Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
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by Linda Griffiths, directed by Jennifer Brewin
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
October 22-November 8, 2015
Rhoda: “In thirty years, it will all be accomplished”
Factory Theatre has kicked off its so-called “Naked” Season of “Canadian Classics Reimagined” with Age of Arousal by Linda Griffiths, who died just a year ago. The season is “naked” because the plays are presented on a bare stage in very simple costumes. Canadian literature is rather too keen to declare works as “classics” that have not been around very long. Age of Arousal premiered only in 2007. But it is perfectly reasonable to present the play as a testament to Griffiths. Compared to the production at the Shaw Festival in 2010, the new Factory production directed by Jennifer Brewin is far subtler and better captures the tone of the piece. Yet, for that very reason, the inherent flaws in the play are even more apparent.
For those unfamiliar with the work, here is the background I wrote for my review of the 2010 production. Griffiths’ play is nominally based, or as she says “wildly inspired”, by George Gissing’s 1893 novel The Odd Women. These women were not “odd” in the sense of peculiar, but rather thought to be left out since the odd population imbalance of the time with half a million more women than men in Britain meant that large numbers of women would never be paired in marriage.
Rhoda Nunn says in the novel that “The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives. I, naturally, being one of them, take another view”. Rhoda’s view and that of her mentor Mary Barfoot, is that this surplus is an opportunity. Barfoot has opened a school to teach women typing and other clerical skills and thus to help them on their way to independence and pride in that freedom, to erase the still-imbedded notion that a woman is not fulfilled unless she is married. One would think that dramatizing the ideas expressed in the novel would be eye-opening enough. That there was an earlier women’s movement in the 1860‘s focussed on work rather than the vote is something few people know about.
Unfortunately, Griffiths is not satisfied with this and infuses Gissing’s story with her own 21st century twists. She turns Mary and Rhoda into lesbian lovers. She makes Mary an ex-suffragette who went on a hunger strike and underwent force-feeding. In fact, the first suffragette did not go on a hunger strike until 1909. Why not appreciate the work of the Gissing’s women for what it is without confusing it with later events? Griffiths also decides the character Virginia needs a more modern reason for her alcoholism than her poverty and derives it instead from an unfulfilled desire for transvestism.
Griffiths’ version focusses especially on the typewriter as a means of women’s liberation. The school run by Mary (Julie Stewart) and Rhoda (Marie Beath Badian) teaches typing and features three antique Remingtons prominently. When Rhoda runs into an old friend, Virginia (Aviva Armour-Ostroff), now fallen on hard times, she invites her and her two sisters, the plain Alice (Juno Rinaldi) and the attractive Monica (Leah Doz), to join the school. Meanwhile, Mary’s cousin Everard (Sam Kalilieh) has returned to Britain after extensive travelling. Although Griffiths uses him as a mouthpiece for all the supposedly scientific arguments of the period that proved women inferior to men, he still struggles to be enlightened and almost succeeds. He has an affair with Monica but ultimately falls in love with Rhoda, who has to choose between love and the ideals that have guided her life.
The oddest aspect of Griffiths’ writing is her constant use of asides which she pretentiously calls “thoughtspeak”. Unlike conventional asides that reveal a characters thoughts to the audience, Griffiths has her characters speak at length the inner thoughts that their decorous words in conversation do not reveal. Anyone who knows Eugene O’Neill’s five-hour-long drama Strange Interlude from 1928 that makes extensive use of this technique will know Griffiths, proud of it as she is, did not invent the idea. The main flaw of the 2010 Shaw production was that director Jackie Maxwell had the actors shout out Griffiths’ “thoughtspeak” to emphasize how unspoken feelings were repressed by the conventions of polite Victorian conversation. In the Factory production, Brewin treats the “thoughtspeak” as traditional theatrical asides spoken in a lower tone of voice. This renders the play much less jarring, though even as frequent and lengthy asides, Griffiths’ “thoughtspeak” causes difficulties.
