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by Michael Marc Bouchard, translated by Linda Gaboriau, directed by Vanessa Porteous

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 14-September 28, 2014

Descartes: “Pour examiner la vérité il est besoin, une fois en sa vie, de mettre toutes choses en doute autant qu’il se peut” (Principes de philosophie, 1644)

If anyone knows about Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-89), it is likely from the famous 1933 film about her life directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Greta Garbo in the title role.  Though the film is only loosely based on history and the beautiful Garbo looks nothing like the notably plain Christina, his film gets the essential points right about a woman raised as a man who wanted to maintain the freedom males enjoy.  To do so Christina had to abdicate in order to live her life the way she chose.  Garbo wearing men’s clothing and moving and gesturing like a man created iconic images that are still powerfully transgressive.

The Stratford Festival launched its last series of openings this season with the world premiere of Linda Gaboriau’s English translation of Michel Marc Bouchard’s 2012 play Christina, The Girl King (Christine, la reine-garçon).  Bouchard’s play makes the same principal points as the 1933 film and, ultimately, is no more historically accurate.  As is typical of Bouchard, he does not so much develop his theme as repeat it ad nauseam. 

The historical Christina was so hairy when she was born that the nurses mistakenly thought she was a boy and announced the birth as such to her father King Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632), who had been longing for a male heir.  When he discovered the error he was amused rather than upset and, contrary to the laws of Swedish succession, named the girl as his heir and decided to raise her as a boy.  Christina was only six when she took the throne which led to her being called the “Girl King”, which is quite incorrectly rendered in the original title as the “reine-garçon” or “queen-boy”. 

Christina’s difference from other women was a case of nature and nurture.  She may have been raised as a boy but she also took to traditionally male sports, dress and deportment.  The 1933 film gives Christina an unsuitable lover in the form of a Catholic envoy Antonio Pimentel de Prado.  This never occurred.  Bouchard following historical sources reveals Christina’s unsuitable lover as Countess Ebba Sparre, one of Christina’s ladies-in-waiting.  In Bouchard’s play the Swedish court is distressed enough that Christina refuses to marry, but the discovery of her liaison with Sparre pushes some over the edge.  Bouchard ends Act 1 with one of Christina’s would-be male lovers, Count Johan Oxenstierna, kidnapping Sparre and threatening her with torture. 

As it turns out, this is just a cheap attempt by Bouchard to create tension and make us return after intermission.  Sparre does go missing for a few days but is never tortured.  In the play Sparre’s decision to marry her longtime fiancé strikes Christina as a devastating blow causing Christina to wish never to see Sparre again. In reality, Christina hosted Sparre’s wedding and continued to write passionate letters to her even after her abdication. 

In trying to make a play about a Swedish monarch relevant to a Quebecois audience, Bouchard overplays the role of the French characters in Christina’s life.  Christina is famous for inviting the best thinkers and artists to her court in order to make it the “Athens of the North”. One of these was the philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650).  Bouchard presents Descartes as Christina’s prime spiritual counsellor throughout her life in Sweden.  In reality, Descartes was in contact with Christina only from December 1649 to February 1650.  Bouchard decides to take the view of Theodor Ebert that Descartes was poisoned by a Catholic missionary Jacques Viogué.  The problem is that Bouchard gets the reason wrong.  If Descartes was assassinated it was to prevent him from turning Christina away from Catholicism, whereas in Bouchard’s play Descartes is viewed as an agent trying to turn Christina towards Catholicism.  This really doesn’t make sense since Descarte’s writings extolling reason over faith were placed on the Papal Index of forbidden books.

In the same vein, Bouchard turns the French ambassador Pierre Chanut into an insidious agent of the Vatican attempting to convert Christina and make the conversion of the great Lutheran queen into one of its greatest triumphs.  Bouchard has Chanut present Christina with guarantees from the Pope Alexander VII that she can live as she wishes if she becomes a Catholic, only to renege on his offers.  Bouchard closes the play with Christina making a pilgrimage to visit the imprisoned freethinker Ninon de l’Enclos (1620-1705), as if the French author and courtesan were the greatest influence on Christina, when, in fact, L’Enclos was just one of numerous influences on Christina, who gave herself the name Alexandra after her greatest hero, Alexander the Great.

This, Bouchard’s presentation of Christina, like that in the film, has to be taken with a cupful of salt.  The greatest flaw in the play is that, unlike the film, it fails to make Christina (Jenny Young) an interesting character.  She’s comes off as a tomboy who falls in loves with a girl and talks with a philosopher, but Bouchard never gives us access to the conflicts in her personality or thinking.  Bouchard’s

next worst flaw is repetition.  The play begins with Christina’s outrage that her cousin Karl Gustav (Rylan Wilkie) has tried to rape her, but the play proceeds with the pattern “I-won’t-marry” “You-must-marry” long after we have gotten the point and after the Swedish court should have gotten the message. 

