✭✭✭✭✩

by John Murrell, directed by Joseph Ziegler

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

May 5-29, 2010

Soulpepper’s revival of John Murrell’s Waiting for the Parade is a great success.  Under Joseph Ziegler’s incisive direction the excellent, well-chosen cast of five present a model of fine ensemble acting.  Murrell’s 1977 play seems deliberately to avoid profundity, but Ziegler and the cast show the work in the best possible light.

Murrell’s goal is simply to chronicle the lives of five representative women in Calgary as they wait from 1939 to 1945 for their men to return home from World War II.  Michelle Monteith is feisty and resilient as Catherine, a married factory worker whose loneliness tempts her into an affair.  Nancy Palk plays Margaret with great humour and sympathy.  She is a God-fearing pessimist, sure that her two sons will be lost to her and ill at ease with the newfangled attitudes of younger folk.  Krystin Pellerin plays Catherine’s main friend Eve, a woman who escapes her loveless marriage to an older man through the fantasy world of movies.  Eve may be the weakest of the five characters, but Pellerin invests her with a growing moral strength that turns against her husband’s unthinking glorification of war.  Fiona Byrne glows as Marta, the daughter of German immigrants, whose father has been interned as an “enemy sympathizer.”  Though she is Canadian, on Catherine and Eve make any attempt to befriend her.  Byrne masterfully reveals the anger and frustration that simmer just below Marta’s politeness.  All four women dislike Janet, an officious do-gooder and indefatigable event-organizer, who takes charge of every meeting.  Deborah Drakeford plays her so gloriously to the hilt one wishes Murrell did not give her, too, a secret sorrow to soften her character.    

Ziegler directs the cast with real zest.  The initial dance sequence when Janet partners the other four women with varying success is staged so well it sums up the five characters almost better than anything they say.  Some productions can drift too far into the saccharine, but Ziegler gives the play an edge it often lacks.  He realizes that it is as much about bitterness as bonding, about those left behind taking their fears and frustrations out on each other since they have no other outlet. For lovers of fine acting, this Parade is definitely worth seeing.              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-05-07.

Photo: Deborah Drakeford, Krystin Pellerin, Nancy Palk and Michelle Monteith. ©Sian Richards.