Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✩
by Severn Thompson, directed by Christine Brubaker
Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
January 19-31, 2016
Elle: “To inhabit a place, you must be inhabited”
The principal reason to see Elle, now receiving its world premiere at Theatre Passe Muraille, is to welcome Severn Thompson back to the stage in a major role. Thompson had been playing lead roles at the Shaw Festival in the 1990s and early 2000s, when she dropped out of sight. Now she is back. The mixture of humour, passion, vulnerability and strength she brings to her performances have been much missed.
Thompson has adapted Douglas Glover’s novel Elle, winner of the 2003 Governor General’s Literary Award, to the stage. The title character of Glover’s novel is unnamed but is known to be based on the true story of the noblewoman Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval, who sailed to the New World with her relative Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval (c. 1500-60), a French nobleman and pirate, who was named the first Lieutenant General of New France.
Roberval was part of Jacques Cartier’s third failed attempt to colonize Canada. In 1542 Roberval lead three ships of colonists to Charlesbourg-Royal, a colony built the previous year. On the way, however, he, a strict Protestant, abandoned Marguerite on the Île des Démons off the coast of Newfoundland with her lover and her servant as punishment for her lewdness. While the French colony collapsed after two years, Marguerite survived for about ten years until she was rescued by Basque fishermen and returned to France. Her story was famous enough in the 16th century that it inspired several writers including Marguerite de Navarre who used it as one the stories in her Héptameron (1558). In Canada, Marguerite de La Rocque’s story had inspired at least one narrative poem, a play and three novels before Glover’s novel was published.
Following Glover’s use of first-person narration, Thompson’s Elle narrates as well as re-enacts her life story. The action begins not merely in media res but in flagrante delicto as Elle is having sex in insalubrious hold of the ship with Richard, Comte d’Epirny, a seasick tennis player who has excited her lust. Elle’s passion for reading and for men has not made her popular at court and she knows this voyage is an attempt to be rid of her. Yet, the new Lieutenant Governor, here conceived of as her uncle, takes such a dim view of her on-board behaviour, that he puts her off the ship.
From this point on the various exaggerations that had been comic additions to Elle’s narrative turn into a form of magic realism. From an aged woman who rescues her, Elle somehow acquires the shamanistic ability to change herself into a bear. After a period as an outsider, she eventually becomes accepted by the people of a nearby tribe. She has come to feel so at home in Canada that why she allows herself to be taken back to France by a group of Basque fishermen is a mystery.
The historical ending of Marguerite and Roberval is actually more interesting than the revenge tale of Glover makes of it. Marguerite became a schoolmistress living in a chateau and Roberval became one of the first Huguenot martyrs of the Catholic war against Protestants led by Catherine de’ Medici and the Duke of Guise. In her first years on the island, one can understand why Glover’s Elle would seek revenge against Roberval. But the point of the narrative seems to be how a self-described “frivolous Frenchwoman” changes, literally, into a force of nature. At that point, given the power she has gained from having been marooned, revenge against Roberval makes no sense and one might assume would be beneath her.
The last section of the play is thus the least effective, not because of Thompson’s adaptation, but because of her source. To make a bear a central symbol of the Canadian wilderness that changes a woman who encounters it, has already been done, most notably in Marion Engle’s 1976 novel Bear, which also won the Governor General’s Literary Award. That Glover’s Elle can change into a bear and Engle’s Lou has a spiritual and sexual relationship with a bear, in both cases aided by an aged native woman, does not much change the symbolism.
The virtue of Glover’s novel and of Thompson’s adaptation is its satire. When Elle is rescued she notes that Portuguese and Basque fishermen have been coming to Canada long before the French “discovered” it and claimed it for their own. That Elle survives longer in the wilderness than the French government-supported colony is itself a critique of colonists’ inability to adapt and learn from their surroundings. In its anti-male satire, Elle may call herself “frivolous” but her tennis-playing lover is hopelessly impractical and is the first to die. In its religious satire, Elle, once a fervent Catholic, begins praying to both her god and the natives’ and finally to none.
The role that Elle provides is a juicy one for Thompson and ideally suited to her strengths. Her wry delivery makes the satire all the more trenchant. Her ability to convey a character’s strength beneath her own view of herself as vulnerable is perfect for Elle’s situation. Thompson has always been an insightful interpreter of words, but here she has a chance to display her equally superlative skills at mime and physical theatre. The Elle she creates changes before us from a self-centred society-oriented aristocrat to simply a lone human being with the one simple wish to survive.
Jonathan Fisher, who primarily adds live guitar music to Lyon Smith’s highly effective soundscape, is a taciturn, self-contained Itslk, welcome as an unromanticized First Nations character. His presence in what it otherwise a one-woman show is important for embodying the show’s critique against the European colonization of the New World as if it were not already inhabited. Physically, the playing area already is inhabited before Elle becomes aware of it.
Designer Jennifer Goodman has reconfigured Theatre Passe Muraille’s Mainspace into a narrow thrust stage bringing Thompson very close to the audience, the peninsular stage helping to depict both the isolation of the ship and later the isolation of the island. Goodman’s set is a giant bony structure that looks very much like the skeleton of a left hand or left paw threatening those on stage. Yet, depending on the lighting, it can also look like the inside of the cave where Elle seeks refuge or the ribs of the hut Itslk helps to build. Brubaker makes very imaginative use of a large piece of cloth that can be a sail, a tent or, most remarkably, the skin of the bear into which Elle transforms herself.
This is an entertaining, provocative and well imagined evening of theatre with appeal far beyond those who have read Glover’s novel. It is for anyone who loves to watch a superb actor fully in her element.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Severn Thompson as Elle; Jonathan Fisher as Itslk and Severn Thompson as Elle. ©2016 Michel Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.
2016-01-20
Elle