Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✩✩✩✩
by Rick Whelan, directed by Dennis Garnhum
Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
May 30-November 2, 2003
"Torture for the Whole Family"
Do not even consider seeing "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" at the Stratford Festival. If someone offers you a ticket, do not accept it. Cleaning the septic tank would be more enjoyable. Above all, do not take your family to see it. It is NOT, I repeat NOT, a family show despite what the Festival says.
The Stratford Festival season brochure recommends "Hunchback" as part of the "Family Experience". Perhaps, if you're the Manson family. On stage in graphic detail in its two and a half hours a man tries to rape a woman, a deformed man is flogged in public while chained to a wheel, a woman is tortured on the rack, a woman sees a man break her mother's neck before her eyes, a woman is hanged, poor people are massacred by bowmen, people are burned with molten lead and this does not include the continual discussion and threat of violence throughout the show. Do you want to explain to your children why a priest and an affianced officer lust after a gypsy girl and harm her if they don't get their way with her? Do you want to explain why the gypsy girl loves the officer because of his sword and his boots and lifts her skirt to him saying "Drink me up"?
Disney was taken to task for its 1996 animated feature of Victor Hugo's 1831 novel. Even though it was sanitized, this bleak work about sexual obsession where evil triumphs over good was deemed a bizarre subject for a children's movie. But Stratford playwright Rick Whelan and director and dramaturge Dennis Garnhum, contrary to the Festival's marketing plans, have vowed to present the work unsanitized. Where does the idea come from that 19th-century novels written for adults are today good fodder for children? What's next--"Madame Bovary, the Family Experience"?
Even so, judged merely on its own merits, the play is dreck. Whelan's language is composed solely of the worst clichés from 1950s costume epics-- "Your burning eyes pierce me like a thousand daggers". Christmas trees and sandwiches are mentioned although they didn't exist in 1482, the time of the action. The effect would be laughable if the cumulative banality were not so deadening.
In condensing the lengthy novel to the short stage time, Whelan and Garnhum create a sort of Classic Comics version of a complex masterpiece, all plot and no character development. As in a horror movie, they intentionally linger on the work's most sickening scenes while barely telegraphing the emotions that might help make sense of them. But then, in a ludicrously miscalculated attempt at cutesiness, they have an actor, Krista Leis, play Djali, Esmeralda's goat, to accompany her mistress throughout her misfortunes. "What were they thinking?" echoes in the mind as you watch. How was this idiotic script ever approved?
As if this weren't bad enough, the show very poorly acted. I am not exaggerating when I say I have seen high school productions that were much better performed. Only a handful of actors manage to survive with any dignity: Jennifer Gould (the gypsy Esmeralda), Joyce Campion (Falourdel), David Hogan (Charmolue), Philip Griffith Pace (the King's advisor Olivier) and Joseph Shaw (the judge Henri Poteau). Otherwise, Whelan's text and Garnhum's direction makes even Stephen Russell (the lust-wracked priest Frollo) and Dan Chameroy (using a funny voice as the poet Gringoire) look foolish.
Nicolas Van Burek as Quasimodo gives a very physical performance, but he is all intensity without the subtlety that marks the great Quasimodos of the screen. David Snelgrove (Phoebus), Michael Therriault (Jehan), Robert King (Clopin) and Brigit Wilson (Paquette) are overwrought and little else. And Dorian Foley (subbing for Douglas Chamberlain as Louis XI), Naomi Costain (Fleur-de-Lys) and Dayna Tekatch (Clopin's favourite) among others should not be allowed on stage.
Alexander Dodge's set consists of huge cubes covered in black-and-white photographic collages of Notre Dame cathedral. The effect would not work at all if Michael Whitfield's highly nuanced lighting did not help to give the flat surfaces the illusion of depth. Indeed, Whitfield's lighting creates subtler moods and greater atmosphere than anything in the script. Kelly Wolf's "Ye Olde Mediaeval" costumes are unremarkable.
A bad script badly directed, badly acted and with a perverse view of its target audience is not a show for any audience, let alone a family audience. This show marks a new low for Stratford. Avoid it like the plague.
Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jennifer Gould (centre) as Esmerelda. ©2003 Stratford Festival.
2003-06-02
The Hunchback of Notre Dame