Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
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by John Murrell, directed by Diana Leblanc
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
October 17-November 9, 2013
“Farther West Goes South”
Over the past six years Soulpepper has become the only professional theatre company in Ontario that regularly revives acclaimed Canadian plays of the past. While the intention is to celebrate the classics of Canadian drama, these revivals have also helped separate the wheat from the chaff by demonstrating which once-famous plays still speak to Canadians and which do not. Soulpepper’s staging of John Murrell’s Chalmers Award-winning Waiting for the Parade (1977) in 2010 showed that it still holds up well. Soulpepper’s current staging of Murrell’s second Chalmers Award-winner, Farther West (1982), shows it does not.
The play concerns the life of May Buchanan (Tara Nicodemo), based on a real late 19th-century woman of the same name, who became a whore at age 14. The rest of the cast acting as a chorus asks of her “What next?” and she responds by narrating her life story. We learn that May’s outrageous behaviour was causing such a ruckus in the town of Rat Portage, Ontario, that her father advised her, "You better move on, girl, better start moving, farther west!" This she does arriving in Calgary and at this point her narration and the use of a chorus end. By the next scene she is no longer the new whore in town but a madame of brothel with her own women, regular clients and a regular annoyance. This annoyance is the constant harassment from Sergeant Seward (Dan Lett), a man morally repelled by May’s profession, comparing her to the Whore of Babylon, yet sexually attracted to her, much as he tries to repress his desire. A more complex threat arrives in the form of rancher Thomas Shepherd (Matthew MacFadzean), who falls in love with May and wants to marry her.
For May, who wants to maintain her identity and independence, the bonds of love as represented by Shepherd are just as bad as the strictures of the law as represented by Seward. In case we didn’t get the point of this parallelism Murrell has May explicitly tell us so. Faced with male encroachment on her freedom from two sides, May's only option is to keep moving “farther west” to find a “God-forsaken place where there’s no rules, no laws, no judges”.
May knows that if she moves too far west she’ll wind up in China, a land with all the constraints she’s trying to avoid. Nevertheless, when she does move farther west she goes to Vancouver in British Columbia which had already joined Confederation in 1871, and thus was hardly the place she claims she is seeking. Calgary was until 1905 part of the Northwest Territories, so why May doesn’t move elsewhere within the territories is a mystery. He could then have his heroine continue her clearly symbolic journey westward into “freedom” without contradiction.
Murrell subtitles the play “A Romance” but that doesn’t make its schematic nature any more interesting or the action any less boring. After an introduction with the cast singing and May narrating, we think Murrell has written a ballad-opera about May. Unfortunately, once May sets up her brother the remainder of Act 1 loses any forward momentum in a series of quasi-Chekhovian scenes where characters laze about wondering what will become of them. In Act 2, Murrell decides to ramp up the energy but is so intent on creating a symbolic ending that he throws dramatic realism aside. Act 2 culminates in a series of coincidences and melodramatic situations that turn us off because of their the sheer improbability.
Farther West sees a large number of well-known theatre artists making their debut with Soulpepper – Kyra Harper, Christine Horne, Dan Lett, Matthew MacFadzean and Tara Nicodemo. While it is wonderful to see Soulpepper’s ranks invigorated with these actors, you can’t help wish they had been given a better vehicle for their talents. Tara Nicodemo is well-cast as May. She has a slow, wry manner of speaking that suggests that May sees through all the pretenses she encounters. The main difficulty Nicodemo faces is that May’s character does not change. Nicodemo makes May as appealing as she can but she can’t overcome the fact that Murrell has created an inherently undramatic character.
Outside of this triangle, Kyra Harper makes the strongest impression. Her Violet begins with the comedy of an over-the-hill whore who still thinks she’s attractive and ends with the drama of a faithful servant defending her mistress. Though it’s too bad the comedy should end in a stereotype, Harper gives Violet a distinctive vitality that makes her the most engaging character in the play.
The talents of Dan Chameroy as the jovial patron Babcock and Jeff Lillico as the tough Raglan, and worse, of Evan Buliung as the secretive Hanks and Christine Horne as the simple Nettie are all wasted in small, undeveloped roles. We’re told that Nettie is slow-witted but Murrell neglects to write speeches for her to reflect that.
Astrid Janson has created a most peculiar-looking set with two levels, a pool of water and a torn burlap curtain running diagonally across the stage. The design does facilitate the rapid changes of location Murrell requires but the curtain forces the action into the front wedge of the set. Graeme Thomson creates dramatic effects when he lights a figure from behind the curtain, but director Diana Leblanc fails to explore this imagery. Some lighting cues, however, are just weird. The house lights remain up rather too long after the characters begin speaking, and at the end of Act 1 Thomson plunges us into pitch blackness for an uncomfortable few minutes, presumably so we can listen to Paul Humphrey’s sound design of calling birds and a locomotive. What this is supposed to signify, along with the full male and female nudity that begins the show, is one of the many unknowns of the production.
Students of Canadian drama will want to see this production of a seldom-seen play, but they will likely recognize why the play is seldom seen. The tedium of Act 1 followed by the melodrama of Act 2, a central character with no internal conflicts, the schematic symbolism, the inefficient use of the cast – all these plus many minor flaws make for an ineffective, unenlightening evening. Farther West, like Soulpepper’s productions of Fronteras Americanas and White Biting Dog before it, demonstrates yet again that annual awards are no predictors of lasting merit.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Matthew MacFadzean and Tara Nicodemo; Dan Lett and Jesse Aaron Dwyer. ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2013-10-20
Farther West