✭✭✭✭✭

by Robert Chafe, directed by Jillian Keiley

Theatre Newfoundland Labrador, Grand Theatre, London

March 16-31, 2012

“A Vibrant Celebration of Quiet Heroism”

Tempting Providence is theatrical temptation you should definitely give in to.  The Theatre Newfoundland Labrador production has been touring nationally and internationally to great acclaim ever since its premiere in 2002 and you that the Grand Theatre is hosting it you have no excuse to miss it.  It tells the story of an extraordinary woman, Nurse Mara Bennett, “the Florence Nightingale of Newfoundland”, in an extraordinarily inventive theatrical style that captures all the strength and humour of how a proper British woman learns to fit into the superstitious, close-knit community of an isolated fishing outport.

Robert Chafe’s play celebrates the life of Myra Bennett, née Grimsley, who lived from 1890 to 1990.  Bennett was motivated by the overwhelming conviction that the purpose of life was to help others.  Her service as a nurse during World War I only strengthened that conviction and after the war she sought out a place that where she was told there are a dire need for medical help.  That place was Daniel’s Harbour, Newfoundland, above the 50th parallel on the Gulf of St. Lawrence side of the Great Northern Peninsula.  She arrived there, tempting providence, on Friday the 13th in 1921 on a two-year contract and wound up staying there the rest of her life.  So famous did she become for her heroic efforts in improving the health of people all along the 200 miles of the roadless Peninsula that she was know simple as “the Nurse”.  Later her work was rewarded with numerous awards from Newfoundland, Britain and Canada. 

The most striking feature of the production is its amazing inventiveness.  There are only four actors.  Deidre Gillard-Rowlings, who created the role, plays Myra Bennett.  Darryl Hopkins plays the man who after dogged insistence becomes her husband.  Willow Kean plays all the other women in the play and Robert Wyatt Thorne all the other men.  So cleverly written and directed is the play that these four actors, especially Kean and Thorne, give you the feeling of an entire community of people from the very young to the very old, from the stubbornly superstitious to those willing to learn, from those in robust good health to those in dreadful pain. 

The set consists of a table, four chairs and a tablecloth.  The cloth is the same lovely cream colour as Barry Buckle’s attractive period costumes.  Just as Kean and Thorne morph into character after character with the subtest change of posture and voice, so the simple elements of the set are recombined in endlessly imaginative ways to represent the numerous locations for the rapidly changing scenes.  The table is a table, but on one side a rock face, or upside-down a vegetable garden or a sleigh.  The chairs can become a double bed or, plied up, an animal stall.  Most fascinating of all, the tablecloth at one moment is a pile of dough Bennett is kneading as she tries to make bread, the next a newborn baby, the next a washed sheet being taken off the line.  Some transformations will make you smile long after the show is over--the cloth as wedding dress, as dinghy or as crib. 

This really is what theatre is all about.  Director Jillian Keiley knows that a minimalist production dependent on constant transformation will always engage us more than a maximalist production that tries to recreate reality onstage in minute detail.  The reason is that Keiley’s kind of production serves as a catalyst for our imagination, not a substitute for it.  Keiley brings the sense of “play” back into the play. 

The work is immaculately performed.  Gillard-Rowlings presents Bennett at first as prim to the point of severity.  Angus’s mother (Kean) takes her aside to say that in Daniel’s Harbour if she does learn to bake and sew, no one will trust her with more serious matters.  So Myra Bennett sets about learning how gain the trust of the locals.  What is so wonderful about her performance are the hints of loneliness, longing and even love that she shows us lurking beneath Bennett’s stern demeanour.  Life in Britain and in war taught her to repress all sentiment, but gradually Gillard-Rowlings shows how Bennett begins to take an ironic view of her own seemingly emotionless nature. 

Hopkins makes a lively Angus, who determines to marry Bennett as soon as he claps eye on her.  How he manages to break through her forbidding exterior is a large part of the fun of the play.  I’ve already praised the transformational abilities of Kean and Thorne.  You will long remember Kean as Angus’s mother sizing up Bennett at her very first clinic and deciding that she likes her because she’s equally as tough.  You will also remember the painful scene when Kean plays an obviously sick mother who has already lost one child to tuberculosis and can’t bear to hear that she may have the disease herself.  Thorne is especially memorable as Angus’s comic brother Alex, “not the sharpest knife in the drawer”, who acts out agony all too convincingly when by accident he nearly severs his foot. 

This is the kind of play that easily helps you enter another world.  Like Bennett you come to know its beauty, strengths, quirks and follies and love the land and its people because of them.  Theatre Newfoundland Labrador could hardly have a more attractive calling card around the world than this production of this play that celebrates the kind of self-effacing, long-term commitment to social betterment that all too often goes unrecognized.  This is theatre at its finest that will restore your faith in humanity.  See it now.      

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (foreground) Darryl Hopkins and Deidre Gillard-Rowlings; (background) Robert Wyatt Thorne and Willow Kean. ©2011 Peter Buckle.

For tickets, visit www.grandtheatre.com.