Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Michele Smith & Dean Gilmour, directed by Michele Smith
Theatre Smith-Gilmour, The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto
March 20-April 1, 2018
Bishop Bienvenu: “You have faith in me it seems. And I must have faith in you, musn’t I?”
It is brave for Theatre Smith-Gilmour to take on a story like Victor Hugo’s massive 1862 novel Les Misérables that is already so well known through so many films and television adaptations and, of course, the famous 1980 musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil that is still running in London’s West End. Theoretically, a new stage adaptation would supply more insight into Hugo’s subject matter than a single film or musical could do. Surprisingly, for a company so inventive as Theatre Smith-Gilmour, this proves not to be the case. Though dependant mostly on mime and a few props, Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s adaptation is uneven in tone and less focussed than its previous adaptation of a novel, As I Lay Dying in 2013, and provides less insight into Hugo’s story than does the musical or the best film adaptation, Richard Boleslawski’s version of 1935.
Initially, the play seems as if it will be vintage Smith-Gilmour. Dean Gilmour on a bare stage plays the narrator, Jean Valjean and the Bishop of Digne simply by whirling round and changing his voice and demeanour. The way Gilmour plays Valjean’s disbelief at the Bishop’s trust in him is both humorous and pitiful at once, and the way Gilmour’s Bishop counters Valjean’s aggression with serene calm is delightful.
Fantine’s story goes well too as played by Nina Gilmour. Gilmour charts Fantine’s whirlwind romance with the charming Félix (Benjamin Muir), her abandonment, pregnancy and exploitation by the innkeepers, the Thénardiers, who keep demanding more money for the upkeep of her young daughter Cosette. Fantine is fired from work and eventually resorts to prostitution to ensure Cosette’s safety. Gilmour carefully gradates Fantine’s increasing desperation until her death which is the emotional highpoint of this production.
Mac Fyfe makes an impressive Javert. While adept at the the troupe’s physical movement style, he is is particularly fine in speaking the text with the greatest force. Daniel Roberts and Diana Tso are an excellent M. and Mme Thénardier and make the pair more intimidating and less comic than their equivalents in the musical.
Strangely, Benjamin Muir is asked to play both his romances – first as Félix, then as Marius – as comic. While he does this well, it does seem that the honest, love-struck Marius should in some way be portrayed differently than the scoundrel Félix.
Already during Fantine’s story, though so well played, theatrical elements creep in that will later unbalance the production. Part of the time when Fantine narrates her story she does so using a microphone. The reason is unclear. Later in Act 1 Valjean uses the microphone to reveal his inner thoughts about whether or not to turn himself in when a false Jean Valjean is arrested elsewhere in France. This use of amplification makes sense even though Smith-Gilmour has managed to do without such aids in the past. Indeed, the show never uses microphones again which makes their use at all seem peculiar.
Act 1 has played on a bare stage as happens in most Smith-Gilmour productions, with only Simon Rossiter’s lighting to signal changes of mood or location. This time, projections on the back wall by Elisa Gilmour are used in Act 2 to highlight the anti-monarchist Paris Uprising of 1832. Since Smith-Gilmour is so renowned for creating all their effects from movement, it is disconcerting for projections to appear in Act 2 when they have not been used at all in Act 1. Some projections quite contrary to Smith-Gilmour’s usual aesthetic are photographic. Their best use is in turning the back wall red so that the cast of eight can in silhouette mime the battle between monarchist and anti-monarchist forces.
The main disappointment with the Smith-Gilmour adaptation is that over the course of two hours and 45 minutes we get no closer to Hugo’s characters that we do in the musical or in a film adaptation like Boleslawski’s. Indeed, we often feel more distanced from them. Theoretically, without music a spoken adaptation should allow more time for the actors to dig into the characters and into the story. Yet, particularly in Act 2, we feel as if the cast is rushing simply to get through the rudiments of the plot. Even then, there is no Gavroche, there is barely time to register that Éponine is in love with Marius before she dies and Javert has very little to say to show how his world-view has been so destroyed it precipitates his suicide.
While the chameleonic abilities of the cast are never in doubt and one visually arresting scene follows another, the general insight Smith-Gilmour brings to its productions and its use of symbolic artefacts seem to be missing in Les Misérables. In general the effect is of an ingeniously depicted plot summary of a great story without the emotion that the story should inspire. We look forward to a return to form with Smith-Gilmour’s next production.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Dean Gilmour as Jean Valjean and Mac Fyfe as Javert; Nina Gilmour, Daniel Roberts, Dean Gilmour and Benjamin Muir as rebels. ©2018 Elisa Gilmour.
For tickets, visit http://theatrecentre.org.
2018-03-29
Les Misérables