Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩ / ✭✭✭✩✩
by Marie de France / by Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim
directed by Linda Phillips
Pneuma Ensemble and Poculi Ludique Societas, Luella Massey Studio Theatre, Toronto
April 7-9, 2017
“Two Medieval Women Writer Everyone Should Know”
The University of Toronto is home to Poculi Ludique Societas (“The Cup and Game Society”), one of the few university companies devoted to producing theatre from the Middle Ages up to the closing of the theatres in England in 1642. For more than 50 years the PLS has been giving audiences the only chance to see medieval and early Renaissance plays on stage. While the main audience of the PLS are member of academe, quite often it mounts plays that deserve a much wider public.
This is the case with the double bill the PLS is currently presenting of two plays by women of the medieval period. First on the bill is Bisclaveret, a Breton lai by Marie de France (fl.1160-1215). Second is Dulcitius by Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim (c.935-c.973), famous not only as the first female playwright in the West but also as the first person to write drama in the West since the fall of ancient Rome. The chance to see plays by such important writers, who happen also to be women, ought to attract anyone interested in the history of drama or in the female voice in literature.
According to Marie, she translated the lais from the Breton language in which she heard them performed. The key word “performed” has led scholars including the Pneuma Ensemble to believe the Bisclaveret would been sung or spoken to music as would a professional storyteller like a bard to entertain a courtly audience. While a bard would typically accompany himself on a harp and while a narrative in verse would most likely have been sung, the Pneuma Ensemble in the absence of any extant music for the Lais of Marie de France, accompanies narrator Tricia Postle with Gaven Dianda on gittern and Eleanor Verrette on vielle. The musicians play musical selections that happened to be bound with the manuscript of Marie de France’s works, including such famous tunes as “Sumer Is Icumen In”.
Director Linda Phillips has Postle clad in a red cape and wolf mask lead a procession of the Ensemble through the audience onto the stage of the Luella Massey Studio Theatre. There Postle removes the mask and begins the story. Postle narrates the story in the original Anglo-Norman. While some may find it daunting to listen to a 25-minute-long tale told in an extinct language without surtitles, a detailed synopsis of the plot is found on the programme. A vote during the Q&A session following the two plays found that a large majority would rather read a summary and listen to the poem rather than have the distraction of surtitles. It is thrilling to hear the sounds of Anglo-Norman with its mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, and Postle is so expressive that we know immediately what a strange word like “garulf” (“werewolf’) means when she says it.
Surtitles are really rendered unnecessary by the fine acting and detailed mime of Postle as bard. She plays the the many characters of the story with distinct changes of posture and voice and speaks to us as if she is letting us in on a great secret. The musicians add sound effects to their music such as Dianda scratching on a tambour to imitate the wolf-shaped Bisclaveret scraping the bars of his cage. After telling the tale, Postle remasks herself as a wolf and the Ensemble exits the stage through the audience as if we have had a magical visit from a seer from another world.
With Bisclaveret he Pneuma Ensemble makes the best possible case for presenting the Lais of Marie de France as works to be performed rather than read. The story is richer through being enacted and one can see that the text offers the possibility of more than one interpretation. The Pneuma Ensemble presented the work in the guise of a warning against unfaithful wives, but the tale could easily told in a darker hue about a woman who cannot cope with the horrid fate her husband suffers.
After the fully professional presentation of Bisclaveret, the programme continues after a short pause with a student/community production of Dulcitius, where the acting is of quite variable quality. While almost nothing is known of Hrotsvitha’s life, it is supposed that she was born into the Saxon nobility and took the veil in her later years. She was renowned for her learning which included not only the Church fathers but the classical Roman poets and playwrights. Her complete works, all written in Latin, are divided into legends, plays and histories, including a verse history of the years 919-965 of the Ottonian dynasty then ruling Lower Saxony.
In her Preface to the published edition of her plays, Hrotsvitha explains her purpose in choosing Terence: “There are others who, although they are deeply attached to the sacred writings and have no liking for most pagan productions, make an exception in favour of the works of Terence, and, fascinated by the charm of the manner, risk being corrupted by the wickedness of the matter. Wherefore I, the strong voice of Gandersheim, have not hesitated to imitate in my writings a poet whose works are so widely read, my object being to glorify, within the limits of my poor talent, the laudable chastity of Christian virgins in that self-same form of composition which has been used to describe the shameless acts of licentious women”.
While her Preface focusses on providing uplifting stories of women, her plays are comedies in a much higher sense. The Christian world view is theologically comic in that for those who are believers there is no death but rather greater glory in the afterlife. The pagans in Hrotsvitha’s plays are revealed as fools who do not understand the power of the beliefs of those they persecute. Anyone who has read English translations of Hrotsvitha will likely have been disappointed by how dull they are. Not so with the sprightly new translation of Colleen Butler, who has managed to capture better than anyone Hrotsvitha’s wicked, or should we say saintly sense of humour.
