Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Peter Hinton
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
August 13-September 23, 2006
"Blythe Dominates ‘Kemble’"
The last time a play by Peter Hinton appeared at the Stratford Festival it was his massive, large-cast, three-part verse play “The Swanne” in 2002, 2003 and 2004. That play was an historical fantasy that explored the idea that the real heir to the British throne was not Victoria but an illegitimate black boy. Hinton’s latest play is “Fanny Kemble” about the famous 19th-century actress, writer and abolitionist. It is on a much smaller scale--a one-person show starring Domini Blythe--but it has much the same concerns as “The Swanne” with role, identity, servitude, history and destiny. It also has many of the same conceptual problems.
Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble (1809-1893) was born into a famous British acting family that included Sarah Siddons. She followed family expectations and entered the family profession despite having a far greater love for writing than acting. On tour in the United States, she met and married Pierce Butler, heir to a wealthy Philadelphia family. Two years later he inherited the family’s plantations in Georgia whereupon he became the second-largest slave-owner in the country. This horrified Kemble, an ardent abolitionist, whose best-known work is her “Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-9”. Butler’s family forbade her from publishing it, but after the beginning of the American Civil war, she did publish it and it is credited with turning the tide of British sentiment against the South. In 1845 she left Butler and in 1848 he divorced her. She then returned to the stage supporting herself by lecturing and giving readings from Shakespeare.
Hinton’s play imagines Kemble not yet unpacked in a dressing room of a theatre in Philadelphia about to deliver one of her readings. Tamara Marie Kucheran has created an attractive set with the trunks opening to reveal miniature allegorical scenes. She gives Kemble two identical period gowns--black for Act 1, white for Act 2--reflecting Kemble’s practice of dressing to suit the matter of her reading, tragedy or comedy respectively. The back wall showing the negative of a portrait of Kemble as Juliet neatly combines this theme along with racial topics of the play. Robert Thomson’s lighting creates the gloomy atmosphere of the plantation scenes and spotlights key objects, such as Kemble’s wedding ring, throughout the action.
As the offstage voice of the stage manager repeatedly gives Kemble a five-minute warning to curtain time, the actress muses on her life and reflects on the question, “Who shall I enter as tonight?” which becomes a refrain throughout the play. The two hours it takes Kemble to rehearse her past for us thus represents the quick reflections of a few minutes before she leaves for the stage. As in his “Swanne” trilogy the action proceeds associatively, not chronologically, beginning with Butler’s massive sale of his slaves to pay off his debts, and shuttles back and forth through time, among London, Philadelphia past and present and Georgia. As with “The Swanne”, Hinton does not take enough care in signalling the shifts of time and place so that Kemble’s fairly straightforward story becomes hopelessly confusing, with her various trips to the States hard to disentangle.
Hinton makes favours these associative links over a clear chronology because his is primarily interested in hammering home thematic points derived from Kemble’s life more than he is in helping know the character. He begins with Butler’s slave auction because that gives him his central image. Kemble claims that slave-owning takes a toll on both slave and master, that “the misery of the slave is equal to the moral abasement of the master,“ though, one should think, less physically painful for the master. Kemble herself feels like a slave in marriage where she is her husband’s chattel rather than his equal. When Kemble takes the stage she feels like she is standing on the block like a slave to be auctioned. Hinton parallels the loss of identity in acting with the loss of humanity in both slave and master.
Rather than being the intriguing life it should be, Fanny Kemble in Hinton’s play becomes more like a text for preaching. He has Kemble draw all the politically correct morals of her actions for us as if we the audience were too weak-minded to discover them ourselves and then iterates them as if we hadn’t got the point. With the confused timeline and the repetitive didacticism, Hinton manages to make the life of one of the most fascinating women of the 19th century into an exercise in pretense and tedium.
What gives the show life is the vivacious performance of Domini Blythe as Kemble. She plays at least a dozen characters black and white, male and female, and Fanny herself at several different ages, all clearly differentiated from each other. Most amusing is her portrayal of Kemble’s imperious, Lady Bracknell-like Aunt Siddons, who prefers to be called “the tragic muse Melpomene” even by her relations. Most moving is her portrayal of Kemble’s female friends among the slaves, Psyche, whom Kemble taught to read. Much of the Act 2 is taken up with Psyche’s telling the story of how she and a friend Jenny Hill planned to escape but how Psyche at the last minute lost her nerve leaving Jenny to keep running.
Since Kemble records her conversations with Psyche and other slaves in her journals, Hinton has Psyche bring up the problem we would now call “appropriation of voice”, a circumstance aggravated by the fact that Blythe actually does take on the voice to Psyche to tell her tale. For a playwright so scrupulously politically correct as Hinton, it is odd that Hinton never has Kemble give Psyche a reply to her accusation that she has infringed on her confidence. This gap among all the clichés retailed as insights (e.g., not everything is black and white but grey), leaves the audience feeling they haven’t really got to know this great woman from the past as much as the lessons Hinton wants us to derive from it.
Domini Blythe is a wonderful actor. When she meditatively delivers Portia’s speech about “the quality of mercy”, we recognize yet again her great ability to make Shakespeare language sound so natural, passionate and intelligible. Hinton’s tale of Kemble inevitably pales in contrast. Blythe is such a fine performer that she deserves to star in a work that more fully engages the audience and more fully showcases the full breadth of her talent.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Domini Blythe as Fanny Kemble. ©Richard Bain.
2006-08-16
Fanny Kemble