Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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by Evelyne de la Chenelière, translated by Linda Gaboriau, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 15-February 16, 2014
Simone: “Irrigate me, irrigate me!”
Evelyne de la Chenelière’s latest play manages the difficult task of boring an audience even though it is only 75 minutes long. The main difficulty with the play is that Chenelière is unable to make us interested in the failing marriage of the central couple Jean and Simone. In seeking universality Chenelière makes Jean and Simone for too generic. The first difficulty with the production is that director Richard Rose is unable to provide any coherence to the often incoherent narrative. The second difficulty is that only two of the three cast members are persuasive actors.
The Tarragon’s production of Flesh and Other Fragments of Love is the English-language premiere of La chair et autres fragments de l'amour first presented in Montreal in 2012. The play is loosely based on the 1979 novel Une vie pour deux by the French author Marie Cardinal (1929-2001). In the play as in the novel Jean (Blair Williams) and Simone (Maria del Mar) decide to take a vacation away from their children in order to rekindle their dying marriage. Simone has chosen a remote village in County Sligo in Ireland thinking that the isolation will help bring her and Jean together. It happens, however, that one day Jean goes for a walk on the beach and comes across the dead body of a young woman.
Rather than calling the police, the natural response of these two intellectuals is to speculate about how this dead woman is a symbol of their marriage. They call her Mary and soon they create competing views of what her past life was and how it led to her death. Jean takes the male chauvinist view that Mary was a virgin who wanted to lose her virginity but rather than experiencing freedom ends up pregnant. Simone makes up a feminist version that assumes that Mary wanted to become a doctor but was thwarted in her ambition. Under pressure of the couple’s injecting life into her Mary (Nicole Underhay) comes alive and becomes the embodiment of whatever it is that has come between Jean and Simone. Whether it is Chenelière’s writing, Rose’s direction or Underhay’s wonderfully vivid performance, our interest awakens whenever the focus is on Mary and wanes whenever it is on Jean and Simone. Chenelière then takes the action on an unforeseen turn that feels like a last-minute bid to elicit sympathy for the couple but fails because of the general deceit behind any trick ending and because it’s hard to see how the ending is related, except metaphorically, to anything that has gone before.
Thus we leave the theatre not really knowing what happened during the action but also not really caring. This feeling is not due to the heroic efforts of Underhay, who, in an unintended irony, makes a corpse the one character who is the most full of life. I have never thought of Underhay primarily as a physical performer, but she beautifully enacts the movement choreographed by Denise Fujiwara that shows how the dead Mary gradually writhes into life, acquires the power to raise herself and finally stand. Underhay’s remarkable physical performance is matched by her lively verbal delivery in a hearty Irish brogue. In another unintended irony, Underhay makes Mary a character who is far more engaging than the identities that Jean and Simone try to force onto her.
This could have been the point of the play – that Jean and Simone’s intellectual clichés do not prepare them to face life, death or love in the real world. Mary’s undeniable reality would reveal how dry of ideas the minds of these would-be revolutionaries have become. Unfortunately, that is not the path Chenelière wants to take and she forces the action in a direction contrary to its nature.
Blair Williams gives a performance very similar to the many concerned but ineffectual intellectuals he has played at the Shaw Festival. As usual he has exquisite clarity of diction and an ability to bring out the wit or poetry in anything he speaks, even some of Chenelière’s less inspired passages. Maria del Mar, a television and film actor making her professional stage debut, fades in comparison with Underhay and Williams. Her diction is often unclear due to rushing through her words and she has to stop to take breaths in awkward places in many of Chenelière’s extremely long lines. Unlike Under and Williams, del Mar doesn’t always communicate a sense of conviction behind the words she is speaking, and in a a play that already verges on incoherence, this is definitely not an advantage.
Karyn McCallum’s design evokes the sea and the beach, but this is a play that could benefit from an even more abstract staging. Rose’s direction makes the action confusing because it’s not always clear who is really speaking to whom or who is meant or not meant to hear certain remarks. Chenelière is the author of such popular plays as Des fraises en janvier (1999) and Bashir Lazhar (2007), which was made into the award-winning film Monsieur Lazhar in 2011. So we will have to consider Flesh and Other Fragments of Love as a misfire. For another view of the work, readers should know that the NAC French Theatre in Ottawa is staging it from April 9-12 this year with Chenelière herself playing Mary and Marie Cardinal’s daughter, Alice Ronfard directing. Perhaps with the participation of those two women, that production will be able to make the play work in a way that the Tarragon production does not.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Nicole Underhay, Blair Williams and Maria del Mar. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com/tickets/.
2014-01-17
Flesh and Other Fragments of Love