The art of flattery in dangerous times
Two strong sides in play’s palace love triangle
Marie Antoinette: The Colour of Flesh Theatre: Shadow Written by: Joel Gross Directed by: John Hudson Starring: Nicola Elbro, Alana Hawley, Frank Zotter Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83rd Ave. Running: through Feb. 16 Tickets: 780-434-5564, TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)
“Wonderful!” cries an arriviste society painter on the eve of that famous French brouhaha of 1789. “I’m the first member of my family to have a servant ... just in time for a revolution!”
That’s the thing about hardscrabble upward mobility in a society of gross class inequalities: climb and connive as you might, it’s a gamble. Portraiture, in particular, the provision of flattering images to the wealthy and powerful, is chancy. It may not even be sustainable — as they’ll say in a later century — either socially or artistically.
Marie Antoinette: The Colour of Flesh, by American playwright Joel Gross, at Shadow Theatre, sets forth a love triangle, which is really more of pyramid since two of its participants — the artist in question and an aristocrat who is a democrat, who both have something to gain — are manipulating their way up to the third character, a loveless innocent who happens to be the queen of France.
In Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the ambitious artist, and the queen, Marie Antoinette, who found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong guy and the wrong attitude wearing the wrong accent, Gross extrapolates rather smartly from history. Elisa and the queen, who are both in favour of idealized skin tones, have love affairs with the same rosy-hued man, the fictitious Count Alexis de Ligne, a monarchist/ champagne socialist whose revolutionary fervour inspires him to fight in the American Revolution.
In John Hudson’s Shadow production, dressed by Brian Bast all in gorgeous cream colours, Nicola Elbro creates an unexpectedly dimensional and ultimately touching portrait of Marie Antoinette, the sad child bride who isn’t as dim as she presents, not by a long shot. This very original actor combines imperial exasperation, a hint of acerbity, and vulnerability in a compelling and accessible way. In the end, she grows into a kind of self-knowledge and perspective that neither of her victimizers can muster.
Alanna Hawley’s Elisa has a vivid, aggressive sparkle to her, as the beautiful, manipulative artist, who’s smarter than her royal victim (and gets an arsenal of witty lines from the playwright), but ultimately outsmarts herself and gets caught out in her own manipulations.
Curiously, it’s in the fictional character, the equivocal figure of the lady-killer nobleman, that the play flounders, both in its writing, and the Shadow production, judging by the preview I attended. Who on earth is this guy? Frank Zotter’s performance as Alexis understandably fluctuates all over the place — in tone, in weight, and cadence speech—sometimes in the same speech. Sentences start formally, and end with contemporary throwaway asides, and winks. Possibly this is with the idea of fashioning a modern, conflicted character, who is suffering from a trumped-up case of combination of self-loathing and inflated self-esteem. Hard to say. Anyhow, it’s the 18th century, and while Vienna had delivered Marie onto the world stage, it hadn’t coughed up Dr. Freud yet.
Similarly, the sound design (Dave Clarke) goes for baroque with a sort of modern amalgam of what “period” music is. There isn’t much French about it, in truth. And the climactic use of the Albinoni Adagio, the most clichéd of all possible choices, won’t persuade anyone. Maybe it’s ironic.
If the speeches outlining the need for reform to quell unrest and sustain the ancient regime seem a little detachable (and long), the contemporary resonances of the play are clear. For their part, the actors see to it that the chemistry of attraction crackles, and knows no class boundaries.
The argument about art and beauty is a little subtler. Can the artist afford to indulge the idealizing tendency and ignore reality? “What kind of an artist can see nothing of the world?” asks Alexis, his dander up.
In an era when art is so often the exploration of the inner labyrinth, this is a discussable point.