Review - The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs - Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✩

by Carole Fréchette, translated by John Murrell,

directed by Weyni Mengesha

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

March 7-April 8, 2012

“A Room with an Inside View”

Tarragon Theatre is giving Carole Fréchette’s 2008 play The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs (La Petite Pièce en haut de l’escalier) its English-language premiere in a translation by John Murrell. What if you have a fairy-tale marriage that starts out like Cinderella but after a while you suspect it may be more like Bluebeard? That’s exactly the situation that the newly-married Grace finds herself in in Fréchette’s play that works as a psychological thriller even as it mixes the Bluebeard story with aspects of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and turns it into something new.

Grace has married Henry, an immensely rich investment banker--her first marriage, his fourth--who proposed to her not long after first meeting her by accident. When Henry gave Grace a tour of his 28-room mansion he said that all he had was now hers. But then Grace noticed a hidden staircase and a door at the top that was always closed. When she insisted on seeing the room behind the door, Henry lost his temper and forbade her ever to climb the stairs or go inside the small room.

When the 90-minute play opens, Grace (Nicole Underhay) is already on the staircase heading for the door. In her head she hears the voice of her mother Joyce (Sarah Dodd), who warns her to stay away from the door and do nothing that will compromise the her financially successful marriage. Also in her head is the voice of her older sister Anne (Clare Calnan), who despises the rich and works to help the needy people of the world. She tells Grace she should be able to do whatever she wants in her own house and to throw off Henry’s controlling influence. Also in her mind, and then literally in her ear on her cellphone, is Henry (Rick Roberts), who is stuck at the airport and phones frequently to say how much he loves Grace and misses her. Fréchette thus uses this device to dramatize the various influences fighting for supremacy in Grace’s mind, but ultimately it is Grace’s curiosity alone, as in the Bluebeard tale, that impels her open the door and go in. Unfortunately, she is observed by the maid Jenny (Raquel Duffy), whose silence Grace tries to secure with gifts of her jewelry.

I do not wish to give away the ending, but I must reveal that what Grace discovers behind the door is not the corpses of Henry’s previous wives, but rather something far more mysterious. If you don’t want to know what it is, do not read the author’s note in the programme. With this revelation the plot of Small Room continues on the same course as Bluebeard even as Grace’s discovery begins to change its meaning.

Fréchette is fully aware of the Bluebeard story best-known in the version by Charles Perrault (1697). There the nameless wife’s sister is also named Anne and the sisters have two brothers who come to rescue them at the last minute. Here Grace and Anne talk about a recurring fantasy they had as children of two brothers (though they have none) coming to rescue them in a cloud of dust. In a phone call near the end when Grace is filled with fear, Anne in a faraway place reminds her that she has no one to rescue her. Perrault’s moral, “La curiosité, malgré tous ses attraits, / Coûte souvent bien des regrets” (“Curiosity despite its attraction, costs too many sorrows”) is not Fréchette’s. Neither is Perrault’s secondary moral that a wife should obey her husband no matter what colour his beard is. Rather, Grace’s curiosity is not an idle trait but an attempt to know more about her husband. She may provoke his anger in uncovering his secret but she lives up to her name in her reaction to him.

Although Fréchette has updated the fairy tale to the present, the room and its contents are still metaphorical. Director Weyni Mengesha, designer Astrid Janson and lighting designer Bonnie Beecher have carefully poised the production halfway between the realistic and the symbolic. Janson’s set is a large mirrored rectangle with the steps to the door indicated by lights underneath the floor along the diagonal. The audience sits in an ell along two sides of the stage. The contents of the room, at a point closest to the bend in the ell is another buried light obscured by dirt of some kind. The pathway through the house to the hidden staircase is indicated solely by Beecher’s meticulous light of the rim and select sections of the stage. When Grace is inside the small room, Beecher covers Grace with extraordinarily eerie ragged stripes of dim light in the midst of total blackness.

The cast is uniformly strong. It is great to see Underhay, who is so adept at comedy, show a completely different side, combining both vulnerability and strength, in her portrayal of Grace. Rick Roberts is suitable enigmatic as Henry. He gives his declarations of love to Grace a strange tone of desperation as if he senses she could slip away from him. In the midst of the mounting suspense, Dodd provides a welcome note of comedy with unwavering focus on the material benefits of Grace’s marriage. Calnan’s Anne serves a stern voice from the real world, trying to shake Grace out of the fairy-tale mindset she has adopted and to look at the problems of the real world outside her mansion. In the end we feel that Grace’s capacity for compassion is not so different from Anne’s. Duffy makes the maid Jenny a mysterious figure. Does she act on her own or under Henry’s instructions? We are never quite sure until the very end.

If there is a flaw in Fréchette’s play it is that it spends so much time resetting and replaying the Bluebeard story that we begin to wonder whether the author has anything else in mind. Patience pays off, finally, with Grace’s strange discovery which so contradicts the Bluebeard story that we struggle to see how it fits in. It does though, even if it becomes clear only in the final moments of the play. This is a highly imaginative production of a fascinating play. It may be framed as a thriller, but one whose psychological and metaphysical implications break the bounds of genre.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.

2012-03-08

The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs