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by Jean Giraudoux, translated by David Edney, directed by Donna Feore

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

August 18-October 1, 2017

Prospector: “Is a park any better than a coal mine?”

Jean Giraudoux’s 1945 play The Madwoman of Chaillot (La Folle de Chaillot) is a wish-fulfilling fantasy of the victory of art over industry and eccentricity over cruel rationality.  In France the title role has become a standard showcase for the skills of an older female actor.  It certainly was for Judith Magre at the celebrations surrounding Athénée Théâtre Louis Jouvet in Paris in 2002 – and so it is here.  The Madwoman is a great role for Seana McKenna but despite her efforts one leaves severely doubting whether Madwoman is also a great play.

The play begins as three corrupt businessmen – The President (Ben Carlson), The Baron (David Collins) and The Broker (Rylan Wilkie) – gather at the a café in the Place d’Alma in the Chaillot district of Paris, between the Champs Elysées and the Seine and across the river from the Eiffel Tower.  The three brag about their exploits such as engineering disasters so that stocks fall and they buy shares low and later sell them high.  They are meeting to set up a conglomerate to take over Paris, then the world.  While they are attempting to hold their discussions, they are constantly interrupted by a wide variety of colourful buskers and street vendors whom they ask to have shooed away. 

After having observed them a mysterious man in black called The Prospector (Wayne Best) joins them.  He wants them to invest in a remarkable discovery.  He is convinced that large reserves of oil lie directly beneath Chaillot.  He realizes that what stands in his way is the general sentimentality of people for beauty, monuments and art, but with the businessmen’s help he can clear all the municipal hurdles protecting the heritage of the area and begin digging. 

In this wordy, inordinately extended introduction, Giraudoux has already set out the two sides of the world that he sets in rather simplistic opposition.  On the one side are the men of business and finance whose only concern is making money.  In Teresa Przybylski’s design They are clad in black and grey in opposition to all the poor and the artists who are clad in a riot of colours.  They wish to exploit nature and destroy beauty.  The others wish to preserve nature and cherish beauty.  Their is no talk of corporations helping to fund the arts as one finds in the programme of any major theatre company, symphony or museum because mention of such a role would ruin the absolute, fairy-tale-like opposition of good and evil Giraudoux wants.

Into the café as the four continue talking strolls its owner, Aurélie, known as the Madwoman of Chaillot because of her eccentricity.  She lives in a world dedicated to beauty and so refuses to read the daily newspapers or to look in the mirror which she says shows her an old woman’s face she doesn’t recognize.  She says, “The world is beautiful.  It’s happy.  That’s how God made it.  No man can change it”.  Her idealism and wilful ignorance may be charming, but the buskers and vendors, having witnessed the businessmen’s discussion feel it is now time to shatter the Madwoman’s illusions. 

The Ragman (Scott Wentworth) tells the Madwoman of an invasion of men who are not happy and who no longer see the world as beautiful.  All they know is money and the means to increase it.  At first the Madwoman can’t believe what she is hearing, but when all the street people confirm his view she is forced to concede the truth of what they say.  The notion that oil lies under Chaillot leads her to formulate a plan. 

We see that plan go into effect in Act 2.  Dramatically, all that needs to happen is for the businessmen, the prospectors, the advertisers and the businessmen’s wives to follow the note she has sent out to visit her in her basement.  Her basement, for inexplicable reasons, is equipped with the hidden entrance to a secret inescapable vault.  All she has to do is lure the objectionable people into the vault and lock them in forever.  If Giraudoux did this the second act would be over in about fifteen minutes.

Instead, Giraudoux decided to set up Act 2 as a parallel to Act 1.  The rationale is that before the Madwoman of Chaillot proceeds, she wants the approval of the other “madwomen” of Paris – of Passy (Kim Horsman), of Saint-Sulpice (Marion Adler) and of Concorde (Yanna McIntosh).  Although the extended scene among these “madwomen” is totally unnecessary to the action, it happens to be the most entertaining sequence in the entire play.  It looks clearly forward to the Theatre of the Absurd as the Madwoman of Chaillot has difficulty holding the meeting because Passy is preoccupied with the ghost of her dead dog Dickie, Saint-Sulpice with a spirit who sometimes accompanies her, and Concorde regretting that a president of the Republic, long dead, has not waved to her, each all the while accusing the other of being insane.

