Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✭✭
by Lillian Groag, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 24-October 8, 2006
"A Magical Evening"
In each of her four years as Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival, Jackie Maxwell has programmed at least one work by a female playwright. The result has been some remarkable discoveries. This year’s choice, “The Magic Fire” by American playwright Lillian Groag in its Canadian premiere, is no exception. First staged by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1997, “The Magic Fire” is a wonderfully warm autobiographical play about a young woman’s memories of growing up in an opera-loving family of European immigrants in Argentina. Amusing, touching, intellectually stimulating, the play highlights one of the Shaw Festival’s greatest strengths--ensemble acting of the very highest calibre.
The show is conceived as a memory play in which a stand-in for the playwright named Lise Berg, now an American citizen, narrates and comments on events from May through July in 1952 when she was a schoolgirl in Buenos Aires. She grows up in a family that embodies the two types of immigrants who came to Argentina. Her mother’s side, the Guarneris, left Italy voluntarily to seek a better life in the New World. Her father side, the Bergs, left Vienna more recently to avoid persecution under the Nazis. Both middle-class families revere the arts, but what unites them above all is their love of opera.
For the young Lise the central event of this period is the party for her seventh birthday on June 24. For Lise Berg’s family the central event is the disappearance of their maid’s brother after a unsanctioned strike and his brief hide-out in the family home during Lise’s birthday party. For Argentina the central event the death after a long illness of Eva Perón in July 26 that plunged the country into mourning and deprived Juan Perón of the revered symbol who protected him from criticism.
Though the interaction of the older Lise and the young Lise, Groag explores the question of the accuracy and inaccuracy of memory. The older Lise constantly asks why the younger Lise was so unaware of the political events going on around her. This personal situation mirrors that of the Berg-Guarneri family in general who has insulated itself from the politics of the new world where they live by constantly focussing on the art of the old world where the came from. The play’s title refers to conclusion of Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre” when Wotan, outraged at his daughter Brünnhilde’s disobedience, divests her of her immortality and places her in an enchanted sleep on a mountain top to become the bride of whatever man awakens her. His one concession to Brünnhilde’s pride is that he surround her with a ring of magic fire to frighten all but the most heroic of men from approaching her.
The older Lise states explicitly that her family, especially her father, surrounded her with a kind of “magic fire” of protection so that she would never know what was happening in the world outside the family. At the same time it is clear that the Berg-Guarneris have both consciously and unconsciously surrounded themselves with a “magic fire” of art to fend off the unpleasant realities of the world where they live and in so doing have through nostalgia, much criticized by the older Lise, idealized the old world they came from so much that they have forgotten what it was really like. At the same time it could be said that the cult of Evita was a kind of “magic fire” that Argentineans used to protect themselves from recognizing the fascist side of Peronism.
The play has a strong relation to Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” not merely because of its use of a large ensemble but in its depiction of a group of people unable or unwilling to acknowledge the profound changes happening in the world they live in. Groag update’s Chekhov’s method through metatheatrical techniques such using as the older Lise as narrator and by having her occasionally intervene in the scenes she conjures up on stage. This combined with the panoply of allusions to opera, literature and art and the questions raised about the nature of memory and the role of art in relation to politics make “The Magic Fire” an extraordinarily rich, stimulating play.
Groag communicates all these themes through the wonderful assortment of memorable, complex characters who make up Lise’s world. Under Jackie Maxwell’s meticulous direction the cast brings these figure so much to life we think of them more as people we’ve known that as characters in a play. The birthday party scene alone with its overlapping conversations among the family over a multicourse dinner, its ever-shifting focus and its interplay between onstage and offstage action is itself masterpiece of minutely choreographed direction of breathtaking naturalism.
Tara Rosling as the older Lise is our intelligent, equivocal guide who is often surprised herself at the world she conjures up on stage, a world that eventually takes on a life of its own and reveals things to her she didn’t quite know were there. The remarkably talented young actor Lila Bata-Walsh plays her younger mischievous self. Ric Reid gives a powerful performance as Lise’s Viennese father Otto, who doesn’t want to admit to himself that he has fled persecution in Europe only to find himself in the midst of it again in the New World. His morals are tested when he discovers it is only because a family friend in the government grants the family special treatment that the family has been spared greater difficulties. Sharry Flett is equally powerful as Lise’s Italian mother Amalia, who forcibly denies her own awareness of the troubles outside to keep up the pretense that the family’s life in Buenos Aires is “happy”.
Jennifer Phipps frequently steals the show as Amalia’s eternally complaintive grandmother who continually insists her husband “kidnappèd” her from Italy to Argentina. Michael Ball plays her son, Amalia’s father, as a quick-tempered man always ready to defend Italy against attacks from his Viennese in-laws. As Amalia’s sister Elena, an unemployed actress, Goldie Semple displays a vitriolic wit born of personal disappoint frequently directed at the young Lise as if Elena hated the fact that the young girl still had her bright future before her. Playing Amalia’s Aunt Paula, Donna Belleville is hilarious as a woman whose thwarted career has mentally unhinged her and led to a morbid fascination with all aspects of suicide. In contrast Patricia Hamilton as Otto’s Aunt Clara visiting from Paris can barely hide her repugnance for the emotionalism of the Italian side of the family.
Only three characters not related to the Bergs or Guarneris. Waneta Storms plays the family’s maid with oddly little display of worry about her brother’s disappearance one would think was eating away at her. Jay Turvey forcefully plays an editor and friend of Elena’s who is most disturbed by the family’s self-willed ignorance about untoward changes in the country’s politics. Dan Chameroy, in an excellent performance against type, plays General Henri Fontannes, the family’s scintillating friend and protector and best buddy to Lise, whose darker side the older Lise and her father must come to acknowledge.
Sue LePage beautifully captures in her set and period costumes the faded aura of what for most of us is an exotic time and place. In this she is immensely aided by John Gzowski’s sound design, so central to a play where music is of such vital importance. Louise Guinand bathes the action of this memory play in an appropriately soft glow.
In her author’s note Groag says that she conceived of the play as “a novel directly for the stage”. Actively setting herself against the minimalism of so much contemporary theatre, Groag has filled “The Magic Fire” to overflowing with characters, detail and allusion. If this is Groag’s “novel”, it the kind that is so vivid and so fully involving that, having reached the last page, one would gladly turn back to page one to experience it all over again.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cast of The Magic Fire. ©David Cooper.
2006-08-14
The Magic Fire