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by Pierre Carlet de Marivaux, directed by Kate Lynch

Toronto Fringe Festival, Robert Gill Theatre, Toronto

July 6-17, 2005

“An Experiment Pays Off”

While the Toronto Fringe Festival usually features brand new work, often there is at least one revival of a seldom-seen classic among its more than 100 offerings.  This year it’s “The Dispute” by Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763), the foremost French playwright of the 18th century.  “The Dispute” (“La Dispute”) is one of his more experimental works, so experimental, in fact, that the audience of Marivaux’s day didn’t understand it and it closed after only one performance in 1744.  It wasn’t performed again until 1938. 

Under director Kate Lynch, the Sweat Company gives this thought-provoking comedy a highly entertaining production.  The action itself concerns an unusual experiment in human behaviour.  Hermiane and the Prince of an unknown country argue about whether man or woman was the first to be unfaithful.  It just so happens that the Prince’s father was intrigued with that very question and has had four children, two men and two women, raised in isolation from each other and world save for contact with their two black keepers.  Now that the children are old enough, the Prince decrees they shall be freed on the grounds and observed in order to settle the dispute.

Marivaux derives much humour from depicting the four teenagers’ first encounters with freedom and with both sexes.  The men and women try to analyze why they have a strange attraction to each other.  The two women instantly hate each other while the two men become best buddies in literally a rough and tumble way.  It’s unfortunate that Marivaux includes so many speeches equating whiteness with beauty and blackness with ugliness.  Yet, two factors mitigate what seems a racist point of view.  First, all those who make this equation, i.e. the Prince and the four teenagers, are revealed as less than ideal human beings.  Second, Marivaux makes the two black keepers the “raisonneur” figures, the most rational characters in the play, something highly unusual at a time when non-white characters on stage, as in Voltaire’s “Zaïre” (1732) or “Mahomet” (1741), were depicted as prey to uncontrollable passion.

The star of the show is Carly Street as Eglé.  She is the first of isolated children we meet.  We see through her the first reaction to a reflection and to members of both sexes.  Street is a quirky, very physical performer, a great mimic with a habit writhing on the floor as if trying out various yoga positions.  In any other Marivaux play this might be too much, but here it seems fitting for someone who has been released from confinement for the first time.  Her comic timing is impeccable.

Geoffrey Pounsett plays Azor the first man she sees and the first she falls in love with.  He is excellent at portraying the awkwardness of experiencing the strange sensations of love, friendship and jealousy for the first time.  Robin Schisler is Adine, the other female, and Brendan Murray is Mesrin, the other male.  The performances of both are more toned down than Street’s and Pounsett’s.  Schisler finds comedy in Adine’s unfounded but unshakeable belief that she is more desirable than Eglé, and Murray makes a pleasantly dopey Mesrin.  The scene when Azor and Mesrin first meet is especially funny.  Lynch has the two play and wrestle like young cubs as they try to sort out exactly what kind of love they feel for each other.  It’s hilarious now but its implications must have been rather disturbing for Marivaux’s time.

As Hermiane, Jayne Lewis is more successful at conveying regal hauteur than is Tim Campbell as the Prince.  Camille James as Carise and Jeremiah Sparks as Mesrou, the two keepers, maintain a dignity and calm that distinguishes them from both the court and the teenagers.  Designer James Cameron has clothed the court in modern evening wear, the keepers in African-themed clothing and the four teenagers in light green pants and tops like hospital outfits that remind us the four were kept prisoners and that the Prince’s experiment is ultimately a cruel one.

The audiences of Marivaux’s own time must have had difficulties with a play in which none of the main characters are admirable and which concludes with surprising brutality.  This is thought-provoking rarity staged with panache.  No lover of classic drama should miss it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Elizabeth Beeler and Keith Savage. ©2004 Gilberto Prioste.