This passage is followed, unfortunately, by a long “trial’ of the bad men of the world in absentia by having the Ragman impersonate one of them and espouse his objectionable views leaving the street people gathered there to pass judgement.  The whole “trial” is unnecessary since each of the bad men has already told the audience in spotlit monologues in Act 1 of their own misdeeds that led to their wealth.  The one fact we gain from the Ragman’s speech is that that the poor are to blame for their poverty, a sentiment all too familiar in contemporary right-wing discourse.

After Aurélie has immured the bad people forever, she exults: “The world is saved. And you see how simple it all was? Nothing is ever so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon”.  This line received a torrent of applause but those applauding should realize that the Madwoman could only “save the world” because of the highly artificial plot Giraudoux constructed that allowed her access to a secret vault. Besides this, as we should all know by now, locking away thirteen evil-doers forever, does not rid the world of the evil itself.

To enjoy the play we have to buy into the satiric fantasy that Giraudoux has created.  But since the issues of how greed can destroy beauty and nature are still vitally relevant (e.g. drilling for oil in national parks or the Arctic), we have to wonder what the point is of seeing those people who thirst for money above all else so easily and unrealistically removed.  It was not novel in 1945 to see how corporate greed threatened a country’s natural and cultural heritage.  It is even less novel now. 

In an overlong play that preaches to the choir what stands out are the roles that Giraudoux has created.  Prime among this is the title character, although when we meet the other “madwomen” of Paris in Act, Aurélie seems perfectly sane.  Her “madness” seems to lie simply in her deliberate avoidance of anything around her that would upset her view of the world as beautiful.  For this role Seana McKenna adopts a high-toned manner of speech that she has used before for virtually every satirical character she has played from Lady Sneerwell in The School for Scandal in 1999 to Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker in 2012.  It would more of a pleasure if McKenna would allow herself to add some glint of the unhinged to her speech and manner, but she does not. 

In contrast the other “madwomen” do add peripheral madness to their performances.  Kim Horsman does so hilariously with her distracted concern for the well-being of her dog’s ghost and as a result steals the show in Act 2.  Marion Adler plays a more withdrawn characters, but her bizarre manner is that of an older woman who has somehow managed to remain a pre-pubescent girl all her life.  Yanna McIntosh doesn’t have as much stage time to establish her character, but rapid alternations between nostalgia and anger help to show that the Madwoman of Concorde has her own style of peculiarity.

Among the men, the main character is the Ragman and Scott Wentworth delivers his lengthy speeches with uncommon naturalness.  Although the second of his speeches is redundant, Wentworth makes it much more theatrical than the first and thus more engaging. 

Ben Carlson seems to relish the chance to put his oratorical skill in service of a villain for a change.  Carlson’s way of making complex text crystal clear only serves to reveal how sinister The President is.  Neither David Collins’s Baron nor Rylan Wilkie’s Broker come off as half so evil.  In contrast, Wayne Best plays The Prospector as if he were in an old melodrama taking every chance he has to billow his black cape.  Best speaks his lines in hushed, harsh tones as if his character’s insatiable greed had left him more demented than any of the “mad” characters on stage.

Giraudoux would like us to be interested in the love between Pierre (Antoine Yared), a boy who tries to drown himself, and Irma (Mikaela Davies), the café’s kitchen girl, but made the two so generalized and their relationship so incidental to the plot, that no matter how well Yared and Davies perform the roles, the two do not engage us.

In this age when rampant condo development is making city skylines uniform across the globe and when the opening of the Northwest Passage threatens an unspoiled area with tourism and industry, the worries of Giraudoux’s play resonate even more strongly than they would have done ten years ago.  Yet, witnessing a simplistic presentation of the issues and their solution, even in Giraudoux’s fairy-tale form, brings no satisfaction since we know how complex the issues really are.  Giraudoux’s world of whimsy may once have been delightful, but now it seems too flimsy a vessel for such urgent questions. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Seana McKenna as the Madwoman of Chaillot with members of the company; David Collins as The Baron, Wayne Best as The Prospector, Ben Carlson as The President and Rylan Wilkie as The Broker; Marion Adler as the Madwoman of Saint Sulpice, Seana McKenna as the Madwoman of Chaillot and Kim Horsman as the Madwoman of Passy. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.