A Walk with Mr. McGee: the prequel to Blood on the Moon at the Bytown Museum

 

Jean-Nicolas Masson as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, cuts a fine figure as he  finishes the evening with a most uplifting and impassioned plea for what it is to  feel Canadian in this new nation of Canada. All this happens just before he is assassinated and that is where the play ends.  One could say that Talish Zafar has written a  prequel to Pierre Brault’s  award winning monodrama  Blood on the Moon. Speaking before the Canadian parliament in this final moment, McGee  seems to epitomize the spirit of what Canada has  become and it makes us realize that the death of this man in 1868 was a great loss to the country.  The speech, made up of  authentic  excerpts from earlier published speeches by McGee, embellished by playwright  Zafar , was flowing, patriotic prose, which gives one the sense of this  interesting and certainly timely script  staged by director Dillon Orr and performed in the tiny ground floor space of the Bytown Museum. Certainly not the best place for a play,  with bad acoustics, no lighting facilities and almost no room to manoeuvre for this four person cast, the space proved to be the most difficult obstacle to overcome.

 

Nevertheless, the show was a slice of history, laced with poetry, authentic texts, much imagination and the presence of the gods!  There they were, the three Fates: Nona , Decima and Morta who appear before us, take over the show and decide to  create a performance where they lead McGee on a journey into his past, to show him how dangerous his new political life has become. He is upsetting everyone, mostly the Irish Nationalists and if he continues on his path for a new sense of Canadian (not Irish) nationalism, he will soon regret it.  His wife is also terribly worried and is certain they will all be killed.

In this series of flashbacks  created by the Fates, they want  McGee  to see how his carreer is  affecting other people, how his work is great but how his ideas are  also becoming extremely dangerous. We see his  encounters with politicians, with his tearful wife and  with a famous journalist : Elizabeth McLelwain plays Faith Fenton whose  elegant and majestic delivery of a  a beautiful  monologue describing  how feeling against women  blocked her  career  in this new Canada,  was another one of the high points of the evening.  Apparently the journalist refused to   use her real name(Alice Freeman) because anti-Semitic feeling was probably just as strong as the misogyny that reigned at that time. .

We learn a lot about McGee in this play, even though the story is woven by the Three Fates who leap back and forth through time, and filter all these encounters into theatrical moments that are just as much products of the writer’ s as the director’s imagination.

Alexandra Janvier, Elizabeth Mclelwain and Erin Lindsay as the three Fates who take on all the roles are at their best when they intervene as a musical trio. Taking poetry written by McGee, Ian Huffam and Erin Lindsay  have woven the words into catchy musical arrangements where  the women’s excellent singing voices,( Alexandra Janvier is a powerful singer), bring  us into the 21^st century , especially when Erin Lindsay becomes a beat box and creates some definitely non parliamentary rhythms that are quite fun. Mlle Lindsay appears to be the most interesting  acting talent of the cast with a rich speaking voice and a stage presence that makes one wonder what she could  do in another form of theatre.

Playing in a non-traditional acting space like this Bytown Museum restaurant area is a big challenge but it might have made more sense to try to adapt the staging of the play to the specificities of that space, just to create something more interesting. The four actors seemed to be wandering around each other most of the time and I had the feeling that director Dillon Orr was so focussed on the text, that he really did not give much thought to the space which proved to be the biggest challenge of the evening. 

A word to the actors, there is no need to yell. The acoustics are so bad that the louder registers cause the words to become blurred.  And then, there was that lovely wide door at the back that opened out onto the locks and the cliffs behind the Museum! What a marvellous backdrop that might have made- but it didn’t happen!

This group calling itself Obviously, a Theatre company, under the artistic direction of Dillon Orr and Carol Sinclair, is just beginning its professional adventure since its inception a year ago. They have already produced two plays, translations into English of works by Molière and Michel Marc Bouchard. It is clear that their mandate is to focus on the linguistic duality of Ottawa and for this reason, I  have no doubt that their work will become extremely important. They are all graduates of the University of Ottawa theatre programme, they are just beginners, but they have a solid background in theatre, they have excellent ideas and we will be watching them in the months to come.

A Walk With Mr.  McGee is a good bit of theatrical tourism for people who would like to become acquainted with Thomas D’Arcy McGee and a certain image of the events that spurred him on, especially the period concerning the signing of Confederation on July 1, 1867.

It plays at the Bytown Museum, by the Rideau Locks near the Chateau Laurier. Performances are at 8pm

Ottawa, Alvina Ruprecht

6 July,  2012

A Walk With McGee

Obviously, A Theatre Company

By Talish Zafar 

Directed by Dillon Orr 

Original compositions and Music Direction: Erin Lindsay 

Poetry, lyrics and parliamentary speeches: T.D.McGee 

Dramaturgy:  Ian Huffam

Photo: Sylvain Sabatié

CAST

Thomas D’Arcy McGee:  Jean-Nicolas Masson 

Nona and various characters including J.A. Macdonald:  Erin Lindsay 

Demina and various characters including Faith Fenton: Elizabeth Mclelwain 

Morta and various characters including George Étienne Cartier:  Alexandra Janvier