New take on old play is stylish but superficial
The Madwoman of Chaillot (out of 4) By Jean Giraudoux, translated by David Edney, directed by Donna Feore. Until Oct. 1 at the Tom Patterson Theatre, 111 Lakeside Dr., Stratford. stratfordfestival.ca or 1-800-567-1600
An important function of major repertory theatres such as Stratford and Shaw is advocacy for old plays. These institutions are uniquely positioned to produce historical scripts that otherwise might just sit on shelves and perhaps get explored in classrooms.
When it works well — as with Chris Abraham’s cracking new Stratford production of Tartuffe — a dialogue is created between past and present that enriches audiences’ understanding of both.
When it doesn’t, you walk away none the wiser about what the big deal was about the historical script in the first place.
This is the unfortunate case with Stratford’s current production of The Madwoman of Chaillot, written during the last years of the Second World War by the Frenchman Jean Giraudoux and presented here in a new translation by David Edney.
Donna Feore is best known and justly admired for her work on musicals (such as this season’s thoroughly entertaining Guys and Dolls). She puts her choreographic skills to work in a stylish but surface-level production that has also been embraced as an opportunity for colourful design by Teresa Przybylski, evoking Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and Miro’s abstractions.
The play is initially set in a Paris café where the President of a new company (Ben Carlson) plots and plans with his cronies: the Broker (Rylan Wilkie), the Baron (David Collins) and the Prospector (Wayne Best). The enterprise? Drilling for oil underneath the city.
The impractical extremity of this undertaking and the exaggerated, archetypal nature of the characterization cues immediately that we are in the realm of absurdist satire, shot through with a strong current of whimsy.
The President and his crew find themselves opposed by the title character, Aurélie (Seana McKenna), an eccentric fallen aristocrat. Told about the nature of the President’s enterprise by the Ragpicker (Scott Wentworth), Aurélie joins forces in the second act with her equally daffy lady posse (Marian Adler, Kim Horsman, Yanna McIntosh), holds a mock trial of the bad guys and sends them all to their death in a fiery pit where their drilling was to take place.
The production plays this as straightforward allegory and invites the audience to support the anti-capitalist message, enjoy the baddies getting their comeuppance and be charmed by the Madwomen and their supporters: artists, peddlers and other societal outsiders.
Feore’s skills in moving bodies elegantly on and offstage and the prettiness of the design initially create pleasing stage pictures, and the commitment of the actors to playing the types they’re given is at first compelling. McKenna’s performance in particular is charming and beautifully spoken.
Przybylski’s costumes are pleasing to the eye; she and Feore handle the in-the-round setting of the Tom Patterson Theatre well in terms of sightlines. But the tackiness of the script, the relentlessness of the whimsy and a lack of variance in tone and pace add up to both acts hitting a plateau.
As energy lulls in this nearly three- hour production, questions present themselves about the distance between Giraudoux’s time and our own. In the meantime, the notion of the seemingly unhinged person in fact being a visionary has moved through commonplace to falling out of step with contemporary debates around mental health.
Giraudoux was relatively unengaged with the war during which he wrote the play, but fascism was nonetheless everywhere around him. While, as Feore argues in a program note, Giraudoux “clearly loves his Madwomen” and it’s pretty clear she does too, what about the fact that Aurélie basically convenes a kangaroo court and condemns her accused to death in absentia?
The production’s lack of subtlety creates an echo chamber of assumed agreement with the play’s anti-establishment premise.
A more critical engagement might have teased out the complexities of staging it in a season sponsored by a number of asset management, insurance and consultancy companies, some of Canada’s largest banks and an Enbridge subsidiary.
I don’t intend to make a case to not put the play on; quite the opposite. I’m rather arguing that the current moment creates a particular context and an opportunity for engagement that this production has not taken up.