Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✩✩
by Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Muraille, directed by Philip Akin
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 27-October 8, 2017
“Wha daur meddle wi' me?”
(Royal Stuart dynasty’s motto adopted by the Family Compact)
It is good to see that the Shaw Festival's new Artistic Director has programmed in his first season a Canadian play about Canadian history. One wonders only why the historical period chosen predates Shaw's lifetime (1856-1950) by nineteen years. Rick Salutin’s 1973 play 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt deals with an important event in Upper Canada's history that helped define the future of the province. It is written, however, in the mélange of non-naturalistic, Brecht-influenced styles that was typical of collective creations in Ontario in the 1970s. It does not depict Canadian history as a fully fledged carnival show as does Michael Hollingsworth’s 21-play series The History of the Village of the Small Huts (1985-2015). Nor does it have the rigorous playing style and poetic language of James Reaney’s great Donnellys Trilogy (1973-75). Nevertheless, under director Philip Akin, the Shaw ensemble gives Salutin’s play the best possible production it could have that gives us insight into both the 1830s of its subject matter and into the 1970s when it was written.
The Farmers’ Revolt concerns an actual rebellion in 1837 by farmers and other common labourers against the absolute domination of colonial life by a group called the Family Compact. The Family Compact was a group descended from United Empire Loyalists who fashioned themselves into an upper class on the model of Great Britain through the acquisition of land and by overlapping memberships in government, banking, education and religion. The first half of the play shows various injustices caused by the hobbling complicity of the Family Compact in all realms of government and finance. A young man (Travis Seetoo) has cleared acres of land for two years and thus believes it is his. But when a government inspector (Jeremiah Sparks) arrives and finds the man has no government document for the land, he threatens to take it away since it already belongs to a member of the Family Compact. The young man waits five days at the government land office in Toronto where a long queue of complainants are simply ignored.
Switching genres from melodrama to magic, Ric Reid in the role of a magician/showman demonstrates how ordinary Canadians transformed themselves into members of the Family Compact. Listing such notable members as John Robinson, Bishop Strachan, William Osgoode, Jonas Jones and Sir James Buchanan Macaulay, Reid has his assistant wave a flag and from behind it appear newly minted members of the Compact. Reid lists the links by family connection and by multiple institutional memberships through which each of more than twenty men turned themselves into a ruling class. The long complex speech is a tour de force for Reid, and an actor’s treat for Travis Seetoo and Jonah McIntosh who create different satirical portraits of each of the Compact members Reid describes.
The often unfocussed play is a vaudeville-like anthology of scenes in different genres rather than a cohesive narrative and some scenes are more relevant to telling the story than others. Many of the most enjoyable scene, in fact, have little to do with the subject. We see a young man (Marla McLean) meeting his shy mail-order bride (Sharry Flett) for the first time, and later see them part because the man decides he must fight in the rebellion. Whether the husband returns we never know. We see an imperious Susanna Moodie-type figure (Flett) discover first-hand what the travails facing New Canadians are when her horse and buggy get stuck in the mud. It’s an hilarious scene but has nothing to do with the Rebellion.
Though the play is very much an ensemble piece, Ric Reid’s William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861) emerges as a central figure. Mackenzie founded a newspaper, the Constitution in 1836 to take the side of Reform candidates against the Compact and advocated sweeping constitutional change based on the American model. He travels to Detroit to see how American institutions work and is amazed that voting there is not fraught with violence and intimidation as it is in Upper Canada.
Hymns, popular songs and patriotic tunes sung by the entire group, often using their own bodies and artificial tree stumps as percussion, enliven the proceedings. Movement designed by Esie Mensah creates two impressive scenes. In one, we see the violence as Tories beat up anyone who says they are planning to vote for Reform. In the other, she beautifully choreographs the battle of Montgomery’s Tavern on December 4, 1837, when the Tory-led army fired on the Mackenzie’s men who were armed only with old muskets and farm implements and who thought they were merely demonstrating rather than entering a battle. Charissa Richards and Jonah McIntosh are moving as two men, likely Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews, who are captured and sentenced to hang for treason.
The main difficulty with Salutin’s play is that it does not have an ending. In answer to McIntosh’s question whether the Reform side has lost, all Richard’s character can answer is “Not yet”. Though Salutin has set up the injustice caused by the Compact, the agitation to oppose it and the battle that arose from this agitation, he does not show us the result or even suggest why this revolt, inspired by an American model, was so important.
The reason for this is that the revolt, in the short run, was a failure. It did, however, call attention to what the Compact was doing in Upper Canada so that Britain sent Lord Durham to make a report which saw a solution in the union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1840, which naturally diluted the power of the Compact, but of course had much greater implications. Thus, the original story Salutin sets out to tell has no tidy ending. Yet, to end it where he does with the rebellion’s failure will confuse anyone not up on their Canadian history about whether the rebellion had any lasting effects.
It is exciting to hear Yonge Street in Toronto and Navy Island in the Niagara River mentioned in an historical drama staged in Niagara-on-the-Lake. But the play’s main virtue is as a showcase for the phenomenal talents of the its eight-person cast. Donna Belleville, Sharry Flett, Marla McLean and Charissa Richards not only play women of many kinds but also men of many kinds to great effect. One wonders when Flett would ever otherwise have the chance to play a man who is literally falling down drunk except for a play like this. While Ric Reid is gradually subsumed into the heroic role of Mackenzie, Jeremiah Sparks mostly plays a variety of menacing Tories. Travis Seetoo and Jonah McIntosh impress not only with their ability to switch from character to character in an instant but by the acrobatics they add to their performances.
Rachel Forbes’s set combines a 1970s geometric patterned wallpaper design with the rustic look of recently cleared farmland to capture the nature of the play viewing as it does 1837 through the lens of 1973. She has a snakelike ramp descend from upstage left paved with wooden logs like a “corduroy road” as they were called. Normally, such an intrusion would impede the flow of action, but Akin and Mansah have so well blocked the play that the action flows as much over the ramp and it does around it.
A major virtue of the production is its race- and gender-blind casting. The casting goes a very long way towards universalizing a rebellion from a specific time in Canadian history. It becomes a rebellion of all those who have ever been oppressed because of sex, race or class by an undemocratic elite that grows harsher the more it feels it is losing its grip on power. In fact, Salutin’s play makes much more sense as a depiction of a failed rebellion that will eventually succeed when it is presented, as Akins does here, as one instance of a universal struggle rather than as written as one specific struggle in a nation’s past.
Do see 1837: The Farmer’s Rebellion for its high theatricality and panoply of fine performances. You will learn that Canadian history is not so bland as commonly supposed and will likely rush to an encyclopedia to learn more about Mackenzie, the Family Compact and the Rebellion than Salutin has managed to include in his play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cast of 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt, Ric Reid (far right), ©2017 Emily Cooper; Sharry Flett, Jeremiah Sparks, Travis Seetoo and Jonah McIntosh, ©2017 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2017-05-28
1837: The Farmers’ Revolt