Review - Hooked - Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto

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by Carolyn Smart, adapted by Nicky Guadagni, directed by Layne Coleman

Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto

April 21-May 10, 2015

Carson McCullers: “My body’s the transgressor / Or was it but the drink”

In 2009 Canadian poet Carolyn Smart published a collection of seven dramatic monologues called Hooked. Each of the monologues is spoken by a famous or infamous woman born sometime before World War II who looks back on her life and death. Fascinated by the work, actor Nicky Guadagni now presents the poems, slightly edited, as an evening of theatre.

My general view of adaptations for the theatre is that an audience member should not need the aid of programme notes to understand and appreciate a play. The adaptation should stand on its own and supply the audience with whatever background is necessary to understand it. This is not what happens in Hooked. Only four of the characters say outright what their names are or give us enough clues that we can guess their identities. For the other three a person would have to refer to the programme or already be familiar with their life stories to recognize their identities. Even so, the first and seventh women were people I had never heard of before.

The play follows the order of the poems in Smart’s book and begins with Myra Hindley (1942-2002), a serial killer once called “the most evil woman in Britain”. She and Ian Brady carried out what are known as the “Moors Murders” between 1963 and 1965, sexually assaulting, torturing and killing at least five children between the ages of 10 and 17 for no other motive than the thrill of it. Smart’s poem does not mention the murders but focusses rather on Hindley’s disgust with society, notions of sanity and life in general, amused that various crematoria refused to process her body.

The next character is also a much reviled woman – Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914-48) – one of the seven famous aristocratic Mitford children. While her younger sister Jessica was pro-communist, Unity and her sister Diana were pro-fascist. Unity went so far as to move to Germany to seek out Hitler’s company and become a such a devotee that Eva Braun became jealous. When Britain declared war on Germany, she attempted to shoot herself in the head, but the bullet remained lodged in her skull causing effects resembling a stroke. Smart’s poem reveals a woman who is virulently anti-Semitic and unapologetically proud of her life.

The following five characters are all writers or women associated with writers. The first of these is Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-48), Southern belle and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She goes from a sheltered life to the fast life among the chic set of the 1920s, succumbing to alcoholism and mental instability. After her marriage with Fitzgerald became acrimonious, she spent the rest of her life in various sanatoria.

After Zelda comes painter Dora Carrington (1893-1932), whose great love of her life was the writer Lytton Strachey, whom she knew was a homosexual. When Strachey met Ralph Partridge the two fell in love, Dora agreed to marry Ralph to keep the three of them together. After Strachey died, she was so grief-stricken she committed suicide.

Next comes the one Canadian character of the set, the poet Elizabeth Smart (1913-86). Smart happened to read a book of poems by British poet George Barker and determined to marry him. The fact that he was already married did not stop her and she had an 18-year-long affair with him that produced four children that Smart had to raise without his help or money. In 1945 she published her best-known work, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, based on her affair and which her mother had suppressed. Smart is the one woman to

experience some good luck in that when her novel was reissued in 1966, she received so much acclaim she was able to devote herself to writing.

The portrait of American novelist Carson McCullers (1917-67) is a depressing contrast. Though able to write, McCullers was an alcoholic, suffered from depression and had a series of strokes throughout her life. Her left side was entirely paralyzed by age 31. Her husband was also an alcoholic and depressed and eventually committed suicide.

The final portrait is that of Jane Bowles née Auer (1917-73). She married the composer John Bowles. Since the two were bisexual, the marriage served society’s need for respectability even though the Bowles’ did not care. Smart’s monologue focusses on Jane Bowles’s affair with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa and Bowles’s decline into alcoholism and a series of strokes.

All the women in Smart’s monologues are “hooked” in various ways – on drugs, on alcohol, on fame –but it is hard to know what the parade of sad characters is meant to represent. They can’t be said to be creative women whose lives were thwarted by men, first because Hindley and Mitford cannot be called creative and second because the lives of Hindley, Mitford and Carrington were enhanced, no matter how perversely, by their relationship with men. Elizabeth Smart sought out her husband, illogical as that was, and Jane Bowles’s husband allowed her to express both sides of her sexuality. Except for Elizabeth Smart, the monologues reflect women who have a vital youth but decline due to alcohol, drugs, mental or physical illness or all four. It is a distinctly unedifying spectacle and despite the blurb on the back of the book, Hooked seems to have little or nothing to do with feminism. Smart’s book, and the play, could have been about women who were creative despite the physical and social struggles they faced, but her inclusion of Hindley and Mitford scuttles any such generalization.

Ultimately, the point of staging the monologues would be to provide a tour de force for the actor involved. Nicky Guadagni presents the poems well and obviously relishes the tough condensed lines of Smart’s poetry. Though she changes accent with each character, her upper-class Mitford was not so different from her Mancunian Hindley making me think that her Mitford was just an extension of Hindley. When she returned to a deep southern accent for McCullers, I, knowing nothing of Smart’s book, wondered whether Zelda was making a second appearance. Guadagni’s Bowles starts out distractingly too much like an impression of Joan Rivers.

Director Layne Coleman has Guadagni use all of the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, including stairs into the audience and the balcony above the audience. Rebecca Picherack’s creative lighting is the greatest help in signalling a change of character, mood or location. Since Smart’s text does not always identify who the speakers are, it would have been quite simple to use projected titles to indicate their identities.

Those who have already read Hooked will be delighted to hear it performed by an actor who clearly has a great love for the work and a lively interest in her characters. Those who have not read the book will likely be bewildered by the show and wonder what these depressing stories with their rather too similar endings are all supposed to mean.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

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

2015-04-22

Hooked