Royal Vic and its ghosts take centre stage
Nurses’ lounge serves as setting for hospital farce Progress!
The passing of the Royal Victoria as a functioning hospital has been marked by a couple of especially bittersweet commemorative events over the past year. First there was the reconstruction of the nurses’ traditional tea party, complete with Victorian costume and antique silver tea sets, that took place in the nurses’ lounge in January. Then there was the stirring Black Watch pipe-anddrum parade for the official closing in April.
But the Royal Vic’s epic history hasn’t quite flatlined yet. This week sees the venerable limestone pile swinging open its doors for one final cultural event before the keys are handed over. Director Guy Sprung has managed to persuade the powers that be to clear the corridors and allow him to wheel Infinithéâtre’s latest production in for an immersive, site- specific run of performances. The theatre in question will be the nurses’ lounge, prepped by stage designer Cassandre Cha-tonnier for Alyson Grant’s new play, Progress!
The meta- theatrical setup for Progress!, Grant’s followup to her previous Infinithéâtre play Trench Patterns, is that it takes place during the Royal Vic’s wind- down of operations. It begins with a middle- aged patient waking up from a suicide attempt to find two Victorian vaudevillian ghosts putting on a show of her life. The ghosts represent the very first two patients to die in the woman’s sick room, circa 1893, which allows Grant to muse over the hospital’s 120- year history.
“The Royal Vic loomed so large in the lives of Montrealers as it stood on the hill here,” says Grant, who previously wrote for the Montreal Gazette and currently teaches English Lit at Dawson. “So many Montrealers know all the nooks and crannies of this hospital. They walked the corridors or held the hands of people dying here. They were born here or gave birth here or got better here,” she says as she relaxes with Chatonnier in the nurses’ lounge, surrounded by pink- meringue mouldings and antiquarian furniture.
If that makes it all sound like melancholy medicine to swallow, your spirits might revive on hearing that Progress!, like many other potentially bleak hospital-set dramas ( Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Wit, The National Health), is a comedy — an absurdist farce, to be exact.
“One of my main concerns from the get- go,” Grant says, “was that the humour works. The jokes are important to me. Yes, the main character has tried to kill herself, but I don’t want to bang people over the head with it. There’s a similar dynamic going on with the main character here as in Trench Patterns,” which was about a Canadian soldier recovering from her post- Afghanistan traumas. “In both cases the main character uses humour as a defence mechanism. But there’s a heaviness and darkness to Trench Patterns that isn’t in this play.”
Finding the right location in the hospital was also of paramount importance, and that’s where Chatonnier came in. After rejecting what might have been the most obvious choice — the hospital’s main auditorium — she discovered the nurses’ lounge, which consists of two adjoining rooms.
“When we arrived here, we thought, ‘ that’s it!’ because the rooms are like a bridge between the old and the new,” Chatonnier says. “We have this room, which has a real baroque, old- fashioned feel, and you go into the adjoining room and suddenly you’re in a cold hospital space with neon tubes and plastic tiles.”
How these two spaces will be used for the performance is a surprise the production team is keeping up its sleeves for the moment, but Chatonnier points to an odd little stage in the second room.
“It was probably used for demonstrations. The obvious thing would have been to say, oh, we have a weird little theatre at the back, we can do the play there, we don’t have to build anything. But then we thought, no, it’s actually more interesting to do the play in the room with the audience and to use the stage at the back as a metaphor, a space for the ghosts to perform their play- within- a- play.”
Given the play’s ghostly goingson, one can imagine the audience timorously approaching the looming Victorian turrets and shuddering at the thought of sinister wraiths haunting those empty corridors and wards, like something out of The Shining. For Grant, however, the ghosts represent something far more benign. As well as being comical, there’s something touchingly solicitous about them. She has a particularly affecting story behind that.
“The original idea of the ghosts being like caretakers was based on something my sister, who was an ICU nurse at the Children’s Hospital here, told me. There was a teenage boy who was dying here and he kept referring to the redhaired girl who was helping him. And of course nobody could see her. But after he died, the nurses recalled that there had been a red- haired girl there as a patient. She’d died and her parents kept visiting the hospital on a yearly basis. They saw it as a place of pilgrimage almost. I don’t really believe in ghosts, but I couldn’t help thinking, well, what’s going to happen to the red- haired girl when this hospital is closed? Where is she going to go? What’s going to happen to all those other people who died here? Obviously not literally, but their spirit, or my sense of their spirit. And so the two ghosts in Progress! are kind of pissed off, because they were supposed to be here forever, taking care of people who were also dying in their room. And now that’s all been changed. For me that’s a big thing. In the city ’s psyche, it’s a huge thing.”
Speaking of supernatural soliciting, there’s just time to catch Macbeth, which ends Sunday, at the Segal’s cinema space. The first in a season of screenings of acclaimed open- air productions from London’s legendary Globe Theatre, it’s introduced by Repercussion Theatre’s artistic director Amanda Kellock. For more information, visit segalcentre. org.
They were born here or gave birth here or got better here.