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by John Mighton, directed by Chris Abraham

Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

July-13-September 24, 2011

John Mighton’s The Little Years is a good play on the way to being a great play though it hasn’t arrived there yet.  It presents the situation of its central character so forcefully that most people will assume that that is the point of the play.  In fact, Mighton wants that situation to resonate with much larger implications, but since the situation has become a cliché, it does not.  On the other hand, the production under director Chris Abraham is so immaculate that few will worry that the nature of the play’s story militates against its taking on a wider meaning.

The action follows the life of Kate over a period of 45 years from 1950 to 1995.  At age 14 she already regrets her lost youth.  She is prodigiously intelligent and loves math and science, particularly the various theories of time, but she has many obstacles in her path.  She grows up in the 1950s when girls were encouraged to study practical things like home economics and were considered unsuitable for math and science.  Her mother favours her brother William over her.  William is as acclaimed for his talent and popularity as much as Kate is considered odd for her interests and lack of social skills.  As a result when we next meet her as an adult, the girl who showed so much vitality and potential has become bitter, withdrawn and unfulfilled. 

Considered only this far, the play seems to be a familiar parable about the evils of a male-dominated society in repressing the freedom of expression and inquiry among women.  That certainly is what most people will take from the play, but that is not really Mighton’s point.  The play relates how William became famous as a poet in his lifetime but when reevaluated after his death was considered “academic”.  A painter Kate meets, Roger, lives long enough to see his fame diminish during his lifetime.  William’s wife Grace is an ardent feminist but finds eventually that all her discussion groups disband over disagreements about what feminism is.  Clearly, what Mighton would like to demonstrate through these various characters is that appreciation of value and assessment of possibilities are dependent upon time.  Time for most people in the West is thought of as linear, with the present meant to build on the past and set the format for the future.  Yet, Kate mentions many other theories of time--such as circular, dilated and branched--in which the implications of steady progress or decline cannot easily be embedded, if at all.  Mighton would like to say that our narrow view of time causes us in the West to have a narrow way of judging the success or failure of ourselves and others. 

Unfortunately, this larger meaning simply doesn’t come across.  Mighton keeps the focus so steadily on Kate that we naturally assume that her story is all that the play is about.  The main counter-example to Kate is William, a character who never appears.  When Roger and Grace admit in old age that Kate was right about their futures, their remarks reflect once again on Kate’s lost potential rather than highlighting the two as parallel cases.  When Kate meets William and Grace’s daughter Tanya, who was inspired by reading Kate’s forgotten diaries to William-like success in math and science, the dominant notion is again of Kate’s wasted potential.  The fact that the same actor who played the young Kate plays Tanya is meant to highlight the notion of circular time, but most people will be caught up in the emotion of the meeting of Kate and her unknown protégée rather than in the intellectual implications of Tanya’s success. 

What Mighton is attempting to do in this play is fascinating.  It’s too bad he does not achieve it.  First, the implications on judgement of the other theories of time is not explained fully enough.  Second, Mighton does not devote enough time to the stories of Roger and Grace as parallel characters to Kate, and he does not give enough emphasis to the change in attitude toward William. 

Despite all this, the acting is absolutely superb.  Bethany Jillard creates a strong contrast between the brilliant but introverted young Kate and the brilliant but extroverted Tanya.  Irene Poole creates a powerful portrait of the adult Kate as she ages, moving from active provocation to retreating into a nearly impenetrable shell of anger and disappointment.  Yanna McIntosh and Evan Buliung both show the gradual lose of energy and ideals in Grace and Roger as they age.  Chick Reid effects an amazing physical change in Kate’s mother Alice from a lively young mother to a fairly unpleasant woman living unhappily in a nursing home.

Chris Abraham poises the action exactly halfway between the emotional and the distant.  His sense of pacing is astute, although an 80-minute play needs no intermission, and he is a master at helping actors find the most effective length for every pause.  Kimberly Purtell’s lighting often casts geometric shapes on the Julie Fox’s all-white set that move, fuse and separate, thus providing a kind of visual commentary on the action.  Fox’s costumes ably evoke the changes of decade and well-being of the characters as the action moves forward.

Mighton admits that the inspiration for the title of The Little Years comes from Book 3, ¶10 of the Meditations of Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius (121-180 ad): “Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come--dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone”.  The points made here are so central not just to understanding Mighton’s title but to understanding the true scope of the play that it is a shame that Mighton finds no way to work it into the text of the play.  It would help us see that the play is not simply a parable about the lost potential of only one person.

                   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Irene Poole and Bethany Jillard. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For Tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.