And Slowly Beauty, a most original tribute to the artist and a performance that captures the depths of the artistic sensibility

And Slowly Beauty, a most original tribute to the artist and a performance that captures the depths of the artistic sensibility

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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

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