Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by Wajdi Mouawad, translated by Linda Gaboriau, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
April 27-May 29, 2011
Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched was a major hit for the Tarragon in 2007 that prompted two reprises and a tour. Those expecting the same kind of exhilarating experience from Forests will be dismayed to find themselves coping with an extravagantly complex plot involving so many coincidences and implausibilities it is more frustrating than intriguing.
The play begins with a real enough dilemma. Aimée (Jan Alexandra Smith) is pregnant but also has a malignant brain tumour. She make the awful decision whether to have the child and die or to have an abortion and live a bit longer. She chooses the former and 14 years later we meet her child Loup (Vivien Endicott-Douglas). Soon Mouawad shifts into fantasy by asking us to believe that the tumour was caused by a free-floating bone in Aimée’s brain somehow teleported there by a woman who lived decades earlier named Ludivine (Sophie Goulet). Douglas Dupontel (R.H. Thomson), a palaeontologist obsessed with Aimée’s case, convinces the permanently angry Loup that she can only know who she is by finding out about Ludivine.
Though this is nonsense, Dupontel takes Loup on an archival quest that takes them back to Europe in 1872 and allows Mouawad to expatiate on the Franco-Prussian War the two World Wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Montreal Massacre of 1989. Any notion that this is a serious exploration of history is undermined by the utterly fantastical nature of the story with its overused gothic elements of incest, weird twins and madness. Mouawad lavishes far too much time on the perversions of Keller family who live in a zoo in a forest but rushes over the real link between Aimée and Ludivine--the choice between life and death--when Ludivine was part of the French Resistance.
If you are able to appreciate acting, direction and design divorced from plot, you will find all three in Forests are of the highest order. The cast of eleven--nine playing multiple roles over six generations--give superb performances, but we can’t become very interested in anyone except for a few key moments. Endicott-Douglas at the end, Smith as Aimée, Liisa Repo-Martell as Ludivine’s best friend and Brandon McGibbon as Ludivine’s mad brother provide some of these moments. The problem is that there is no payoff for the effort Mouawad demands of the actors or the audience. After three hours of enough plot to fill several novels, we finish no closer to finding out how Ludivine’s jawbone rematerialized in Aimée’s brain than when we started--and we don’t really care.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-04-29.
Photo: R.H. Thomson and Vivien Endicott-Douglas. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2011-04-29
Forests