Playing the fool well takes smarts
Dolly Parton once said, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” If Soulpepper Theatre actor Gregory Prest had his turn at the phrase, it would go, “It takes a lot of wit to look this dumb.”
The world certainly isn’t hurting for fools to ogle on the global stage, but it’s rarely as fun to watch as Prest in David Hir-son’s1991comedy La Bête, set in 17th-century France, written entirely in rhyming couplets. Known primarily for dramatic roles in Of Human Bondage, Angels in America, Long Day’s
Journey Into Night and more, Prest is now enjoying an undeniable thrust into comedic territory, making a historic moment by owning almost all of act one with the play’s infamous 30-minute monologue.
As a blowhard who fancies himself an artist of the highest order, Prest makes an enviable scene partner of himself — volleying from thought to thought, phrase to phrase, rhyme to rhyme. Prest hides his own hard work as a skilful actor under the guise of a character who is off on an interminable tangent, with no coherent thought to guide him, no actual grasp of the topics he prattles on about. Prest sends his voice into the upper nasal echelons as he perches on his tiptoes when he’s excited, gets low and drawn-out when in thought, breaking free from the rhythm in Hirson’s clever couplets and turning it into real speech — or as “real” as it gets, considering he calls words “verbobos” and chairs “francescas” (reminiscent of another idiot who makes up words like “bigly”).
Hirson’s play was a late addition to Soulpepper Theatre’s 2018 season, replacing Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Disapproval, which was to be directed by former artistic director Albert Schultz. (That play revolves around a man who joins a community theatre production of A Beggar’s Opera and sleeps with several women in the cast, a plot line that now inspires a spasm of cringes.)
Pairing director Tanja Jacobs with this meta-comedy that pits the concepts of high and low art against each other through two fictional classical French actors, the refined Elomire (modelled after Molière) and Prest’s base, flatulent and long-winded street performer Valere, is actually a fitting response to fill the hole left by Disapproval. More than just a comment on the nature of art and the state of public intelligence, Jacobs adds another layer of gendered inequality by making the voice of reason, intellect and hard work a woman (Sarah Wilson). When Elomire finds her place leading a theatre troupe at the Royal Court threatened by Valere, who has won the favour of Princess Conti (Rachel Jones) with his absurd street performances, she’s an instantly relatable figure for anyone whose hardearned career has been upstaged by privileged mediocrity.
The entire first act, epitomized by that 30-minute monologue, is the 17th-century version of aggressive mansplaining. Wilson’s pained faces in that time are priceless. And there’s a smart turn in act two when Elomire concocts a plan to oust Valere, and he responds with a particular, unforeseen bite as he calls her “darling” and “dear” and says “a star should take her lickings with a smile.”
And yet, the man — and a buffoon of one — is still the one with the 30-minute monologue. He is still the one who laps up the stage, who wraps the audience around his finger, who comes out on top — both in the play and in the audience’s experience of it. Hirson does give Elomire her time with a moving argument for the sanctity of art that comes quite late in the game, and he evidently believes that this character has the moral and intellectual upper ground. But for anyone who doesn’t believe that high art is more inherently good than low art, or who thinks the comparison of the two is more complex than Hirson lays out, there is no moral or intellectual winner and Elomire becomes a rigid snob who can’t evolve with the times.
Princess Conti, performed by another comedic gem in Jones, is the one who captures the play’s prescience on the current moment: “We can’t tell truth and travesty apart,” and “fools control the world, that’s what you’re saying, because of them we are decaying.”
This was perhaps more thrilling when La Bête was more of a cautionary tale than a reminder of the reality we’re living in. But, lucky for this cast, its exploration of our love of idiots lets them play to their smarts.