✭✭✭✭✭<b>
</b><b>by Poul Ruders, directed by Phyllida Lloyd
Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto
September 23-October 9, 2004
</b>
<i>The Handmaid’s Tale</i> in an outstandingly effective piece of music theatre. Margaret Atwood’s vision of institutionalized misogyny in a dystopian US of the near future is even more frightening embodied on stage. Part of the city-wide SuperDanish Festival, this is the original production of the opera as it premiered in Copenhagen in 2000 but with an almost entirely Canadian cast. The opera and the production are thrilling in every way.
As in the novel a series of natural disasters has opened the way for a fundamentalist coup that establishes the Republic of Gilead along narrow biblical lines. Fertile women are captured and trained to serve as “handmaids” to conceive and bear children for the infertile wives of the elite. Librettist Paul Bentley has accomplished the rare feat of maintaining the plot and tone of the novel in re-imagining it for the stage. His main innovation is to split the main character of Offred into two—Offred (Stephanie Marshall), the handmaid assigned to the Commander Fred, and The Double (Krisztina Szabó), who represents Offred’s life before her capture. Danish composer Poul Ruders’s music sounds like film music for the most hair-raising sci-fi thriller you’ve ever seen, a monster skulking or thrashing in the orchestra pit under conductor Richard Bradshaw’s firm command.
Marshall gives an incandescent performance vocally and dramatically as a woman desperately trying to hold onto her sanity in a world gone mad. Szabó shows us the vital, loving woman Offred once was. Among the rest of the faultless cast, Helen Todd stands out as the half-crazed indoctrinator Aunt Lydia and warm-voiced Frédérique Vézina as Ofglen, Offred’s link to the resistance movement.
The set, costumes, lighting are spectacular. Here red nun’s habits are the new burqas. Phyllida Lloyd’s incisive direction gives the multi-scene narrative a cinematic flow making this opera, now more relevant than ever, <i>the</i> theatre event of the year.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in <i>Eye Weekly</i> 2004-09-30.
Photo: Stephanie Marshall (centre). ©2004 Michael Cooper.
<b>2004-09-30</b>
<b>The Handmaid’s Tale</b>