Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Blake Brooker
One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre, Young Centre, Toronto
December 2-13, 2008
“Is this going to be depressing?” asks Kayo Sexton to Ted Hughes as one widower of a poet who committed suicide to another. “No,” replies Hughes after a long pause. Indeed, he is right. Though both Anne Sexton (1928-74) and Sylvia Plath (1932-63) were obsessed with death throughout their self-shortened lives, the poetry they wrote is full of life, the kind of intensified vision of what life is when fully aware of its ephemerality.
Sylvia Plath Must Not Die, that premiered in January this year, is the newest work by One Yellow Rabbit, the acclaimed theatre group from Calgary. It runs in repertory with a revival of its Doing Leonard Cohen from 1997. Sylvia is by no means a conventional play much less a conventional biographical play. The set is an empty stage save for two Adirondack chairs and the actors are actors in the present playing characters from the past. There is a vague chronology, moving from when Sexton and Plath met each other in 1959 at a seminar in Boston to Plath’s death and beyond, but playwright and director Blake Brooker is not so much interested in the poets’ biographies as in their poetry itself which makes up the vast majority of the piece. Usually, after a bit of connective material, such as the fact that both had stays in mental hospitals, comes a poem from each reflecting that event. In this way Brooker turns our attention away from the sensationalism surrounding their suicides to their creativity in the face of death and mental illness.
What emerges are not similarities but differences. While Plath (Onalea Gilbertson) is an overachieving academic who married one of Britain’s great poets, Sexton (Denise Clarke) is a boozy, flirtatious housewife, married to a travelling salesman, who turns to poetry for therapy. Gilbertson and Clarke bring out these differences in their posture, movement and their delivery of the poems, with Plath’s seeming tightly wound and formal versus Sexton’s seeming earthier and full of humour. The husbands, predictably, have little to do, Andy Curtis making Kayo Sexton ordinary but clear-thinking, while Michael Green’s Ted Hughes is staid and intellectual. Gilbertson and Clarke deliver the poetry flawlessly. It sounds completely natural, simply a heightened form of speech where every word bears weight. By the end the fraught tension between women and men one might expect as theme has shifted into the mysterious tension between creativity and annihilation, a mystery these two iconic women perceived all too clearly.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-12-03.
Photo: Onalea Gilbertson as Sylvia Plath. ©Trudie Lee.
2008-12-03
Sylvia Plath Must Not Die