Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Douglas Beattie
Touchmark Theatre, River Run Centre, Guelph
February 12-19, 2005
"Undisguised Delight"
In past seasons Touchmark Theatre has brought Guelph both rarities like Christopher Fry’s “A Phoenix Too Frequent” and classics like “The Glass Menagerie”. This year it presents its newest play so far, “Blessings in Disguise” by Touchmark’s own Artistic Director, Douglas Beattie. The play had its world premiere at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in 1999 and saw a second production at the Thousand Islands Playhouse in 2003. The Touchmark production is the first time the author himself will direct his own play. The work itself is a remarkable comedy filled with both laughter and ideas. It’s Guelph’s good fortune to see the author’s view of his work in a first-rate production enacted by a flawless cast.
Subtitled “a new, old world-style comedy”, “Blessings in Disguise” is set in 1858 in the fictional Pyrenean town of Bouillon somewhere near Lourdes. Those who know their history--or at least the 1943 film “The Song of Bernadette” or the Franz Werfel novel it’s based on--will recall that in 1858 is a poor, 14-year-old girl in Lourdes, Bernadette Soubiroux, began having a series of eighteen visions of the Virgin Mary, during which the Virgin caused a fountain of healing water to appear and asked that Bernadette have the local priests build a chapel around the spot. Lourdes as since become the prime pilgrimage destination in Catholicism now drawing about five million visitors per year and recording thousands of miraculous healings.
Beattie’s Bouillon, however, is in the doldrums. While there is news every day of the miracles in Lourdes, Bouillon seems particularly devoid of luck, much less of miracles. The play begins with a thunderstorm that severely damages Father Gustave’s church. Madame Vermillion, a wealthy patron, grandee of the town and devotée of Lourdes, gives Gustave a large sum of money to have a famed Parisian artist paint a fresco of the Virgin inside the church, but when Gustave entrusts the money to a visiting nun, the nun promptly absconds with the funds.
The complex solution involves Sister Marie, the mysterious nun, who visits Gregoire, Bouillon’s resident artist, now become an embittered café-owner, a man hounded out of the church for profligacy, who has given up art for the solace of drink. Much to his abundant skepticism, Sister Marie claims, in fact, to be the Virgin Mary. She cures Gustave of his ailments with the proviso that he paint her portrait in the church. The task of convincing Father Gustave that this is a good idea while convincing Madame Vermillion that he is following the Parisian painter’s instructions provides the main comic tension in the play.
The setting, the doubt-filled priest, the washed-up artist, the nun who claims to be Mary, all these contribute to Beattie’s exploration of questions of inspiration, divine or artistic, and of belief in religion, in miracles or in oneself. Does belief come from within or without? And isn’t art itself a kind of miracle requiring, as Coleridge said, a “willing suspension of disbelief”? During the play we are pre-occupied with Beattie’s deftly managed comedy of character and situation. The themes and their interconnections, however, resonate long afterwards.
Beattie has chosen an excellent cast. It is wonderful to see Stratford stalwarts Brian Tree and Stephen Russell, too often consigned to secondary parts at that festival, shine in complex major roles. Tree, makes full use of his witheringly dry delivery to wring full humour from Father Gustave’s every line. He creates a portrait of a priest whose religious life has long since become more a series of annoying duties than one of joy or inspiration. Russell gives us the fascinating parallel portrait of the outcast artist Gregoire, who has lost both inspiration for art and faith in himself. He carefully delineates the change in Gregoire from drunken despair and disbelief at the seemingly loony Sister Marie to the gradual recovery of a sense of worth.
Liza Balkan, who was such a treat as Doto in “A Phoenix Too Frequent”, is truly hilarious as Sister Marie. The relentless positivism she displaying in face of the never fully effaced negativism of Gustave and Gregoire is always humorous with the joke the disbelievers. The way she speaks of heavenly matters in the most down-to-earth tones is priceless. Is this really the Virgin Mary, on vacation from Heaven, popping over from Lourdes between appearances to Bernadette, or is this just a very persuasive, no-nonsense nutcase whose Mary-complex has become second nature? Beattie and Balkan leave this point deliciously ambiguous.
Patricia Yeatman, last seen with Touchmark as Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie”, returns to play the haughty Madame Vermillion, faddish both in religion and in art. Yeatman plays her as more than a caricature of the village tyrant and shows in the Madame’s reflection on her age that a sense of her mortality may be driving her obsessiveness. Parallel to Madame Vermillion is Gregoire’s former lover and model, the prostitute Sophie, who unlike the Madame cares nothing for outward shows of morality. Like Sister Marie, she still believes in the good in Gregoire, even he no longer does. Krista Jackson plays her with admirable simplicity.
Beattie has staged the play in runway format with the audience on either side of the playing area. The set representing the church, Beattie’s own clever design, is at one end while an open area representing everywhere else is at the other. The frequent scene changes are so well choreographed, they are pleasures in themselves. Sarah Plater’s fine period costumes establish distinctions between rich and poor, while Renée Brode’s lighting is crucial in establishing location and mood from the sickly light of the drunken Gregoire’s café to the radiance surrounding the play’s final revelation.
“Blessings in Disguise” is a thoughtful, warm, humane comedy. The issues of faith, belief and art found here seem even more vitally relevant in 2005 than they were perhaps when the play was first performed. It’s a rare delight that brings forth laughter as it tickles the brain.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Brian Tree. ©Douglas Beattie.
2005-06-01
Blessings in Disguise