Bouchard’s third flaw is his bizarre tendency to include scenes that may be dramatically interesting in themselves but make no sense in the context of the play.  When Karl Gustav can’t get Christina to marry him after the attempted rape, he decided to have Christina’s mother, Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg (Patricia Collins) use her influence for him.  The trouble with this, made plain even in the text, is that Christina and her mother have not spoken for 30 years because they both hate each other.  Maria, in fact, has hated Christina from birth.  The only reason Bouchard includes the scene is to work in the macabre anecdote about Maria’s having her embalmed husband Gustavus Adolphus with her in bed for two years after his death.  Another scene that does nothing to further the action or the theme is when Christina observes Descartes dissect a cadaver to extract the pineal gland from the brain which he believes is the seat of the soul.  Bouchard has Descartes speak of free will and the body as a machine, but never gets around to explaining how these two points of view are not contradictory, much less how the soul fits in to his scheme. 

Al that makes this combination of half-baked history and half-baked philosophy work is the fully committed performances of the entire cast.  Given the narrow parameters Bouchard has given her role, Jenny Young plays Christina as an intense, politically astute, but sexually naive tomboy, full of ideals but not of ways to enact them.  Young can’t make a character charismatic when Bouchard has not written her that way.  The confident Christina we see at the end is meant to be a contrast to the earlier Christina, but Bouchard has made Christina’s conflicts too external in the first part of the play for us to see how she has achieved her state of self-possession.

Wayne Best does fine work as Christina’s father figure Count Axel Oxenstierna, who tries to protect Christina a long as he can and tries to keep her on the throne although he sees the rising turn against Lutheranism in her mind.  Bouchard has decided to overload the feminist message of the play by making both of Christina’s male suitors into idiots.  Rylan Wilkie can make no sense of Karl

Gustav who repeatedly thinks he can flirt with Christina after having ruined any possible trust with his attempt at rape.  Graham Abbey’s character Johan Oxenstierna begins as a brainless hunk who spends much too much of the play praising the beauty of his own legs.  His wooing of Christina while wearing stag horns à la Falstaff in Merry Wives and making his own echoing noises is simply ridiculous.  Soon after this, Bouchard decides with typical arbitrariness that the numbskull is actually a sadist to be feared.

Claire Lautier is excellent as Ebba Sparre, whose love for her monarch gradually changes to another kind of love when Christina finally makes sense of her own feelings.  Patricia Collins stops the show as Christina’s decrepit half-mad mother whose only moments of lucidity come when she wants to spew venom at her daughter.

Because Bouchard allows Descartes to express his philosophy in only a few slogans – “there are two kinds of love, compassionate and concupiscent” – the character comes off more as a charlatan than a great thinker, despite John Kirkpatrick’s attempts to make him a serious figure.  Perhaps if Bouchard omitted the pointless scenes about the pineal gland, he would have more time to have Descartes explain what he means by “I think therefore I am”.  As for the French ambassador Chanut, Kevin Bundy makes him little more than a snakelike villain, while Brigit Wilson has little to do as Duchess Erika Brähe, whom Bouchard uses as an infrequent but unessential narrator.

One can understand why the Stratford Festival would wish to present a play about one of the most fascinating women of the 17th century.  It’s just too bad that the play does not make us see how fascinating she is.  Director Vanessa Porteous praises the play for “celebrating Christina’s homosexuality (still airbrushed in the history books)”.  Yet, Bouchard does a little airbrushing himself by failing to mention that Christina also had affairs with men.  The Pope has Cardinal Decio Azzolino transferred from Rome to get him out of Christina’s clutches.  To portray Christiana only as lesbian simplifies but also falsifies her story. 

There are other plays about Queen Christina, most notably August Strindberg’s Kristina (1901) from his cycle of Swedish history plays and feminist playwright Pam Gems’ Queen Christina (1977).  Laura Ruohonen’s Queen C (2003) makes the same points as Bouchard’s but more forcefully and has been performed internationally.  Sweden‘s Queen Christina is an extraordinarily complex figure who should be known to more people.  Until someone stages a compelling version of a different Christina play, Garbo will have to serve as the model of a woman who does whatever she must to live life on her own terms.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Claire Lautier as Countess Ebba Sparre and Jenny Young as Queen Christina; Patricia Collins as Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg and Elliott Loran as The Albino; Graham Abbey as Count Johan Oxenstierna. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.