This is certainly the case with Dulcitius. The Emperor Diocletian (David Klausner) wants three virgin sisters – Agape (Jenna McKellips), Chionia (Leslie Durward) and Hirena (Megan Adam) – to get married but insists they renounce their Christian faith and worship the Roman gods. When the women refuse he orders Dulcitius (Bil Antoniou), governor of Thessalonica, to torture them. Dulcitius, however, becomes enamoured of their beauty and spies on them from a kitchen adjacent to their cell. So befuddled is he by divine influence that he tries to make love with the pots and pans he finds in the kitchen believing they are the sisters. While this is quite a surprising scene for a nun to write it does show in an extreme way the folly of idolatry or the worship of objects that the sisters find so abhorrent in paganism.
Dulcitius is so blacked with soot by his kitchen love-making that he is thought to be possessed and is beaten. Diocletian therefore passes the duty of punishing the sisters to Count Sissinius (Tré Shields). Finding Hirena the loveliest of the three, he condemns the other two to be burnt alive. Though unharmed by the flames, the sisters choose to die because their martyrdom will inspire faith in others. Sissinius decides the worst punishment for Hirena will be to have her taken to a brothel. At first his soldiers cannot move her because through divine power she has become fixed to the ground. When they can remove her, we learn that angels have taken the place of the soldiers and led her to a mountaintop. Since Sissinius and his men cannot reach her, he has a soldier shoot her with an arrow. She is hit but explains to Sissinius that he has only given her joy: “Hinc mihi quam maxime gaudendum, / tibi vero dolendum, / quia pro tui severitate malignitatis / in tartara damnaberis” (“To me my death means joy, but to you calamity. For your cruelty you will be damned in Tartarus”).
As with the Lais of Marie de France, there is much debate about whether Hrotsvitha’s plays were ever staged. The PLS production, however, under Phillips’s imaginative direction proves that a play like Dulcitius is eminently stage-worthy and filled with theatrical scenes that have much more impact on the stage than on the page.
While Dulcitius’s misguided attempts to fondle and couple with kitchen utensils would likely not have been shown on stage, Phillips has Dulcitius, well played by Antoniou, hilariously pop out of the kitchen during his fit, making love to a different pot or pan each time and each time becoming darker with soot. Phillips beautifully imagines the deaths of Agape and Chionia. They are thrown into a fire symbolized by broken lighting gels. When they decide to die, they simply let their outer robes slip off and step away from the fire in their shifts to walk out through the audience.
Hirena’s being fixed to the ground gives the two soldiers (Chris Klippenstein and Una Creedon-Carey) a chance to display their ample talent at physical comedy when they struggle and strain to move so light an object as a young girl.
Phillips, who also designed the play, has clad the actors in medieval garb, similar to how the PLS stages the English mystery plays where a medieval audience would assume people of the past were no different than themselves. The actors playing the three sisters sing a lovely Ave Maria to strengthen themselves and the Pneuma Ensemble provides atmospheric improvised musical interludes. Given that the play dates from the 10th century, the Ensemble foregoes bowed instruments and the gittern since these were introduced to Europe by Crusaders returning from the Middle East. Instead, Postle plays a psaltery, Dianda a lyre and Eleanor Verrette a frame drum and bell.
It is too much to hope that professional companies will take up the work of Hrotsvitha. The Stratford Festival has hardly grazed the surface of the wealth of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, let alone his immediate predecessors or medieval drama. Yet, with its Forum of events parallel to its main offerings, Stratford could provide a place for people to see the work of these medieval women on stage dealing as they do with such universal topics as the supernatural, tyranny, love, belief and power.
The PLS takes Dulcitius on tour to the University of Western Michigan on May 13 while the Pneuma Ensemble takes a different lai of Marie de France, “Floris and Blancheflour”. The performance there is nearly sold out. For those who missed the short run of these fascinating works, we can hope perhaps for a revival of them or, failing that, for a further exploration of Marie de France by the Pneuma Ensemble and of Hrotsvitha by the PLS. In an age when people complain about the lack of women’s voices on stage, we should celebrate a period long ago when women’s voices were clearly heard and admired.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: The Pneuma Ensemble; Marie de France from BnF, Arsenal Library, Ms. 3142 fol. 256; Hrotsvit of Gandersheim presents an aged emperor Otto the Great with her Gesta Oddonis, under the eyes of Abbess Gerberga by Albrecht Dürer, 1501; David Klausner, Una Creedon-Carey, Jenna McKellips, Leslie Durwar, Megan Adam and Chris Klippenstein, ©2017.
For tickets, visit http://groups.chass.utoronto.ca/plspls.
2017-04-09
Bisclaveret / Dulcitius