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by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson & Daniela Vlaskalic, directed by Charlie Tomlinson

Bent Out of Shape Productions, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto

October 14-November 15, 2009

Three free-standing claw-foot bathtubs on a black tiled floor with three large shower heads above them--this is what you see when you enter the Tarragon Extra Space to see The Drowning Girls by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson and Daniela Vlaskalic.  When the light comes again each is filled with a woman in Victorian undergarments--underwater.  A place of relaxation and renewal has become a tomb.

The play is an 80-minute version of a 1999 Edmonton Fringe Festival play.  Both versions have won many awards, but one can’t help think they reward Charles Tomlinson’s highly inventive staging rather than the play itself.  The story is based on the 1915 British case of George Joseph Smith, who married and drowned three women in succession to gain their money.  He walked free each time, the death ruled as an accident.  The play begins in the form of a chorus with the three dead wives Bessie (Daniela Vlaskalic), Alice (Beth Graham) and Margaret (Natascha Girgis) relating the hopes and fears they shared and the fate they met.  This segues into an examination of each case separately and concludes with Smith’s trial after he was caught using a false name.    

Of these, the first section is the eeriest and most effective renewing as it does the form of choral Greek tragedy.  All three, aged over 20 to over 40, feared they would become that despised creature, the spinster, and longed for the freedom and status women could acquire at that time only through marriage.  Smith’s charm took their breath away figuratively, then literally.  Unfortunately, we have to hear the women’s stories retold twice again in increasingly more mundane detail.  What we never learn is how each of these three very likeable women could have found themselves in a situation where they would see marriage to a virtual stranger as their only choice.  It’s hard to believe, as the play suggests, that Smith appealed to these three very different personalities in exactly the same way unless marriage itself, rather than Smith, was their only interest. 

All three actors give engaging performances, though why they use Canadian accents for the women and British for all the other characters they play is a mystery.  Tomlinson’s clever and varied use of the tubs, water and hidden props is unfailingly imaginative, but the decision to end the show on an upbeat note is bizarre.  Smith may finally be convicted but fits of giggles seem an odd response from three women whose lives he callously destroyed. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-10-21.

Photo: Daniela Vlaskalic, Natascha Girgis and Beth Graham. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.