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<b>by Véronique Olmi, translated by Morwyn Brebner, directed by Kelly Thornton
Nightwood Theatre, Young Centre, Toronto
May 3-27, 2006
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A wife returns home to her husband after having spent three months in prison for having sex with a minor. This is the plot of French author Véronique Olmi’s <i>Mathilde</i> (2000) and it should provide the basis for an electrifying confrontation between husband and wife. Strangely, that’s not what happens. First, Olmi is more interested in the couple as symbols than as real people. Second, Morwyn Brebner’s translation for this English-language premiere hasn’t bothered to make Olmi’s text sound remotely like colloquial English. “I prayed I know not to whom” and similar stilted phrases make the play seem more pretentious than it is.
For Olmi, the couple, Pierre (Tom McCamus) and Mathilde (Martha Burns), represents opposites--male versus female, oncologist versus writer, death versus life, reason versus desire. Their struggle should be of two equals, but under Kelly Thornton’s direction, McCamus makes Pierre so vulnerable and sincere, we side with him and don’t see his manipulativeness. Burns makes Mathilde seem so mentally unstable we can’t view her affair as the act of defiance Olmi thinks it is. Indeed, if the sexes were reversed would we side with a married man who had sex with a minor and justified it on existential grounds because it finally gave him an “authentic” experience? I think not.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in <i>Eye Weekly</i> 2006-05-11.
Photo: Martha Burns and Tom McCamus. ©Guntar Kravis.
<b>2006-05-11</b>
<b>Mathilde</b>