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by Sarah Berthiaume, translated by Nadine Desrochers, directed by Ker Wells

Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

September 26-October 6, 2013

“A New Voice Tells Us a Murky Tale”

   

Canadian Stage has begun its 2013/14 season rather inauspiciously with the Toronto premiere of The Flood Thereafter (Le Déluge après).  This, the first play by Québecois writer Sarah Berthiaume, is pretentious and deadly boring.  As if James Joyce had not already done the same things, but better, in his novel Ulysses, Berthiaume has the idea of discovering the patterns of Homer’s Odyssey at work in the everyday lives of ordinary people.  The Flood Thereafter focusses, as does Chapter XI in Joyce’s novel, on the episode of the sirens.  Why she should choose this episode is a mystery since she omits most of the important features of the story.

In The Flood Thereafter, a small fishing village in the Lower Saint Lawrence region of Quebec is still dealing with events that occurred twenty years ago.  As our narrator Pénélope (Maggie Huculak) tells us, her husband Homère (W. Joseph Matheson) went out fishing.  What he caught was a mermaid that people named Grace (Patricia Marceau).  Once on shore all the men were so entranced they all had their way with her.  She duly bore a child, June (Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster).  June now performs once a night at the Bar l’Émotion run by Georges (Oliver Becker), where she takes off all her clothes.  She is so beautiful all the men can do is cry.  All this changes when a stranger comes to town.  Denis (Kevin MacDonald) is forced to stay in town when his truck breaks down.  Since June doesn’t know which of the men in town is her father, Denis is the first man she could fall in love with.

This could all be lightly whimsical except that Berthiaume couches Pénélope’s narration in portentous purple prose as if we are meant to look for something of cosmic significance in the action.  This narration contrasts with the realism of profanity-laden dialogue of the villagers.  The play’s pretentiousness derives from Berthiaume’s constant emphasis on the action’s significance without letting the action speak for itself.  The play’s tedium derives from Berthiaume’s inability to engage with the action or in the characters. 

Berthiaume would get points for reclaiming The Odyssey for women by making Pénélope the narrator rather than Homer or Odysseus, except that Margaret Atwood already did that, and did it better, in The Penelopiad (2005), first staged in Canada in 2007.  Berthiaume’s Homère is not blind but he has lost his peripheral vision because of an accident when his boat collided with an island that appeared in the St. Lawrence out of nowhere.  Berthiaume links blindness with Denis, the presumed Odysseus figure, who first appears blinded by the sun over the village and then is blinded when liquid from his truck falls in his eyes. 

What Berthiaume is trying to convey through all this is completely unclear.  In The Odyssey it is not just the sirens’ beauty but their song that is so dangerous to seafarers.  That’s why Odysseus tells his crew to put wax in their ears and to tie him to the mast so that he can hear the song without trying to steer nearer to them.  In Berthiaume’s play their is no song whatsoever except for the Eurhythmics’ Sweet Dreams that June uses for her strip routine.  June’s mother, the symbolically named Grace, doesn’t even seem to know how to tell stories.  The only possible parallel to the sirens passage in The Odyssey is that Denis is attracted to June but does not forget his girlfriend back home, and he needs no symbolic tying to the mast to remind him of her.  The result is that the dramatic tension in the play is nil.

Director Ker Wells has not found a way to make Berthiaume’s text work on stage.  When the men cry while gazing on June’s naked beauty, he has them wring out wet dishcloths over their heads making the scene comic.  In fact, the men’s obsession with June is supposed to be tragic since for twenty years they have neglected their wives to the point where they have forgotten their names.  Pénélope is simply the name Homère’s wife gives herself while she waits for Homère to remember her real name.                     

The strong cast do the best they can with the material, but it is difficult when all the characters are either sketches or symbols.  Maggie Huculak is a wonderful narrator.  Her soothing voice is gently tinged with irony.  Berthiaume gives her so much narration one begins to wonder why she didn’t simply make it a solo show with Pénélope as the main character. 

Patricia Marceau is directed to speak half her lines in French, half in English.  She manages this easily and naturally.  She acts so much like a fussy down-to-earth cafe-owner it’s almost impossible to see that she ever could have been the siren that made all the village men go wild.  Symbolically, Berthiaume wants Grace to represent a spirit of nature that protects the village with her presence.  On stage, however, Grace comes off more as the embodiment of small town provincialism than a cosmic force.

Oliver Becker and W. Joseph Matheson as the two men of the village are simply sketches.  Becker’s bartender shows malice but feels a mysterious tenderness towards Grace.  Matheson’s Homère is afflicted with being a walking symbol of male blindness towards women as anything more more than beautiful objects.  At least, Berthiaume manages one good dialogue in the course of the play’s 90 minutes.  That is the discussion between Pénélope and Homère on the night he does not go to the bar when the two married people finally confront the loss of love in their marriage.  If only Berthiaume had concentrated her efforts on scenes like that she might succeed in involving us more in the material.

Kevin MacDonald is quite likeable as Denis, but Berthiaume gives him virtually nothing of interest to say even though he is the one who should have an outsider’s perspective on the strange goings-on in the village.

As for the production John Gzowski’s sound design is the saviour of the play.  The sounds of rushing wind and water and the mingling of eerie noises do more than any of Berthiaume’s words in conjuring up a semi-supernatural mood.  In spite of the title, Yannik Larivée’s set looks like the aftermath of a flood not the precursor to it.  It is highly imaginative, but suggests a nightmare more than a myth.  Both the bar and Grace’s café-cum-home look like junk heaps, although Larivée has selected the piled up junk to reflect what might be the contents of each place – a piano frame and strings with a swinging western door for the bar, heaped up cabinets, a microwave oven and a lamp for the café.  The entire playing are looks like a worn-out pier with boards broken off and white pebbles surrounding it. 

The phrase “Après moi, le déluge” is attributed sometimes to Louis XV, sometime to Mme de Pompadour, conveying the notion of a person so irresponsible that he or she does not care what happens after they are gone.  Berthiaume could hardly have given her play the title Le Déluge après without referencing such a famous phrase.  And indeed a deluge does arrive once Grace and June disappear, but as with all of Berthiaume’s other allusions, it’s hard to see how it makes sense since neither June, nor Grace especially, could be considered as irresponsible.    

While we in English Canada should keep up on the theatre of our Francophone compatriots, Canadian Stage has bet rather too much on Berthiaume.  The company is staging not just one but two of her plays at Berkeley Street.  After Flood, finishes its run on October 6, the author’s latest play Yukonstyle (2013) begins on October 13.  Let’s hope that the recent play evinces a greater ability at creating compelling drama that her first play does.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (top) W. Joseph Matheson, Oliver Becker and Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster; (middle) Kevin MacDonald and Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster.  ©2013 Bruce Zinger.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.