Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
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by Stephen Massicotte, directed by Gil Garratt
Blyth Festival, Memorial Hall, Blyth
August 7-September 12, 2015
Charlie: “Tonight is just a dream. I ask you to remember that”
The Blyth Festival is currently presenting an absolutely wonderful production of Mary’s Wedding, a play from 2002 by Stephen Massicotte. The action follows the meeting, courtship and separation of two young lovers in rural Canada before and during World War I. Not only is the acting superb, but the direction is highly nuanced and the design of the set, sound and lighting combine in perfect harmony to tell the story. The play has a running time of only 75 minutes, but it is unforgettable.
At the very beginning of the play, the character Charlie (Eli Ham) speaks directly to the audience: “Before we begin, there is something I have to tell you. Tonight is just a dream. I ask you to remember that. It begins at the end and ends at the beginning. There are sad parts. Don’t let that stop you from dreaming it too”. As we discover when Mary (Sophia Walker) speaks, the dream we will witness is Mary’s dream in July 1920 the night before she is to be married. In this realm of dream time periods intersect and the story of the two is told in non-chronological order. The events of Mary and Charlie’s meeting and courtship intersect with the events of Charlie’s life on the battlefield in France. The actors switch between direct address to the audience and dialogue with each other. Words or images from one set of events can trigger a switch to another set and back.
Mary and her parents are recent immigrants from England to the rural community where Charlie works on a farm and loves to ride horses. The two accidentally meet when Mary takes shelter in a barn where she finds Charlie is counting the minutes between the lightning flash and the thunder to see whether the storm is approaching or veering away. He tries to put on a brave face but Mary can tell he is afraid of thunderstorms. The motifs of thunder and lightning will lead to sudden transitions to the war in France where bombs are falling and artillery is fired. To counter the storm the two recite a poem they both learned in school, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) by Tennyson, a poem that Charlie has always loved because of its vivid depiction of a cavalry charge despite that it ends in disaster.
When the storm has passed, Charlie offers Mary a ride home on his horse. Only much later does she admit that she is afraid of horses. Like the thunder, horse-riding links to Charlie’s time in France as part of the cavalry. The two meet at first accidentally and then increasingly on purpose when Mary makes her daily trip into the village to pick up the mail. Receiving letters often melds into the times when Mary receives letters from Charlie at the front or when Charlie is at the front writing to Mary.
Mary feels so close to Charlie even when he is away that she takes on the role of his commanding sergeant, Gordon Muriel Flowerdew, known as “Flowers”, an actual historical figure. Finally on march 30, 1918, Charlie gets the chance to experience a real cavalry charge when Lord Strathcona’s Horse hold back the advance of enemy forces at Moreuil Wood.
With the help of Rebecca Picherak’s subtle lighting cues and Lyon Smith’s very effective sound design, director Gil Garratt masterfully shifts the action between times and places. He manages to capture the fluidity of the play’s dream world without ever losing the precision that tells us exactly when and where we are at any moment. Ken MacKenzie has designed an appropriately ambiguous set that can look under some lighting like a farm or village and at others like a battlefield. In one lovely effect, the barn where Mary and Charlie meet opens suddenly to show the elegant parlour where Mary’s mother holds her tea parties. The horse that is so important both in Canada and in France is a barrel on a tall trestle with a saddle over top and a clever wired bridle, bit and reins whose outlines suggests the hose’s head inside them.
Sophia Walker and Eli Ham both give beautifully judged performances. Given Mary’s British reserve and Charlie’s rural shyness, both actors are expert at communicating the growing feelings of love that their characters cannot bring themselves to speak out loud. Ham is especially good as showing how Charlie tries in vain to hide his fear of storms from Mary and how he tries, also in vain, to fit in to a social occasion like Mary’s mother’s tea party.
Walker well distinguishes Mary from Flowers in tone of voice, accent and body language, making both highly sympathetic figures though in very different ways. Walker is especially effective in the scene where Mary parts in anger from Charlie because he insists on going to war. We can tell she is not, in fact angry with Charlie at all, but with a fact she knows she can’t change. Walker speaks her lines in a tone of anger that we know is really one of fear of never seeing Charlie again.
Mary’s Wedding is a lovely, nostalgic play about illusions, memory and the painful would-have-dones and should-have-dones of life. So sensitively acted, directed and staged as it is, theatre-lovers should make a point of seeing it since it is one of the few flawless shows on offer at festivals this summer. Blyth is now under the artistic director of Gil Garratt, who gave such a fine performance in another World War I play at Blyth, Vern Theissen’s Vimy, in 2011. Garratt is aware that the Blyth Festival’s main performance space, the Blyth Memorial Hall, was built to commemorate those who died in World War I. Perhaps for that reason, Blyth has remembered that we are in the midst of the centennial of the “war to end all wars” – a fact that larger companies like Soulpepper, Stratford and the Shaw have so strangely forgotten.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Sophia Walker as Mary and Eli Ham as Charlie. ©2015 Terry Manzo.
2015-08-12
Mary's Wedding