Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Colleen Murphy, directed by Reneltta Arluk
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
August 18-October 6, 2017
“We fear the weather spirit of earth, that we must fight against to wrest our food from land and sea” (The Inuit shaman Aua speaking to explorer Knud Ramussen, 1921)
The Stratford Festival is currently presenting the world premiere of The Breathing Hole, a play by Colleen Murphy that it commissioned to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial. The magic realist play follows 500 years of life in the Arctic by focussing on the life of a bear who is saved by an Inuit community before First Contact, and lives to see the doomed explorer Sir John Franklin, the first oil rigs set up in the area and the transit of a luxury cruise ship sailing the ice-free Northwest Passage in 2033. Despite its scope, Murphy’s play tells us nothing new about the past or the future of the Arctic. What excitement there is lies in the direction of Reneltta Arluk and in the fantastic work of the design team.
Since The Breathing Hole is about changes in a geographical region over time, it is less of a play based on dramatic conflict than an historical pageant. Scenes establish the nature of each of the three periods Murphy looks at – the 16th, 19th and 21st centuries – and then moves on with the bear as the only continuing character. The implied conflict is between the Qallunaat, or non-Inuit (principally, white people), and the Arctic and its people. There are no actual battles between the Qallunaat and the Inuit, but rather the gradual incursion and domination of the Qallunaat. Because of this, the play is notably undramatic both within each of the three time periods and in shifting from one time period to the next.
In the first section set in 1534 and 1550, Murphy portrays Inuit culture in it pre-contact days. She shows us an Inuit family who live near a breathing hole (a hole in the ice where seals come up for air) struggling to survive. Bears also hunt and fish by the same breathing hole and in a stroke of good luck one of the men has killed a bear. What drama there is in the scene lies in the tension that exists between Nukilik (the authoritative Johnny Issaluk), the father of the family, and Huumittuq (an intense Jani Lauzon), a woman who is still mourning the loss of her entire family in a sledding accident. The men of Nukilik’s family seem to blame Huumittuq for her moodiness and for not doing enough work, while the women are more sympathetic.
As it happens, just when Huumittuq has decided there is no point to her life, a ice floe slides near with an abandoned bear cub on it. Huumittuq names it Angu’juaq and after some debate is allowed to keep it and raise it. Murphy unfortunately suppresses any interpersonal conflict just as soon as it arises. When fully grown Angu’juaq (a full-sized puppet manipulated by Bruce Hunter), gives some of his catch of seals to the family and even rescues Nukilik from an attack, an act that conveniently restores harmony between Nukilik and Huumittuq. It would have been an advance on tradition if Murphy had managed to avoid having the Inuit characters speak in the stilted English that white authors always use to represent native people speaking in their own language, but she does not.
Act 1 ends with a fast forward to 1845 and the arrival of the Franklin expedition that had been sent by the British Admiralty to search for the last section of the Northwest Passage. Unfortunately, Franklin’s two ships became stuck in the ice near King William Island north of the Arctic Circle for two winters. From the way Murphy portrays him you would never know Franklin had made three Arctic voyages before the fatal one she depicts since she makes him and his men appear so foolish. The first scene Murphy gives us is a comic imagining of of First Contact between the British and two Inuit men. Murphy has Franklin (Randy Hughson is his blustering mode) offer the two Inuit cups of tea in china cups and saucers. The Inuit offer Franklin and his men raw seal meat as a friendly gesture, which the British rudely refuse. Even though Murphy has established that the ground is so icy that the men are constantly slipping on it, she has Franklin command three of his men to dance a hornpipe to warm themselves up. Guess what? They all fall down! Is Murphy showing us how stupid the British are or her own unsubtle sense of humour?
When we meet the Franklin team next at the start of Act 2, it is two years later and the men are starving. At last Murphy decides that humour is no longer à propos. The one Briton that Murphy had not portrayed as a fool, Oliver Morshead (Juan Chioran in a strong performance), the one member of the crew who can speak Inuktitut, has torn off his clothing and goes mad. Even Franklin momentarily becomes delusional. The most chilling moment of the play comes when the young crewman Bean (Thomas Mitchell Barnet) dies in the arms of a slightly older crewman Wickers (Jamie Mac). Mac manages such a strange expression that we don’t know whether the starving Wickers is in love with Bean or whether he would love to eat him.
