Back in the 1960s, the Stratford Festival performed a number of twentieth-century plays by European playwrights, in English translation. In more recent years, this particular strain of theatre has become rare to the point of being an endangered species on Stratford's stages. So this season's production of David Edney's new English translation of Jean Giraudoux's La Folle de Chaillot ("The Madwoman of Chaillot") is a welcome addition to the Festival's repertoire.
It's timely, too -- so timely that it's hard to believe it hasn't been staged more often of late.
And for me, there's a personal resonance. I had an opportunity to appear in a high school production of the play back in 1972, and passed for personal reasons -- there was just too damn much going on in my life that year! But I did go to see the show, and enjoyed very much watching a number of friends on stage in this play.
Since The Madwoman is such a rare bird, a quick synopsis is not out of place. A Prospector discovers that Paris is sitting on a gigantic pool of oil, and conspires in a café with a President and a Baron to destroy Paris and get at the black gold.
Their plottings are overheard by various delightful and eccentric denizens of the neighbourhood of Chaillot, most prominently the Countess Aurelie (Seana McKenna) who passes the time of day in the café daily. Although Aurelie's own eccentricities are so marked that she is called The Madwoman of Chaillot, she is actually no fool. She works out a plot to dispose of the conspirators without delay. There's a hilarious mad tea party/mock trial, and the play ends with Paris returning to life after the Prospector, President, Baron, and the rest are safely locked inside a one-way secret passage in Aurelie's cellar.
No getting around it: this play is not notably realistic. Instead, for all its comical moments, it hovers somewhere between the worlds of fable and allegory -- and this places it in the same general field as another European play staged at Stratford way back in 1981, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit. One major similarity of these two otherwise dissimilar moral tales is the use of occupations or characteristics rather than names to identify the characters -- over half of the characters in The Madwoman are labelled as The Street Singer, The Lifeguard, The Sewer Worker, and so on.
Now, although this all sounds batty beyond words when set down in black and white, the actual play is a much more gently satirical creation. Its impact depends completely on being (for the most part) underplayed. It most emphatically is not a farce, and that style mustn't creep in anywhere. Well, except for a few very brief moments. The best productions of this play will move with a lyrical, almost musical rhythm through the multiple intertwining episodes, especially in the first act.
Director Donna Feore has orchestrated a delightful team effort which understands the stylistic needs of the piece and, for the most part, achieves them. Her experience on the Festival stage shows clearly in her effective use of the Tom Patterson's oblong arena stage, with few if any of the characters getting trapped into twisting around in circles, trying to face everyone at once. Also, and just as unmistakable, is the gently musical feel of the text in so many scenes, a sensation which clearly reflects Feore's long experience of directing musicals.
Designer Teresa Przybylski's first act café set uses a subtle device to suggest the overhanging trees which shade all the best sidewalk cafés in Paris. The space above the stage is hung with interlacing curved strips of lights, suggesting the strings of lights hanging in the tree branches. In the second act, Countess Aurelie's cellar is stuffed to the brim with all kinds of antiquated furnishings, piled-up treasures, and odds and ends of all kinds. The property manager was still busy enumerating all the pieces on a checklist as we took our seats for the second act! Costumes varied from the proper suits for the business characters to such eccentricities as Gabrielle's vast hooped skirt, the Lifeguard's red and orange striped bodysuit, the Prospector's swirling cloak, and Josephine's regal purple dress and hat. Kimberley Purtell's lighting designs were simple and effective, with a sickly reddish special in the offstage exit area for the magic cellar passage.
The most unmusical part of the play is the opening scene in which the President and the Baron meet, plan to set up their new corporation, and then encounter the Prospector who tells them that Paris is sitting on top of a giant pool of oil, ripe for the drilling. This portion of the text is, no surprise, the most businesslike and prosaic of all. Ben Carlson's signature breezy style of speech suited the casual rudeness of the President to perfection, while David Collins developed a nice hint of hesitation and need to be persuaded as the Baron. The big weak link here was Wayne Best, whose performance as the Prospector was laced with over-the-top diction and farcical gestures and mannerisms. It was another one of those characterizations that's funny at first and quickly becomes boring because it's so predictable.
As this plot gradually develops, the stage as gradually fills in with the multiple, diverse, quirky personalities of the Parisian street scene as envisaged by Giraudoux. Comic highlights here, and not over the top, were the street singer of Mike Nadajewski (who only recalls the first phrase of his song, "La belle polonaise") and Gareth Potter as the by-the-book Lifeguard. On a more human level, I was persuaded to love the simplicity of Irma, the Kitchen Girl (Mikaela Davies) and Florette, The Deaf Signer (Elizabeth Morris).