The problem is that such asides, as in other plays, are most effective when used for humour as when Rhoda and Everard picnic together trying to make polite conversation while underneath each lusts for the other. When Griffiths tries to use these asides for serious purposes the effect is simply melodramatic. The technique might be useful if it gave us a deeper sense of the characters, but in fact it flattens out the characterization since all six are portrayed as repressed. That Victorians were repressed with torrid unexpressed emotions roiling about inside is a modern cliché of the period and that is really all Griffiths’ “thoughtspeak” conveys. It smugly assumes that we moderns have moved beyond that, yet if that were so Harold Pinter could hardly have achieved acclaim for his famous pauses that suggest in a far subtler way that spoken words can hide a huge range of hidden intentions.
Griffiths’ approach thus makes all six characters appear artificial. The asides make all of them clichéd representatives of the Victorian period including, strangely enough, the more advanced women who are trying to change the way women are treated. Rhoda has the last lines of the play: “The fire has been lit, it is burning through society with ferocious speed, no household is safe, the world is moving. In thirty years, it will all be accomplished”. Since equal rights for women have still not been realized, these lines are imbued with so much obvious irony as to be leaden. What’s so annoying is that Griffiths looks upon her characters with her 20-20 hindsight, amused to find that those characters are creatures of their time, whether in conforming or not conforming to social norms, but places herself and the present on some higher, more advanced plane as if it were not also historically informed. For a playwright who is promoting feminism, it is perverse that she should adopt such a patronizing attitude.
More a more complex view, one need merely look at Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 (1979) where she makes wild fun of the clichés of the Victorian age in Act 1, only to write an Act 2 set in the present to demonstrate that our liberated times are full of confusion and far less funny. Or one might look at Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) to see that women are quite as capable as men in judging and oppressing other women when power and position are at stake.
Despite the inherent flaws of the play, the cast gives good to excellent performances. Julie Stewart conveys Mary’s fear of ageing but not the indomitable strength she is said to have. In contrast, Marie Beath Badian is so strong as Rhoda it’s hard to see how she could have occupied a secondary position to Mary for so long. In fact, as the action progresses it is Badian’s unshakeable power that seems to hold the whole play together. It helps that of the entire cast she delivers her lines with the greatest clarity and nuance.
Sam Kalilieh has the difficult job of making Griffiths’ reductive portrait of a typical male cad likeable, but he does succeed. Partially, it is because he has a flair for comedy and is able to mingle Everard’s real attempts at understanding feminism with his using a pro-feminist stance to seduce women. When Everard does finally fall for Rhoda, Kalilieh does make it seem as if Everard believes he is sincere.
Among the three sisters, Juno Rinaldi is consistently the funniest and makes Alice’s gradual shift from flighty Victorian female to responsible New Woman believable. Leah Doz is successful as the seductive Monica, who would like to be a feminist but just enjoys sex with men too much. Aviva Armour-Ostroff is convincing as the Virginia we first meet, a woman almost as helplessly “female” as her sister Alice. Griffiths makes Virginia’s desire for transvestism come out of nowhere and Armour-Ostroff doesn’t quite succeed in distracting us from this flaw.
Without a set or even an curtains to hide chairs piled up along the back wall of the stage, the Factory Theatre Mainspace sounds unpleasantly echoey. If an actor speaks too quickly or if the dialogue moves too fast, the reverberations muddy the words. This launch of Factory’s “Naked” season does not see a Canadian classic “reimagined" as the programme proclaims since Brewin has not reimagined the play at all. Rather, she approaches it quite straightforwardly and provides it with good, solid direction. “Naked” really seems to mean nothing more than inexpensive. There’s nothing wrong with producing plays inexpensively. Let’s just not pretend that it’s aesthetically radical rather than a basically economic decision.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Marie Beath Badian and Julie Stewart; Aviva Armour-Ostroff, Marie Beath Badian (seated), Juno Rinaldi, Julie Stewart (seated) and Leaz Doz; Leah Doz and Sam Kalilieh. ©2015 Racheal McCaig.
2015-10-23
Age of Arousal