrie’s. Murrell’s pattern of showing the women alternately being brave and breaking down until they come to know themselves better seems trite. After all, there are people who never come to know themselves and who never bond with others. But they don’t happen to live world of Murrell’s play that tries rather too hard to show its characters in a positive light.
The primary reason to see “Waiting for the Parade” is the excellent, finely detailed performances of the cast. All five actors bring out more complexity in their roles than the one or two character traits Murrell gives them. Kelli Fox gives a typically strong performance as Catherine, a factory worker whose loneliness tempts her into an affair while her husband is away. She is vibrant and unapologetic about her needs. Fox emphasizes her fierce love of life. Donna Belleville plays Margaret, a dour woman with strict, old-fashioned ideas, whose world is turned upside-down by absence to two sons and the new attitudes of those around her. Many will recognize people they know in Belleville’s highly realistic portrayal.
Jenny L. Wright is Eve, a movie-loving schoolteacher whose husband is too old to go to war. Of the five she is the most upset by the daily news and comes to rebel against a cause that demands so much slaughter. Unfortunately, Murrell trivializes her rebellion by emphasizing her obsession for movie stars involved in the conflict. Laurie Paton displays a passion barely held in check as Marta, the daughter of German immigrants, whose father has been interned as an “enemy sympathizer”.
The parallel between this and the present Bush administration’s internment of “enemy combatants” makes the play uncannily relevant. It's too bad then that Murrell uses the incident primarily as a means of ridding Marta of her father-worship and increasing her awareness of her Canadian identity. Helen Taylor plays the role of Janet, an officious do-gooder and event-organizer with spot-on accuracy. She radiates smugness and a self-pride that withstands the worse insults the others give her. Yet, rather than having Janet remain a parody of patriotism and home-front spirit, Murrell is compelled to explain her efforts with a clichéd personal tragedy to make sure that all five women elicit our sympathy by triumphing in adversity.
Linda Moore’s direction is efficient more than imaginative and allows the action to meander rather than injecting it with a strong forward momentum. William Schmuck’s outline of a set provides its own commentary on the action by placing a bed in the highest position on stage. His period costumes are delightfully detailed. Andrea Lundy’s lighting is essential in establishing mood and in distinguishing characters in monologue from characters in “real” interaction.
It’s part of growing up to realize that some things once considered masterpieces are really just good rather than great. John Murrell’s “Waiting for the Parade” turns out to be not so much a trenchant statement about war or feminism as a fine vehicle for the talents of five female actors. That’s how it comes across in the Shaw production and that alone is what makes it worth seeing.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jennie L. Wright and Laurie Paton. ©2004 Andrée Lanthier.
2004-08-04
Waiting for the Parade