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by Beverley Cooper, directed by Jackie Maxwell

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

May 24-June 23, 2018

Isabel: “I thought in this country a person was considered innocent until proven guilty”

Beverley Cooper’s play premiered at the Blyth Festival in 2008.  Ten years later Soulpepper has revived it.  Now the play seems less like a documentary drama based on recent events and more like an analysis of how the over-eagerness to solve a gruesome crime can lead to a second kind of crime in the form of a gross miscarriage of justice.  Cooper’s play is deliberately unsensational and Jackie Maxwell’s unshowy direction seemed calculated to underscore that suspicion and cruelty exist under the apparently placid and banal surface of Southern Ontarian country life. 

In the basic facts of the case on June 9, 1959, Steven Truscott, aged 14, was sent on an errand by his mother.  His classmate Lynne Harper, aged 12, needed a lift to the County Road so Steven gave her a ride there on his bicycle and, according to his version of the story, left her there although he noticed on looking back that she got into a grey car.  Steven completed his errand and returned home.  Lynne did not.  On June 11 Lynne’s body was discovered.  She had been raped and strangled.  On June 13, Steven, the last person to see Lynne alive, was charged with first-degree murder and, controversially, was ordered to be tried as an adult.  On September 30 he was found guilty and sentenced to hang, the death penalty still being in force in Canada.  In 1960 when his appeal was dismissed, the Government of Ontario commuted his sentence to life in prison.  In 1969, he was released on parole.  Only in 2007 was his conviction overturned because of closer and more modern inspection of the key evidence. 

Cooper’s wise strategy in dramatizing this story is to keep Steven and Lynne in the background and to focus instead on how the changing course of events effects the fictional character of Sarah (Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster), who is also a classmate of Steven’s.  She is the principal narrator of the action speaking to us from the present about the events of the past.  Cooper also has most of the secondary characters act as narrators of events in which they were involved so that the play takes on the nature of a Greek tragedy with a chorus and choral leader without adhering to the strict separation of narration and dialogue as occurs in ancient tragedy.

Looked at from today’s perspective the play is about the decades of normal life that Steven Truscott lost due to a miscarriage of justice, but Cooper prevents Steven from becoming a tragic hero by preventing us from ever really getting to know him.  Instead, Cooper more clearly portrays the “innocence lost” of the town of Clinton, where a terrible crime occurred that has still never been solved.  The town’s lost innocence is embodied in Sarah, who moves from a happy childhood belief that all is right with the world to the unsettling realization that no one, not even doctors, lawyers or the police, can be trusted.  Sarah’s tragedy is a loss in faith in authority that can never be regained.

In accordance with the simplicity of Cooper’s style, set designer Camellia Koo has made the acting area at the Baillie Theatre completely open except that she has added a stand of tree trunks all along the back wall with a narrow corridor of darkness behind them.  The trees come to symbolize the woods where Lynne’s body was found.  In the corridor behind them director Jackie Maxwell has Lynne periodically walk back and forth after her death.  Yet, Maxwell often has various characters take their place among the trees when they are not speaking as if they, too, were part of what is concealing the truth.  The impression that both Maxwell and Koo give of the world of the play is a picture of a brightly lit realm of action behind which lies an unknowable realm of darkness.  The only props are mismatched wooden chairs and tables.

Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster does an exemplary job as the central link between us and the narrative.  She clearly distinguishes Sarah as an adult from Sarah as a child and a teenager.  Sarah is hits especially hard by Steven’s conviction because she has had a crush on him all through school, and Lancaster shows us just how agonizing it is for Sarah to accept that a boy she liked could have done so terrible a deed.  Yet, it is particularly chilling when Lancaster shows us how the older Sarah has suppressed her former feelings and has angrily conformed to the negative assessment of Steven in the town. 

As Sarah’s parents, John Cleland depicts Sarah’s father as far more concerned and cautious than is Sarah’s mother, well played by Deborah Drakeford as a bigoted, self-satisfied woman ready to believe the worst about anyone.  Some of this self-satisfaction Drakeford carries over into her other role as the male Dr. Penistan. 

In great contrast to Sarah’s mother is Caroline Gillis’s portrayal of Steven’s mother Doris.  Not for a minute does she believe in her son’s guilt and Gillis’s depiction of Doris’s steadfastness is a moving depiction of how tragedy can bring out the greatest strength in an ordinary person.  In a complete turnaround, Gillis also plays the insolent boy Butch George, whose penchant for making up stories helps convict Steven, who is supposed to be his friend.

Quite unlike the inner strength of Steven’s mother is the complete mental decline of Lynne’s father portrayed with much emotion by John Jarvis.  Jarvis’s other role is that of Steven’s strangely ineffective defence lawyer who seems to cave in when faced with the prosecution’s arguments.

Nancy Palk plays three roles – a cynical citizen of Clinton who like Sarah’s mother immediately believes Steven is guilty, the stern judge at Steven’s trial whose summary of the case is far from impartial and the journalist Isabel LeBourdais.  LeBourdais (1909-2003) is based on a real person, the author of the book The Trial of Steven Truscott (1966) that pointed out all the flaws in procedure in examining the evidence in the case and in the trial itself leading to the conclusion that Steven was wrongfully convicted.  Palk is excellent at showing both how out of place LeBourdais is as a city woman in a country setting but also how her keen intellect wins over anyone willing to listen.  An especially insightful feature of the play is Cooper’s depiction of of how the town does not at all welcome LeBourdais’s arrival mostly because they don’t wish to have the view they have communally accepted overturned.  

In other roles Akosua Amo-Adem plays two of Steven contemporaries – the bubbly schoolgirl Trudy and the more serious Jocelyne Gaudet, whose testimony along with Butch’s, was key to convicting Steven.  Christef Desir plays both an adult farmer and a teen of Steven’s age.  Cooper has written the role of Steven as a cipher, a generally nice guy with no especially remarkable traits.  She does this deliberately so that we along with the people of the town are free to project whatever view we want onto the character.  To play such a figure must be difficult but Dan Mousseau carefully plays Steven so that no gesture or voice inflection betrays hidden guilt or confirms his avowed innocence.  Berkley Silverman functions primarily as the ghostly presence of Lynne Harper.                 

Sadly, Beverley Cooper’s play is still vitally relevant. It is important to recognize that a miscarriage of justice can come about not only through the machinations of grossly based people but also through the insufficient logic and questioning of evidence by ordinary people who think they are attempting to do good.  Perhaps most quietly frightening is Sarah’s giving in to the communal view in Clinton that Steven is guilty despite her own inward doubts and the presence of Steven’s stalwart mother.  Through Sarah’s change of opinion, Cooper shows how easily groupthink can conquer individual thought because it is so much easier to think like those do around you than to fight to think differently.  This makes the play today sound like a warning to those both on the right and the left who wish to suppress ideas contrary to their own.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Dan Mousseau as Steven Truscott, John Jarvis as Steven’s defence lawyer and Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster as Sarah; Berkley Silverman as Lynne Harper, Dan Mousseau as Steven Truscott, and Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster as Sarah; Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster as Sarah and Nancy Palk as Isabel LeBourdais. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.   

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.