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by Maja Ardal, directed by Mary Francis Moore

Contrary Company, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto

January 28-February 14, 2009

If winter has got you down and you’re in need of a pick-me-up, you could hardly do better than Maja Ardal’s one-woman play You Fancy Yourself.  The play itself is about finding warmth in a climate that is cold both physically and emotionally, and the joy Ardal radiates suffuses the theatre.

The semi-autobiographical work, first seen at the SummerWorks Festival in 2006, tells of the experiences of the girl Elsa, who emigrates with her parents from Iceland to Scotland in the 1950s.  In a sublime performance Ardal shows Elsa develop from a wide-eyed four-year-old looking for the equivalents in her new surroundings of the fairies and trolls she knows so well from Icelandic lore, into an eleven-year-old experiencing her first crush.  The constant throughout is Elsa’s imagination that transforms all she feels into cosmic events.  Ardal is not unaware of Elsa’s flaws.  The same gift of imagination also allows her to justify mistreatment of her best friend.  The accusation “you fancy yourself” that is flung at her has the ring of truth.  As an outsider Elsa desperately wants to fit in even while she feels superior to those around her.

Ardal’s portrait of Elsa is a delight in itself, but Ardal also deftly transforms herself into a dozen other characters, male and female, aged and young, who make up Elsa’s world.  Most memorable are Adelle, Elsa’s painfully shy, best friend, whom Elsa betrays to be part of the “in” crowd; June Macready, the haughty pony-tailed leader of this group whose imagination extends only to playing horsey; and Elsa’s authoritarian teacher Miss Campbell, whose strictness cloaks a romantic heart.  Ardal needs no more than a bare stage and a plain wooden trunk to conjure up the pleasures and fears of childhood and the sad fact of how soon children develop cliquishness and the bullying and ostracism that result from it.  Yet, gradually Elsa comes to realize that her outsider status helps her see through the artificial hierarchies and politics of the playground to give her at last a sense of self.  The specifics of Ardal’s story are fascinating, but they are sure to bring back memories of similar events you thought you had forgotten.  Ardal’s wonderfully big-hearted performance is one you won’t want to miss.       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-02-14.

Photo: Maja Ardal. ©Alex Felipe.