Northern epic touches emotional depths
The Breathing Hole K (out of 4) By Colleen Murphy, directed by Reneltta Arluk. Until Sept. 22 at the Festival Theatre, 34 George St. E., Stratford. Stratfordfestival.ca or 1-800-567-1600.
One of the most affecting performances at the Stratford Festival this season isn’t being given by a human, exactly. Nor is it given by an animal, though you’d be tempted to say so. The character is called Angu’juaq and he is a life-sized puppet polar bear, beautifully designed by Daniela Masellis and played by the actor Bruce Hunter.
Angu’juaq is the tragic hero of Colleen Murphy’s ambitious, moving play The Breathing Hole, commissioned by the festival for Canada 150 and set in the Arctic.
Murphy gives Angu’juaq a supernaturally long lifespan of 500 years and makes him an active agent in all three of the play’s sections. In the first, set in the mid-1500s, he’s adopted as a cub by Huumittuq (Jani Lauzon) and lives and hunts peacefully alongside the Inuit.
Circa 1845, the Franklin Expedition of British explorers encounters Angu’juaq and his mate Panik (played by Lauzon) and initially gains a wary trust and respect for the animals, though desperate hunger eventually drives their actions.
And in the darkly satirical final act, passengers on a high-end ecotourism cruise through the Northwest Passage on the New Year’s Eve heralding 2034 (and the 500th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s arrival) encounter the sad old bear, his fur matted with oil.
This production marks many firsts for Stratford: its first Inuit director, Reneltta Arluk; its first commission focused on the North and Indigenous people; and its first cast featuring a large number of Indigenous characters, played by eight Indigenous actors.
It is an epic undertaking and a significant one in this problematically historic year.
When Arluk came on board as di- rector, she urged Murphy (who is not Indigenous) to consult with Inuit on the play’s development and the production script is the result, the program tells us, of “months of critique and two revisions” in collaboration with the Qaggiavuut Society, a Nunavut-based performing arts group.
The indelible message is that any consideration of the North must centre on climate change that’s melting the ice and has already altered the planetary ecosystem forever. Murphy directly and persuasively links these phenomena to European colonization and subsequent capitalist exploitation of the land.
At times these points are made unsubtly, particularly when it involves the flagstaff on which Franklin’s men hang the Union Jack. But in many other ways the play and production gently invite audiences to consider relations between native people, settlers and the natural world through perspectives that are novel — perhaps even a little revolutionary — in this bastion of European-based Canadian culture.
The production starts slowly, with the exchanges between an Inuit family led by Nukilik and Mannilaq (the Inuit actors Johnny Issaluk and Miali Buscemi) feeling somewhat stilted.
This first act sets up the particular relationship of Inuit to their natural environment, including the Indigenous ritual of thanking an animal before eating it, so that its spirit will return in a new form and continue to provide sustenance.
Huumittuq is an outsider in this society, but also a visionary: the act opens with her seeing black water and ends with her predicting the arrival of Franklin’s ship Erebus and with it a change in the way time moves, “not in the shape of a circle, but in the shape of a line.”
The middle section involving Franklin (Randy Hughson), his men and their interaction with two Inuit (Jimmy Blais and Ujarneq Fleischer) is the play’s most nuanced, exploring the question of what counts as authority and knowledge in a number of interesting and sometimes humorous ways (guess how native and settler men bond? Jokes about penis size!).
Franklin’s commitment to all sorts of protocol — religious, military, national — and his intellectual and scientific inquisitiveness make him a fascinating character, and Hughson’s portrayal is thoroughly engaging.
While the play stops short of representing the expedition’s most infamous activity, its depiction of the sailors’ starvation is bracing, played with great conviction by, amongst others, Juan Chioran, Thomas Mitchell Barnet and Jamie Mac.
In the final act, the pitting against each other of different perspectives — nefarious oil company vs. virtuous academic/scientific exploration vs. heinously self-serving ecotourism executives — at first feels schematic.
Subtler points do appear, most memorably in the form of Issaluk as an Inuit security guard for the oil company, who counters suggestions that this compromises him: “FYI — my mom’s happy I got this job.”
Arluk and her technically adept, innovative production team (sets by Masellis, costumes by Joanna Yu, lights by Itai Erdal, music and sound by Carmen Braden) bring the action to a terrible conclusion in a final image of Angu’juaq so moving that it had some viewers holding each other up as they left the theatre.
Strong emotion is one thing: the high ambition of this production is clearly to jolt audiences to awareness of mutual responsibility in the predicament of all the Earth’s creatures and then onwards to action.