Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Linda Griffiths with Paul Thompson, directed by Rob Kempson
timeshare, Tarragon Theatre Workspace, Toronto
May 9-19, 2018
“Two mythological beings”
What you get out of timeshare’s revival of Maggie & Pierre will depend almost entirely on your age. If you are old enough to remember Trudeaumania first-hand and to have lived through the Trudeau era up to the election of Joe Clark in 1979, Maggie & Pierre will seem like a slice of nostalgia for a unique time when Canada was in the world’s eye because of its charismatic Prime Minister and his wife. If you were born after 1979, the main characters of Maggie & Pierre will be famous Canadians you may have heard of but know best as the parents of current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In either case the timeshare production that premiered at the Thousand Islands Playhouse last year starring Kaitlyn Riordan and directed by Rob Kempson conjures up the exciting time when Canada was cool and its Prime Minister and his wife were regarded as larger-than-life figures. The third character in the play, a journalist named Henry, compares the couple to “two mythological beings” like King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. This comparison is quite apt. Just as the United States has mythologized the short tenure of J.F.K. and Jacquie as its “Camelot”, so Linda Griffiths as early at 1980 realized that the time of Maggie and Pierre was Canada’s own Camelot.
Griffiths has Henry trace the relationship of the two from their first meeting in Tahiti in 1967 when Maggie Sinclair was 18 and Pierre was 48, through their courtship, marriage, various government functions to her disillusionment when Pierre’s government work left her alone, lonely and feeling she had lost the freedom she prized so highly. Henry shows us how this led to her separation from Pierre in 1977 and her infamous partying with the Rolling Stones, an act that Griffiths has Trudeau call “the perfect checkmate”. Maggie hated Pierre’s personal motto “Reason before passion”, and the show seems to see Pierre as embodying the former and Maggie the latter.
While many who analyze the play see that having one actor play both roles shows that Maggie and Pierre were really two halves of a complete person, the play also requires that the same actor play Henry the narrator. This, in fact, makes the play more complex than is usually thought since the one actor embodies not just reason and passion but an objective point of view on their interaction. This tripartite division is not unlike Freud’s division of the human personality into the ego (Pierre), id (Maggie) and the reflective superego (Henry). This means that the single actor, in fact, does not embody just Maggie and Pierre but really all of Canada.
I must admit that I never had the chance to see Linda Griffiths’ legendary performance in Maggie & Pierre. Seeing a play about the Trudeaus in 1980 when they were both alive and active would necessarily have been a different experience and quite audacious on the part of Griffiths than seeing an actor play them now when, though Maggie is still alive, they have become historical figures.
Riordan’s Henry is an instantly sympathetic ordinary guy whose criticism of the Trudeaus is mingled with an admiration of their individuality and ability they had to give Canadians a more exciting and vital perception of themselves. Riordan gives a marvellously effortless performance, changing in voice and body language from one character to the other with a mere shift in posture.
Director Rob Kempson has staged the play in the round. Two corners of the stage, a chair in one a chaise-longue in the other, represent the two spaces that belong respectively to Pierre and Maggie. The other corners are Henry’s mounds of file boxes and books with a public area represented by a drinks trolley in the opposite corner – Henry’s corner representing the documented past, the other representing the past yet to be documented. Set designer Jung-Hye Kim has clearly located Henry’s world in the present since the books piled about one of the tables includes not only books by and about Maggie and Pierre but a copy of Justin Trudeau’s memoir Common Ground (2014).
Major historical events like the FLQ Crisis and the War Measures Act are dispatched with only a sentence or two. But audiences should remember that the play is not meant to be a history of Canada but of the relationship of a single couple whose complementary personalities generated the only archetype of a Prime Minister and “First Lady” that Canada has ever had. Though her play is quite straightforward, Griffiths captures what made that couple’s life together both magical and doomed, and indeed more magical because it was doomed. Kempson’s admirable direction and Riordan’s superlative performance help bring home to audiences a time when Canadians were first able to think of themselves as no longer boring.
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Kaitlyn Riordan as Maggie; Kaitlyn Riordan as Pierre; Kaitlyn Riordan as Henry.. ©2017 Greg Wong.
For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.
2018-05-10
Maggie & Pierre