And Slowly Beauty, a most original tribute to the artist and a performance that captures the depths of the artistic sensibility
This singular interweaving of high art, in the form of Chekhov’s theatre, with the everyday life of a simple human being, is given a most exquisite stage treatment by director Michael Shamata in this coproduction by the Belfry Theatre and the English Theatre company of the National Arts Centre. Michel Nadeau’s dreamlike experience, And Slowly Beauty, translated by Maureen Labonté , takes us on a journey of flowing transformation. Mr. Mann – the Man – (Denis Fitzgerald), a well-established employee of a downtown company leads the empty life of a bureaucrat. The empty chatter of the office employees, the even emptier chatter of his wife are compounded by his helplessness in front of his children whose lives don’t bring him any satisfaction.
Then, one evening, after watching a performance of Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, he senses an inner awakening. Feelings of joy, of pleasure and a new heightened sensibility take hold of him and evolve slowly into a new way of seeing the world. Performed through a series of evolving masks, expressing pain, loneliness, frustration, alienation and ultimately happiness, this delicate epiphany is deeply etched on the actor’s face as words seem to take second place to the pauses and the physical expression that marks the essence of this almost hieratic performance that brings our anti-hero into the realm of allegory. Fitzgerald’s final expression of beatitude as he thinks of the absolute beauty and total inutility of snowflakes, warms us to the bottom of our hearts. We know the character has understood the meaning of art and what it can contribute to one’s life.
This is not at all an overly sentimental play. Quite the contrary. The beginning takes us through a satire of white collar bureaucracy as office workers march through the transparent corridors of John Ferguson’s skeleton of a house with glass panels and wooden studs supporting the roof, suggesting Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the circus world of a house of mirrors, even the dehumanized world of Ionesco as the set itself takes on multiple personalities throughout the play, ultimately becoming a character in its own right.
Shamata’s choreography which dominates the performance , positions his actors like dancers as they whip through the labyrinth of paper pushers and jargon spouting administrators, especially in one funny scene where their office babble becomes a chorus of musical gibberish that drew gales of laughter from the audience. The references to the Civil service was all the more obvious to an Ottawa audience which clearly saw itself on stage.
The moment Chekhov’s performance of Three Sisters played out under the roof of that set of light wooden frames, part of the stage become theatre within theatre, and it all oozed out onto the rest of the stage as Chekhov’s trio of sisters invaded Mann’s contemporary world. From that moment on, the performance shifted between Mann’s obsession with the Three Sisters disguised as various characters in Mann’s now precarious and often boring real life, or morphing into Mann’s dream scenarios of love and beauty as he finds himself engulfed in the world of art that Chekhov has opened before him. Throughout these episodes of transformation that emerge from Ferguson’s intriguingly fragile skeleton of a set, beautiful but fleeting encounters with mysteriously charming young women reach out to Mann’s soul.
On that illuminated set, a lone tree reminds us of The Cherry orchard, the Canadian geese passing overhead make us think of The Seagull. Chekhov is everywhere as theatre and reality come together in this stage world where actors shift roles and are caught up in the flow of movement that has them all running chaotically in many directions at once, incarnating the urgency of Chekhov’s sisters whose drive towards Moscow, represents Mann’s own sense of urgency as his new obsession draws him beyond the cafés, the offices, the rooms, the familiar people in his life.
It was interesting the way the rhythm of Shamata’s staging, which is central to Mann’s transformation, reminded me ever so much of Wajdi Mouawad’s version of The Three Sisters which he presented several years ago at the Festival des Francophonies in Limoges, France. Mouawad kept the three actresses dashing back and forth across the stage until they became a trio of fleeting shadows barely visible in that old house that was slowly crumbling away. They incarnated the breathless thrust of their need to escape from that old society and rush off to a new life in Moscow.
Nadeau has created a character that is the living breathing replica of Chekhov’s movement into the modern world and he does it with enormous delicacy. Even Brooke Maxwell’s music contributes to this driving sense of longing that ultimately draws Mann away into his final moments of joy.
The play might do with a bit of trimming at certain moments but Shamata has made this text the perfect statement of a fantasy relationship with an old world coming apart at the seams and the budding of a new optimism, a fairy tale about the birth of a new utopia, perhaps the discovery of a new found spirituality, where the uplifting power of art generates a great sense of hope and liberation. This is an experience not to be missed.
And Slowly Beauty continues until November 19 in the studio of the National Arts Centre.
First published on the site www.scenechanges. com
Ottawa, Alvina Ruprecht, 17 Novembre, 2011
And Slowly Beauty
at the National Arts Centre English Theatre
By: Michel Nadeau (in collaboration with Marie-Josée Bastien, Lorraine Côté, Hugues Frenette, Pierre-François Legendre, Véronika Makdissi-Warren and Jack Robitaille)
Translated by: Maureen Labonté
An NAC English Theatre/Belfry Theatre (Victoria, B.C.) production
Director: Michael Shamata
Designer: John Ferguson
Lighting designer: Michael Walton
Composer: Brooke Maxwell
Associate designer: Tamara Marie Kucheran
Stage manager (NAC): Jane Vanstone Osborn
Stage manager (Belfry): Kim Charleen Smith
Cast:
Anita: Mary-Colin Chisholm
Mr. Mann: Dennis Fitzgerald
Claudette: Caroline Gillis
Sylvain: Christian Murray
Quentin: Thomas Olajide
Nadine: Celine Stubel