Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by John Lazarus, directed by Kathryn MacKay
Undershaft and Lazarus, Toronto Fringe Festival, Robert Gill Theatre, Toronto
July 1-10, 2015
Madame Brillante: “Real life moves too fast”
The starting point for John Lazarus play Exposure is a photograph taken in 1838 called “Boulevard du Temple” by Louis Daguerre (1787-1851). This daguerreotype, as it was then known, is the first known candid (i.e., non-posed) photograph of a man. This is because the man for some reason remained completely still having his boots polished for the ten minutes of exposure time that Daguerre’s early camera required.
To explain this image Lazarus has devised a delightful play that would fit in very nicely at the Shaw Festival. He invents the relationships among Daguerre (Craig Walker), the bootblack (Laurel Paetz) and the young man (Christopher Blackwell) having his boots shined that are gently comic in themselves but also explores the revolutionary implications of Daguerre’s device that fixed a moment in time forever.
We first meet a woman known as Mme Brillante (Paetz), who wheels her colourful and cleverly designed cart to a corner of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. It turns out that she is not only a bootblack but a fortune teller. She shines what men wear to cover their feet and uncovers what future shines in their palms. She is having no luck attracting customers until Daguerre rushes past overturning her supplies.
Daguerre is in a hurry on his way to the French Academy of Sciences to present his new invention wherein a light-sensitive copper sheet coated in silver iodide was exposed to the light thus creating an image that could be developed. He is hoping to be awarded a grant to develop his idea. Mme Brillante recognizes Daguerre but does not want him to recognize her, so she quickly veils herself and speaks to him in a foreign accent. He is amazed that this strange woman knows he is, in fact, an hour early for his appointment. Not only that, she seems to know all about his past including secrets he has told no one, attributing all this knowledge to her psychic powers. She persuades Daguerre to practice his speech to the Academy on her which gives Lazarus the chance to explain the nature and importance of Daguerre’s invention.
The second time the two meet, Daguerre is downcast having been rejected by the Academy and this time comes upon Mme Brillante unveiled. He recognizes her instantly as Angélique, a woman he knew when both were in the circus and later in the theatre. Daguerre’s background was in the theatre where his first major invention was the diorama. Angélique divines the reason for the rejection. Daguerre’s photographs do not capture life. His scenes of streets look empty because anything in motion, whether people are carriages, cannot be captured by the camera which requires objects to remain immobile during the course of its long exposure time.
Lazarus uses the term exposure in at least three different senses in the play. The first involves the exposure of the camera’s plate to light. The second involves Mme Brillante’s ability to expose the secrets of the past. The third has to do with a young aristocrat who refuses to give his name and thus is known only a Anonyme (Blackwell). He dream is to gain greater exposure in the world at large, and Mme Brillante who polishes his boots assured him he will be known long after his death.
The acting of Walker and Paetz is of the highest level. Walker presents Daguerre as man filled with energy both mental and physical. It is thus easy to picture him both as an inventor and a man who has has many mistresses. Paetz gives a wonderfully warm-hearted performance as Mme Brillante, a woman in middle age who has seen most for her dreams collapse but manages to struggle on in spite of everything. We sense that her encouragement to Daguerre and to Anonyme to carry on stems from the encouragement she has to give herself every day. Paetz reveals a vein of melancholy that underlies all Brillante says.
The chemistry between Walker’s Daguerre and Paetz’s Brillante (once he knows who she is) is so palpable that we feel the two have once been in love even before the text makes it clear. As for Blackwell, he is rather too chipper for someone about to commit suicide, but it must be admitted that Lazarus doesn’t provide him a very strong motive.
It would benefit the exposition if Lazarus could avoid having Mme Brillante carry on her first conversation with Daguerre in deliberately terrible accent that seems to roam all over Europe and Asia. Since she and Daguerre have not seen each other for years, a change of tone should be sufficient and would make what the character says clearer. Also, I would rather that Mme Brillante not determine Anonyme’s identity so quickly and definitely. It would be more intriguing if the world’s first candid photo preserved an unsolvable enigma.
Nevertheless, Lazarus’ play explores in only an hour one of the central ironies of photography. Mme Brillante asks Daguerre where the art is in photography, to which he replies, “Where you put the camera”. The irony is that people think of photography as capturing reality, but, in fact, photography changes reality by the act of capturing it. It takes a moment out of the flow of time, it changes three dimensions into two and it necessarily reflects the photographer’s point of view. The image of people photographed lives beyond their death, but they have no control over how their images are interpreted. Hence, Lazarus’ play which interprets the photography “Boulevard du Temple”.
The Shaw Festival dealt with the Impressionist movement in 2009 via Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George, where Sondheim provides backgrounds for the people painted in Georges Seurat’s “Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte – 1884”. Impressionism was in part a reaction on the part of painters against the rise of photography. Yet, the Festival has so far never presented a play about important subject of photography and its impact. This is why a witty and thoughtful play like Exposure would suit the Festival so well.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Craig Walker, Laurel Paetz, and Christopher Blackwell. ©2015 Greg Wanless.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.
2015-07-04
Exposure