<b>✭✭✭</b>✩✩ <b>
music, book & lyrics by Joseph Aragon, directed by Adam Brazier
Theatre 20, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
October 11-28, 2012
</b>
“Science demands the sacrifice of the few for the sake of the many.”
Theatre 20’s inaugural production is a great showcase for Canadian musical talent. <i>Bloodless: The Trial of Burke and Hare</i> (2009) by Winnipegger Joseph Aragon is probably the most assured Canadian musical since <i>The Drowsy Chaperone</i> and much more challenging. It has an ideal cast and is smartly directed by Adam Brazier. As the grimly humorous tale about 19th-century serial murderers who sell bodies to a university anatomy professor, the show has one inescapable difficulty – it is too heavily indebted to Stephen Sondheim classic <i>Sweeney Todd</i> (1979) in mood, presentation and even in musical themes. This is a pity since <i>Bloodless</i> has its own tale to tell which in many ways is more sophisticated than Sondheim’s simple revenge melodrama.
While the character of Sweeney Todd is purely fictional, William Burke and William Hare are historical figures whose grisly doings were all too real. Both were Irish immigrant in Edinburgh in the early 19th century who earned a meagre living of sixpence a day working on the Union Canal to connect Edinburgh to Glasgow. Hare married Margaret Logue who ran a lodging house in the seedy West Port district of the city.
Evan Buliung gives a great performance as Burke, a completely amoral man whose notion of living for today does not include allowing others to do the same. Eddie Glen finally has the chance to play a serious role for a change and proves to be the moral centre of the play. When one of Margaret’s tenants dies, she asks Hare to dispose of the body. Knowing that the anatomists at the Edinburgh Medical College are in need of cadavers, Burke and Hare take the body to Dr. Robert Knox (a supercilious David Keeley), who pays them £7 10s for it or half a year’s wages for each of them. Given such an opportunity, it is no surprise that when Margaret (Jan Alexandra Smith) mentions she’s having trouble with a tenant who is a dying alcoholic who never pays his rent, the two decide the best thing would be to help him along and sell him to Dr. Knox.
When the wives of the two murderers insist on knowing where all this money has suddenly come from, the two decide to tell them. Margaret and Burke’s wife Helen (Trish Lindström) are at first outraged, but soon enough see the economic sense in what the men are doing. The dark comedy comes from the relative ease with which Helen accepts the notion. Lindström makes Helen an empty-headed woman who has few qualms that all the baubles Burke gives her come from people’s deaths. Soon enough she is spotting potential targets and dreaming about what she’ll do with the money. Smith subtly shows that Margaret has a much greater inner struggle. Even when she agrees she makes us feel Margaret’s sense of self-disgust even if it is mixed with her anger at the injustice of the rigid class system in Scotland.
They have all started down a slippery slope and soon when lodgers at Margaret’s inn mention they have no friends or family, they are plied with liquor and burked or suffocated by having their nose and mouth held closed. Eventually Burke and Hare fall out because Burke insists on dressing up Helen while he parades about in expensive clothes himself thus calling attention to their recent wealth. Aragon sticks very close to the historical details but he invents the character of Janet Brown (a fiery Carly Street), a prostitute, who won’t give up the search for her missing co-worker Mary Paterson (a highly sympathetic Kaylee Harwood), for whom she has more than sisterly affection. When Thomas Jones (a tortured Jeff Irving) one of Dr. Knox’s students recognizes Mary as the latest cadaver, he and Janet join in bringing down the criminals.
Even though <i>Bloodless</i> has a much different and, in fact, more important, story to tell than <i>Sweeney Todd</i>, it’s a pity that Aragon allows himself to be so thoroughly influenced by Sondheim’s work. His use of the opening chorus of victims immediately recalls the opening chorus of <i>Sweeney Todd</i>. The song given Janet Brown in Act 2 about searching for Mary is really too close to Sondheim for comfort. Worst of all, Aragon uses virtually the same minor key ostinato that Sondheim does throughout the musical to maintain of sense of unease and dread.
At least the chorus is not also the narrator as in Sondheim. Here Aragon uses Sweeney MacArthur for that purpose. He brings authority to the role of Sir William Rae, the Lord Advocate, but also plays a number of minor characters such as the first two lodgers that Burke and Hare sell to Dr. Knox.
What Aragon brings out quite clearly is that Knox is the ultimate villain of the piece. He is the one who creates a demand for corpses and suggests to Burke and Hare that he expects them to supply him with more. Aragon also makes clear that the rigidity of the class hierarchy and the inequity of wealth give people like Burke and Hare few options other than crime to change their lives. Aragon also brings up the greater question of the demands of science that have only become increasingly relevant. He gives Thomas Jones the line, “Science demands the sacrifice of the few for the sake of the many” that has numerous ominous implications up to our own time.
Because of this, it would have been useful if Aragon had told us what happened to Knox after the trial, how he could not find a position in London and how he came to write a book explaining why white Anglo-Saxons were the superior race. It also would be useful if Aragon explained the role of the Burke and Hare murders in changing British law that had previously allowed only the use of executed criminals in anatomy lessons. This law plus the burgeoning study of medicine led to a lack of cadavers for study and thus to rise of the so-called Resurrectionists, who dug up the recently buried for sale to medical schools. Burke and Hare’s murders supplied a higher grade of cadaver and they were rewarded for it with a higher recompense. In terms of plot, Aragon brings up the rivalry between Margaret and Helen for Burke’s attentions far too late in the musical to deal with properly.
While Aragon has not yet found his own voice, he does have an unfailing ear for melody. Many of the songs are influenced by Irish and Scottish folksongs. For Dr. Knox he appropriates the Gilbert and Sullivan patter song along with its dactylic rhymes so that Knox’s signature tune makes him a pretty much the “very model of an anatomic lecturer.”
Beth Kates’s set of a raised steel walkway with curtained recesses below conjures up the grittiness of an old city undergoing industrialization. Melanie McNeill has created a lovely array of period costumes. Adam Brazier’s direction is clear and to the point. His use of the same table for Margaret’s inn and for the dissecting room always keeps the link between the two before us.
What is abundantly clear is the great fund of music theatre talent so prominently on display in this work. It’s hard not to think that Aragon did not write this musical with this very cast in mind. Also clear is the huge potential of Aragon as a composer and of Theatre 20 as a producer of musicals. The passion Theatre 20 has put into <i>Bloodless</i> in undeniable. I greatly look forward to their next endeavour.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Trish Lindström, Evan Buliung and Jan Alexandra Smith (centre) with the cast. ©2012 Riyad Mustapha.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.mirvish.com/shows/bloodless">www.mirvish.com/shows/bloodless</a>.
<b>2012-10-13</b>
<b>Bloodless: The Trial of Burke and Hare</b>