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by Suzanne Lebeau, translated by Julia Duchesne & John Van Burek, directed by John Van Burek

Pleiades Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto

February 19-March 7, 2015

Elikia: “Whoever has a gun is right”

Pleiades Theatre is presenting the English-language premiere of The Sound of Cracking Bones (Le bruit des os qui craquent) by Suzanne Lebeau which won the 2009 Governor General’s Award for Drama.  From February 14-28 it will present the play in English, from March 3-7 in the original French.  The play’s main purpose is to raise awareness about the use of child soldiers in conflicts around the world, a practice condemned by international law as a form of slavery and considered a war crime by the United Nations.  While Lebeau’s play has an exceedingly worthy goal, the play is essentially an illustrated lecture with the dramatic action serving as the illustrations. 

The play does not begin as a lecture.  Instead Lebeau thrusts us into the action during a civil war somewhere in a country with a jungle and a coastline.  There 13-year-old Elikia (Harveen Sandhu) attempts to rescue 8-year-old Joseph (Caity Quinn) from the rebel group that has forcibly recruited him.  Elikia, who was taken by the revels after they murdered her family before her eyes, sees Joseph as a replacement for her dead brother and vows not to let happen to him what happened to her.  Her goal is to return him to his home village, which, unlike the rest of the unnamed country, is relatively safe. 

Interspersed with the depiction of the dangerous trek of the two children through the jungle to Joseph’s village on the coast, is a presentation to a conference on child soldiers by Angelina (Patricia Cano), head nurse at the hospital in Joseph’s village, some time after the story of Elikia and Joseph has ended.  She describes the horrendous mental and physical trauma suffered by child soldiers referring to Elikia and Joseph as her prime examples.  To support her statements she frequently reads from the journal in which Elikia, once in hospital, wrote down her experiences of her three years as a child soldier.

The main difficulty with Lebeau’s play is its structure.  In the scenes between Elikia and Joseph, both characters narrate what they are doing and thinking as they act, thus providing a built-in commentary on the action.  If this were well done there ought to be no need for a secondary commentary by Angelina to place the children’s actions in context, especially since Angelina relies so heavily on Elikia’s own account of what happened for insight.  Angelina’s presentation seems to signal the author’s fear that we won’t understand the import of what we are seeing unless it is explicitly pointed out to us.  What had started out as dramatic quickly becomes didactic and changes Elikia and Joseph from individual characters into illustrative examples.  Rather than engaging us with Elikia and Joseph, Angelina’s lecture does just the opposite. 

If Lebeau had a new point of view on her topic, besides merely raising the issue, or could offer some suggestion of what to do about it, the play might have more going for it than its choice of subject matter.  Unfortunately, Lebeau’s view of the situation is either clichéd – Angelina tells us that “war is hell” – or conforms with what international bodies have already decided – that the use of child soldiers is reprehensible.  After all the Geneva Convention condemned the use of child

soldiers as early as 1949 as did the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.  February 12 of each year since 2002 has been designated Red Hand Day in a move to pressure governments to abandon the use of child soldiers.         

All this being said, Pleiades Theatre has given the play an exemplary production.  Teresa Przybylski has created one of the most inventive sets seen on the main stage at Theatre Passe Muraille.  It consists of two towers of full stage height suggesting tangles of cascading black lianas to embody the jungle.  The two towers revolve to give the sense that the children are moving through the dense foliage.  The effect is enhanced by its coordination with Jason Hand’s lighting and Desbashis Sinha’s music.  Hand’s and Sinha’s abilities combine in the show’s greatest stage effect when Elikia first sees herself in a mirror in the hospital and shoots her image with her Kalashnikov.

Director John Van Burek has cast the show with actors of different ancestries in order to tie it to no one country.  Harveen Sandhu, most recently seen in the revival of the Shaw Festival’s Arcadia in Toronto, seems energized to be playing a forceful, gritty role so unlike Stoppard’s cool Lady Coverly.  She fully conveys the interplay between urgency and tenderness in Elikia’s scenes with Joseph.  Her short scene as Elikia in the hospital is so effective, one wishes Lebeau had allowed us to see more of Elikia’s time there instead of having Angelina narrate it.

Caity Quinn is excellent in convincing us she is an 8-year-old boy.  We sense that it is precisely Joseph’s childish naiveté, a death sentence in war, that Elikia is trying to protect while trying not to frighten him away with too much of the truth.  Patricia Cano presents Angelina as a mature, self-assured professional who has to keep her inner rage from welling up while presenting her evidence to what seems to be a not entirely sympathetic audience.  As with Sandhu, Cano creates such a strong character, one would really like to see more of her interactions with Elikia enacted rather than narrated.             

The problem with a didactic play like this that preaches to the converted is that people can too easily applaud themselves for having engaged with an important topic for 70 minutes and then go on to do nothing.  For those who really want to learn what is being done in the fight against child soldiers, contact www.child-soldiers.org, www.amnesty.org/en/children or www.warchild.org. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: Patricia Cano, Harveen Sandhu and Caity Quinn; Harveen Sandhu and Caity Quinn. ©2015 Cylla Von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit http://passemuraille.ca.