<b>✭✭</b>✩✩✩
<b>by Pierre de Marivaux, translated and adapted by Nicolas Billon, directed by Matthew Jocelyn
Canadian Stage/Centaur Theatre, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
April 19-May 12, 2012
</b>
“The Game of Shove and Dance”
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763) is one of the great French playwrights, one whose plays should really be better known outside of francophone countries. therefore, I was delighted to see that Canadian Stage had returned to one of its former practices of programming at least one classic play per season but that it had chosen a play by Marivaux that ranks as one of the world’s great comedies. In France, Marivaux is enjoyed for his subtle and witty analysis of psychology. A newcomer to Marivaux would certainly not get that impression from the current coproduction between Canadian Stage and Centaur Theatre.
In <i>The Game of Love and Chance</i> (<i>Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard</i>) of 1730, Marivaux invented one of the most perfect plots in comedy. Orgon (William Webster) and his best friend have arranged a marriage between their two children--Orgon’s daughter Sylvia (Trish Lindström) and the friend’s son Dorante (Harry Judge). Sylvia, however, wants to get to know this man she nor her father has ever seen, so she proposes to switch places with her maid Lisette (Gemma James-Smith) and her sympathetic father approves. Meanwhile, Orgon happens to know that Dorante has planned exactly the same trick and switched places with his valet Arlequino (Gil Garratt). Thus Lisette and Arlequino mistake each other for the masters and Sylvia and Dorante each other as the servants.
When Lisette and Arlequino feel a strong mutual attraction, they worry a little that they are betraying their masters, but otherwise are elated that married with the other will raise their status. For Sylvia and Dorante the situation is different. They, too, feel a strong mutual attraction, but each has to cope with the fact that not only have they fallen in love with the wrong person but with someone of a lower rank. The subtle self-questioning and badinage with the beloved on the topic of the power of love is what led the French to invent the word “marivaudage” to characterize Marivaux’s verbally playful analysis of psychology.
Only when Sylvia or Dorante is alone on stage or are alone together on stage do we get any hint of what Marivaux’s play is all about. Otherwise, virtually everything about the production works against it. First, is Nicolas Billon’s translation and adaptation that gets rid of the elegance of Marivaux’s prose style by trying to make the language as contemporary as possible. Next, director Matthew Jocelyn, clearly aware that Marivaux borrowed names and situations from the Italian <i>commedia dell’arte</i>, has emphasized the physical aspect of the performances over the verbal. With a character named Arlequino it is true that Marivaux was aware of the <i>commedia</i>, however, what makes Marivaux so distinct is how he transformed what was primarily physical comedy into psychological comedy. By directing the play as physical comedy, Jocelyn negates exactly what makes Marivaux so important in the history of drama.
Judged in isolation Gil Garratt gives an amazingly acrobatic performance. How many actors have the balance and strength to deliver entire speeches while in the Warrior III yoga position (one foot on the floor, the body and other leg parallel to the floor)? Jocelyn makes Garratt shift from one bizarre pose to the next as if the character were somehow breakdancing his role in extremely slow motion. Garratt prowess is undeniable but is has nothing to do with characterizing a valet playing his master.
Helium-voiced Gemma James-Smith is very funny when Jocelyn allowed her merely to say her lines. But as with Garratt, Jocelyn burdens her with a host of odd quivers and arm-flailing that, again, has nothing to do with her character’s situation. Trish Lindström and Harry Judge are excellent when allowed to play their roles straight. Lindström has the right sense of fantasy, Judge has the right sense of earnestness and both ably convey the distress of their characters. Yet, Jocelyn gives them an over-emphatic style, too, which perversely tries to find gestural equivalents for inward struggles.
William Webster gives us a rather generic classic comedic father, albeit one more sensitive to his daughter’s wishes than usual. What Zach Fraser has been told to do with Mario, Sylvia brother, is a mystery. He plays Mario as some kind of effeminate dandy but what’s with the continual munching on candies through the show? During an important speech between Sylvia and Orgon near the end, Jocelyn has Mario struggle with the plastic wrap on a candy. This is supposed to be funny, I guess, because it annoys Sylvia, but is it also annoys us since we can’t hear what Sylvia is saying.
Annick La Bissonnière has designed a set that becomes increasingly non-naturalistic as the play progresses. Two formal doors facing each other in front of a drop with a sketched-in door gives way to a mirrored room split in half by a mirrored wedge of wall. This then changes when the mirrored wedge splits apart to reveal red walls on the other side of the mirrored walls. Mirroring and reversals are clearly part of the play’s plot, but this, like the direction itself, is a rather heavy-handed way to reflect it.
Linda Brunelle’s costumes update the action from the 18th century to a fantasy version of the present. The two women both wear black dresses and all the men wear the same maroon-coloured suit. Al that distinguished one from the other are various bright-hued accents--a blue apron for Lisette, a blue bellboy cap for Dorante as valet, green shoes for Sylvia, a pink cummerbund for Arlequino as master. Brunelle’s costumes at least suggest that all men and women are alike when the temporary marks of their status are removed which is the underlying, and revolutionary, aspect of the play that Jocelyn otherwise ignores.
The present production of <i>The Game of Love and Chance</i> pales in comparison with the last professional production of the play in Toronto by Pleiades Theatre in 2000. Both John Van Burek’s translation and his direction which treat the play as the psychological comedy it is were far superior. One can only hope that Jocelyn’s hyperactive production will not put people off Marivaux, who wrote a dozen or more plays that, in the right hands, can still surprise audiences with their insights into how people acquire psychological barriers to their happiness that they then must struggle to tear down.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Gill Garratt and Gemma James-Smith. ©2012 lucetg.com.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.canadianstage.com">www.canadianstage.com</a>.
<b>2012-04-20</b>
<b>The Game of Love and Chance</b>