(By the way, that last is not a misprint for "Deaf Singer." This is the earliest play I have yet encountered which includes sign language as part of the text of the play, with other characters interpreting aloud Florette's signing. The original English translation of 1948 by Maurice Valency referred to the character as "the Deaf Mute.")
Add in a Juggler, a Flower Seller, a Shoelace Peddler, a Sewer Worker, a Ragman, a Doctor, and you can begin to see why a character identified as "The Eccentric" can pass through almost unremarked!
Michael Spencer-Davis gives a finely judged performance as Martial, the Waiter, who acts as a kind of master of ceremonies throughout the café scene -- breezy and understated.
The link connecting these dissimilar worlds is provided by Pierre (Antoine Yared), a young man who was hired by the President to blow up a building but didn't carry through his mission. Instead, out of fear, he leaped into the river to drown himself, only to be rescued by the Lifeguard.
One of Seana McKenna's finest moments in the whole play is the lengthy speech in which Aurelie describes her morning routine, to show Pierre how beautiful life is. She succeeds in persuading him to consider living, albeit still doubtful, but then he meets Irma and that seals the deal. Yared was truly convincing in his wish to die, but allowed himself to thaw out by degrees under Aurelie's concern and her depiction of the beauty of life.
Seana McKenna gave another of her many outstanding performances as Aurelie. Everything about this character, from her speech to her appearance to her movements, has to telegraph gentility and subtlety of mind. McKenna clearly understood this, and more besides.
Earlier on, the Ragman has appeared as but one of the cast of eccentrics, but it's at this point in the play that he assumes major stature. Scott Wentworth stepped easily and naturally into the role of the official spokesperson, persuading the others that they must explain to Aurelie exactly what danger her beloved Paris faces.
The final scene of the act, where Aurelie issues instructions to everyone, was played by McKenna with just the right tone of gentility underlain by an unquestioning assurance that she would be obeyed.
The second act introduces three more characters -- Aurelie's fellow madwomen. Kim Horsman was a forceful, acidic Constance. Marion Adler portrayed a querulous and uncertain Gabrielle. And Yanna McIntosh, in a rare but rewarding foray into comedy, played the ethereal and whimsical Josephine. The four proceed to hold a kind of "mock court trial" for the President and his associates, with the Ragman called upon to stand in for the defendants and Josephine acting as the judge. Wentworth was especially funny here, glorying in his alter ego's own evil schemes to control all the world's money.
More poetic was the scene where Pierre finds Aurelie mistaking him for her long-lost lover, Adolphe Bertaut. Is this just a fantasy? Or is it a dream? Or a hallucination? We aren't told, and don't really need to know, since both McKenna and Yared struck the note of gentle irony tinged with regret that this moment demands.
This production succeeded beautifully in transporting us to the dream-like wonders of Paris before World War Two (the play was first staged in 1944). Not the real Paris, but Paris as it may never have actually been. It's the idea of Paris that matters here, the ideal city of light, of laughter, of love. It's no accident that the stage reached it's most brilliantly lit state in the final moments, after the "villains" were securely locked away, when various characters rushed in to report that the sun was shining again, people were smiling, and the birds were flying once more.
Director Donna Feore has orchestrated a delightful team effort which understands the stylistic needs of the piece and, for the most part, achieves them. Her experience on the Festival stage shows clearly in her effective use of the Tom Patterson's oblong arena stage, with few if any of the characters getting trapped into twisting around in circles, trying to face everyone at once. Also, and just as unmistakable, is the gently musical feel of the text in so many scenes, a sensation which clearly reflects Feore's long experience of directing musicals.
Designer Teresa Przybylski's first act café set uses a subtle device to suggest the overhanging trees which shade all the best sidewalk cafés in Paris. The space above the stage is hung with interlacing curved strips of lights, suggesting the strings of lights hanging in the tree branches. In the second act, Countess Aurelie's cellar is stuffed to the brim with all kinds of antiquated furnishings, piled-up treasures, and odds and ends of all kinds. The property manager was still busy enumerating all the pieces on a checklist as we took our seats for the second act! Costumes varied from the proper suits for the business characters to such eccentricities as Gabrielle's vast hooped skirt, the Lifeguard's red and orange striped bodysuit, the Prospector's swirling cloak, and Josephine's regal purple dress and hat. Kimberley Purtell's lighting designs were simple and effective, with a sickly reddish special in the offstage exit area for the magic cellar passage.
