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by Athol Fugard, directed by David Storch

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

May 5-28, 2014

Elsa: “It reminds me of something I once read where the desert was described as ‘God without mankind’”

Soulpepper’s first production of a play from South Africa is Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca from 1984.  It’s a beautiful simple play in the old-fashioned naturalistic mode about the meaning of art, the meaning of freedom and the role of the individual in society.  The three-person play features wonderfully sensitive performances from Diana Leblanc and David Fox, but is seriously marred by the superficial performance of newcomer Shannon Taylor. 

The most bizarre aspect of the production is the total lack of South African accents.  Would an English-language company stage Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof without American Southern accents?  Is Soulpepper currently staging Vern Theissen’s adaptation of Of Human Bondage without upper and lower class British accents?  So what is the problem with doing accents in Fugard’s play?  Accents are a sign of the background of the characters and of their link to past social history. 

Fugard based the central character of The Road to Mecca on a real person who lived in the same village of Nieu Bethesda in the Karoo desert in the Eastern Cape where Fugard moved in 1972.  Fugard’s “Miss Helen” is based on Helen Elizabeth Martins (1897-1976), a folk artist, who over the course of thirty years decorated her house and the surrounding yard with more than 300 sculpture of concrete and glass representing owls, camels, mystical figures, mermaids and castles which all face east toward Mecca.  Inside she cover her walls with mirrors and broken glass to reflect candlelight all around the rooms.  Though it was considered an eyesore while she was alive, after her death the “Owl House”, as it came to be known was recognized for the unique artwork it was and in 1996 became a national heritage sight.  Though she was shunned for her eccentricity while she was alive, her creation has generation such tourism that it has now become the central source of income for the whole village.

Fugard sets the action in 1974 when Miss Helen is at the end of her life.  Knowing the real Miss Helen frequently had visits from a younger woman unrelated to her from Cape Town, a 12-hour drive away, he created the character of Elsa.  In Act 1, Elsa (Shannon Taylor) has driven all the way from Cape Town for only a one-day visit with Miss Helen (Diana Leblanc).  The two immediately get into an argument and then make up, but the mystery is what has caused Elsa to visit and why nothing in the house has changed in the three months since her last visit. 

Both women have subjects they want to talk about.  Both have subjects they want to keep secret.  By the end we know everything.  The first issue, though, is that the people of the church Miss Helen used to attend think it best for her own safety to move her into a retirement home and have already reserved a place.  The prime instigator of this idea is the pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, Marius Byleveld (David Fox).  What he doesn’t understand is that for Miss Helen to move to a home means giving up the world of art that she has spent years creating around her.  What he views as her “hobby”, she views as her life’s calling, indeed, as her life itself.  If the desert is “God without mankind” as Elsa says, then Miss Helen is an artist without an audience, and Fugard leaves us to ponder the pain that must cause the artist and the strength of vision that must exist in the artist to carry on in spite of everything.

Set designer Beth Kates has built what looks like two rooms of an ordinary wooden house that has been made extraordinary by the multiplicity of colours and textures inside and the proliferation of cement figures of all kinds, owls especially, but also camels, people and pyramids clearly inspired by the real sculptures found at the Owl House.  A huge owl with spread wings dominates the set.  It should help remind us that although Miss Helen is accused of madness the owl itself is a symbol of wisdom.  The one aspect of Miss Helen’s house that Kates does not capture is the refection of light within the house.  Fugard gives Miss Helen a long speech in Act 2 about the effect she has tried to achieve by mixing ground glass with paint for the walls and by the special placement of mirrors, but the walls do not sparkle as they should nor do we see the light bouncing from place to place that director David Storch seems to think is happening somewhere in the audience rather than on stage.

Setting the question of accent aside, Diana Leblanc and David Fox give beautifully nuanced performances.  Initially, Leblanc has Miss Helen appear as confused and helpless as the others claim she is.  Yet, Leblanc also makes us see that this confusion is just the result of having to deal with the conflict which her reclusiveness has made her unaccustomed to.  Leblanc suggests that Miss Helen’s refusal to explain herself comes from something deeper than testiness.  As we discover, to explain why she doesn’t want to leave her house is to explain why she must create and why she cannot live without art.  Leblanc positively glows with inspiration when she delivers Miss Helen’s speeches on what art means to her and that inspiration sends a shudder of grateful recognition through the audience to hear the inexpressible expressed in such movingly personal terms.

In Act 1, David Fox’s character is set up to be a brutish villain willing to turf an old lady out of her house and confine her in a home because her unusual habits do not conform with what the Church thinks is “normal” behaviour.  Yet, Fox’s performance immediately overturns those preconceptions when we see how gently he has Marius speak with Miss Helen and when we feel that his gentleness is part of a deep-rooted tenderness he has for her.  When pushed by Elsa, he reluctantly reveals the prejudices that underlie the Church’s decision to have Miss Helen move, but even when Marius accuses Miss Helen of idolatry, Fox makes us feel what pain it causes his character to speak so harshly.

Were Leblanc and Fox the only actors in the play, the evening would be a celebration of the power that seasoned actors can bring to the stage.  Unfortunately, the first act is dominated by the character of Elsa, in a depressingly annoying performance by Shannon Taylor.  Taylor speaks in a gratingly uninflected voice, miles away from the roundness and warmth of the tones of Leblanc and Fox.   Worse, she seems incapable of expressing anything but the most superficial emotions and then for only fleeting amounts of time.  Elsa has a host of concerns on her mind both about Miss Helen and about herself.  A good actor would convey the sense of unresolved issues churning below the surface.  But Taylor only gives us the surface thus destroying the tension that we ought to see brewing in her character.  When Taylor’s Elsa speaks of the end of her affair with a young man and its consequences, she frowns a bit for the few moments she speaks the words but completely lets it go when, in fact, the bitterness of the affair should still linger in her subsequent statements and ought to have been present beforehand.

David Storch simply cannot create tension in Act 1 when one of the two actors generates nothing, not even interest.  That’s why the play only comes alive in Act 2 when the primary interaction is between Leblanc and Fox.  If you are willing to sit through the dullness of Act 1, you will be rewarded with the exquisite acting of Leblanc and Fox in Act 2.  But, obviously, Soulpepper should have detected the flaw and not allowed poor casting to ruin such a delicate and profound play. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Diana Leblanc as Miss Helen; Diana Leblanc and David Fox as Marius Byleveld. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann. 

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.