As the expedition breaks up and each man goes to die in his own way, we fast forward to 2028 when two event planners are scouting locations for visits by a luxury cruise ship now that the Northwest Passage is finally free of ice. Both they and a biologist (Miali Buscemi), who is studying polar bears, come afoul of a guard (Johnny Issaluk), who is patrolling the perimeter of an oil rig. Murphy has the two Inuit show their disdain for each other, but she could have made this into a much more meaningful conversation between those of the north who work to preserve it versus those who see industry as bringing jobs and money to the area.
Murphy’s final scene is set in on New Year’s Eve 2033 aboard the cruise ship Grande Hermine, named in honour of the ship that Jacque Cartier sailed to the New World in 1534 in search of a western passage to Asia. (For those who wonder, in 2016 the Crystal Serenity became the first cruise ship to sail the Northwest Passage.) The cruise entirely populated by filthy rich Qallunaat is meant to celebrate 500 years of European exploration (and exploitation) of the Arctic. The party room is decorated with an ice sculpture of the dancing bear, the symbol of a possessed shaman, thus showing the trivialization of Inuit culture. Likewise, the gift shop sells mass-produced ilgaak or Inuit “snow goggles”, originally crafted from wood, bone or antler to fit each person’s face with two slits to see through to prevent snow blindness. Now a cultural artifact has become a cheap souvenir.
Murphy finally leaves logic behind in imagining that the ship is sailing through the oil slick left by the failed oil rig of the previous scene without care of potential danger or explosions. Even though the Northwest Passage is free of ice and thus of ice floes, Murphy still has the bear Angu’juaq manage somehow to reach the ship and then, impossibly, climb up its bow to try to get inside. She also has the passengers in sight of the crew throw all manner of things off the ship even though such action is strictly forbidden on all cruise ships, presumably even in 2033. All of this is in service of manufacturing a symbolic tragic ending to demonstrate how the arrival of rich white people has destroyed the Arctic.
The fact that the menacing voyage of the cruise ship is meant to honour Jacques Cartier makes us wonder whether Murphy’s play is meant to suggest that all would have been well in North America if only Europeans had not tried to find a way to Asia. If so the play’s goal is extremely naive. It would be better to face the unhappy facts of history and decide how to deal with them.
Despite the large cast of human beings, the best performances in the show are those of Bruce Hunter as Angu’juaq and Jani Lauzon as the bear’s mate Panik. The beautifully constructed puppets will remind many of the puppet horses used in War Horse (2007), except that these require only one person to manipulate each puppet. The expressiveness of the bears’ movements and gestures really outshines the generally overemphatic performances of the other actors and is a joy to watch in itself. One almost wishes that Murphy had told her tale solely though puppetry and mime since these are the strongest aspects of the play.
Given that the production has used the services of twelve Inuit cultural consultants, one wonder why the Festival commissioned a play about the Arctic from a white Albertan writer in the first place. We learn more about Inuit culture from the programme note by Kenn Harper than from anything in Murphy’s play. Wouldn’t it have been preferable to commission a play from an Inuit author or collective to tell their own tales, either ancient or contemporary, rather than produce a play, no matter how politically correct it tries to be, that spends two-thirds of its time on non-Inuit characters? The design for The Breathing Hole is extremely imaginative and director Reneltta Arluk’s direction is precise and creative. I would be very happy to see the creative team reunite for another play, this time one of wholly Inuit origin.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Bruce Hunter as Angu’juaq and Jani Lauzon as Huumittuq; Miali Buscemi, Nick Nawegahbow, Johnny Issaluk as Nukilik, Gordon Patrick White and Ujarneq Fleischer; Randy Hughson (foreground) as Sir John Franklin with Thomas Mitchell Barnet, Jamie Mac, Zlatomir Moldovanski and others. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2017-08-29
The Breathing Hole