The most unmusical part of the play is the opening scene in which the President and the Baron meet, plan to set up their new corporation, and then encounter the Prospector who tells them that Paris is sitting on top of a giant pool of oil, ripe for the drilling. This portion of the text is, no surprise, the most businesslike and prosaic of all. Ben Carlson's signature breezy style of speech suited the casual rudeness of the President to perfection, while David Collins developed a nice hint of hesitation and need to be persuaded as the Baron. The big weak link here was Wayne Best, whose performance as the Prospector was laced with over-the-top diction and farcical gestures and mannerisms. It was another one of those characterizations that's funny at first and quickly becomes boring because it's so predictable.
As this plot gradually develops, the stage as gradually fills in with the multiple, diverse, quirky personalities of the Parisian street scene as envisaged by Giraudoux. Comic highlights here, and not over the top, were the street singer of Mike Nadajewski (who only recalls the first phrase of his song, "La belle polonaise") and Gareth Potter as the by-the-book Lifeguard. On a more human level, I was persuaded to love the simplicity of Irma, the Kitchen Girl (Mikaela Davies) and Florette, The Deaf Signer (Elizabeth Morris).
(By the way, that last is not a misprint for "Deaf Singer." This is the earliest play I have yet encountered which includes sign language as part of the text of the play, with other characters interpreting aloud Florette's signing. The original English translation of 1948 by Maurice Valency referred to the character as "the Deaf Mute.")
Add in a Juggler, a Flower Seller, a Shoelace Peddler, a Sewer Worker, a Ragman, a Doctor, and you can begin to see why a character identified as "The Eccentric" can pass through almost unremarked!
Michael Spencer-Davis gives a finely judged performance as Martial, the Waiter, who acts as a kind of master of ceremonies throughout the café scene -- breezy and understated.
The link connecting these dissimilar worlds is provided by Pierre (Antoine Yared), a young man who was hired by the President to blow up a building but didn't carry through his mission. Instead, out of fear, he leaped into the river to drown himself, only to be rescued by the Lifeguard.
One of Seana McKenna's finest moments in the whole play is the lengthy speech in which Aurelie describes her morning routine, to show Pierre how beautiful life is. She succeeds in persuading him to consider living, albeit still doubtful, but then he meets Irma and that seals the deal. Yared was truly convincing in his wish to die, but allowed himself to thaw out by degrees under Aurelie's concern and her depiction of the beauty of life.
Seana McKenna gave another of her many outstanding performances as Aurelie. Everything about this character, from her speech to her appearance to her movements, has to telegraph gentility and subtlety of mind. McKenna clearly understood this, and more besides.
Earlier on, the Ragman has appeared as but one of the cast of eccentrics, but it's at this point in the play that he assumes major stature. Scott Wentworth stepped easily and naturally into the role of the official spokesperson, persuading the others that they must explain to Aurelie exactly what danger her beloved Paris faces.
The final scene of the act, where Aurelie issues instructions to everyone, was played by McKenna with just the right tone of gentility underlain by an unquestioning assurance that she would be obeyed.
The second act introduces three more characters -- Aurelie's fellow madwomen. Kim Horsman was a forceful, acidic Constance. Marion Adler portrayed a querulous and uncertain Gabrielle. And Yanna McIntosh, in a rare but rewarding foray into comedy, played the ethereal and whimsical Josephine. The four proceed to hold a kind of "mock court trial" for the President and his associates, with the Ragman called upon to stand in for the defendants and Josephine acting as the judge. Wentworth was especially funny here, glorying in his alter ego's own evil schemes to control all the world's money.
More poetic was the scene where Pierre finds Aurelie mistaking him for her long-lost lover, Adolphe Bertaut. Is this just a fantasy? Or is it a dream? Or a hallucination? We aren't told, and don't really need to know, since both McKenna and Yared struck the note of gentle irony tinged with regret that this moment demands.
This production succeeded beautifully in transporting us to the dream-like wonders of Paris before World War Two (the play was first staged in 1944). Not the real Paris, but Paris as it may never have actually been. It's the idea of Paris that matters here, the ideal city of light, of laughter, of love. It's no accident that the stage reached it's most brilliantly lit state in the final moments, after the "villains" were securely locked away, when various characters rushed in to report that the sun was shining again, people were smiling, and the birds were flying once more.
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