Alvina Ruprecht

International Children’s Festival: Mummpitz from Germany hits Monty Python on the Head!

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 30, 2012

The Terrific Adventures of Brave Joan Woodsward takes us away on an initiatic trip through the imagination of an intense little girl called Joanna who loves to read about witches and knights and devils and dragons and all the mythology of the Middle Ages.

However it all plays out essentially as a comedy with three musicians who fill the space with the nostalgic sounds of guitar, melodica and drums. There is also a wide eyes actress who becomes the little Joanna. She is fed up with school and wants to escape into her imaginary world of books.

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Circle Mirror Transformation: A Well-Crafted Crowd pleaser

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 27, 2012

Reviewed by Alvina Ruprecht.
The Circle Mirror Transformation is one of those plays that is very deceptive. Until the intermission, you wonder where it is all going because it appears to be nothing but a series of funny moments in an adult drama class taking place in a Community Centre in Shirley (Vermont) where five adults have come for different reasons. The exercises and games which are supposed to be related to a form of theatrical training that acts upon the mind by first acting on the body- a psychophysiological approach according to Richard Schechner – can be amusing, or boring, or silly or whatever you want to think, depending on your relationship with the material. Of course it is a parody of those counter culture encounter groups that became so important in the 1960s and 70s. It takes us back to the “communitas” of the peace and love era where the characters here are caricatures of those for whom theatre is a pretext, because individual therapy is the real motive behind all these gyrations, these exercises, these touchy feeling encounters that came out of the anti-psychiatry movement of the hippy period. “When are we going to do some real acting?” yells the sullen young Lauren ( Catherine Rainville) who never really gets into the spirit of the class as it unfolds in a series of short sketches separated by Marc Désormeaux playful but disquieting music, and by quick blackouts, or interrupted by the arrival of various class members during delicate moments of intense conversation.

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La petite poule d’eau (The Little Water Hen). Strong Community Theatre Adaptation of the Novel by Gabrielle Roy .

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 11, 2012

This adaptation for the stage by Irène Mahé and Claude Dorge, from the novel by Gabrielle Roy, was first performed by the Circle Molière in Saint Boniface in 1992. It was then mounted at the Théâtre du Nouvel Ontario in Sudbury. The story of the poor Tousignant family living on an isolated island on the Petite Poule d’Eau River takes place in 1937. Gabrielle Roy who then went on to write The Tin Flute (Bonheur d’occasion) became one of the important Francophone writers of her era. Here, her novel has captured many apsects of the life of the French Canadians living in the Manitoba wilderness and it is clear that this stage version has retained much of the legendary perhaps even stereotypical quality of that life.

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Death and the Maiden,a study of Trauma Left by Torture

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 9, 2012

First produced in England in 1991, Death and the Maiden (named after the piece by Schubert that the doctor used to listen to as he was torturing his victims) feeds off personal testimonies and well published newspaper reports of the horrors perpetrated by the Chilean secret police (DINA) and the military after the takeover in 1973. In 1976, Orlando Letellier an ex-minister in Allende’s cabinet came to Ottawa to lecture at the University of Ottawa about the situation in Chile after the “golpe” and two weeks later he was killed by a bomb in Washington, another victim of the Condor operation that was so highly publicised. The DINA was therefore operating openly in North America hunting for its victims and one had to be willfully indifferent not to have seen those reports and or understood what was happening in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America at that time.

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Extremely Short Play Festival: A unique event

By Alvina Ruprecht | May 7, 2012

John Koensgen at the CCC theatre Awards. Winner of best director for the Extremely Short Play Festival. Photo: David Pasho

This initiative presented by the New Theatre of Ottawa at Arts Court, brings together 11 new texts by local playwrights, all directed by John Koensgen. Each play has its own particularities, poses its own staging problems for the actors and the director, which is what certainly made the audience aware of the staging process as well as the finished product. Thus, this is a night of surprises that is certainly very entertaining. There is no doubt that this Festival should become a yearly event. Let us hope that the NTO can get more funding to allow them to expand the event over the next few years to include more actors, more directors and perhaps even more plays over a longer period of time.

Each play deserves a comment….so here goes.

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Penny Plain: Burkett tackles the apocalypse as his legendary boarding house becomes a haven away from homophobic, anti-semitic, racists and intolerant nasties of all kinds

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 17, 2012

Ronnie Burkett and Ms Penny Plain.

Ronnie Burkett’s puppet vision of the world has evolved enormously since it first began 25 years ago. One of his earlier works, Awful Manors (1990), the first of his performances we saw at the NAC, and that shocked a lot of people, revealed a finely crafted, campy, extremely naughty activist puppet family raging against racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and intolerance of all kinds. Feeding off serious literary and theatrical erudition, his work was, and still is, a completely new phenomenon on the theatrical scene.

Penny Plain shows to what extent the stage vision and puppet manipulation have grown immensely whereas the textual part of the show seems to be having problems. Still focussed on controversial current debates, this marionette theatre, is now tackling the destruction of our planet, suggesting that a new world order is in the making. Burkett has now shown us his own personal cosmogony which is an intriguing step in a new direction.

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L’Opéra de quat’sous – version Brigitte Haentjens: Une distribution de premier ordre et un travail corporel sophistiqué

By Alvina Ruprecht | February 29, 2012

L’opéra de quat’sous de Bertholt Brecht, dans une adaptation de Jean-Marc Dalpé, mise en scène de Brigitte Haentjens.

Brigitte Haentjens nous donne à nouveau la preuve d’une sensibilité créatrice raffinée, quelques mois avant d’assumer officiellement ses responsabilités en tant que directrice artistique du théâtre Français du Centre national des Arts. Le résultat est plus qu’heureux! Après Woyzek , programmé en 2009 (www.criticalstages.org n. 2, 2010) et Tout comme elle (2006), où nous avons bien compris l’importance de son recours aux multiples corps mouvants, stratégie qui souligne l’importance de sa formation chez Lecoq, nous retrouvons non seulement une énorme distribution de premier ordre, mais un travail corporel extrêmement sophistiqué dans L’opéra de quat’sous, que le public à Ottawa a pu découvrir cette semaine.

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33 (A Kabarett): Unconvincing in Spite of Bremner Duthie’s Enormous Stage Presence and Beautiful Voice.

By Alvina Ruprecht | February 23, 2012

Conceived at the outset as a Fringe show , ’33 (A Kabarett) has become a full-fledged stage production that is an on-going process where elements are added and changed as the show travels around the country. For the moment it is clearly a very unequal show: some moments work very well while others have difficulty establishing any theatrical presence and this is rather odd because Bremner Duthie is an artist with an enormous stage presence and beautiful near operatic voice.

This One Man Show takes place in the ruins of a Club in Nazi Germany where real Cabaret performances took place, until the Nazi regime arrested and killed the artists.. These forms of political theatre have become legendary and have produced a longstanding theatrical tradition linked to the Weimar Republic that has had much influence on subsequent theatre in Germany and elsewhere.

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Undercurrents Festival of One Act Plays. Blue Box: Erotic Dreams More Than a Desire to Blow Things Up!

By Alvina Ruprecht | February 8, 2012

Sounds more like titillation than terrorism” stated a Citizen journalist, speaking about Carmen Aguirre’s book Something Fierce, now on the final list of books being considered for the CBC sponsored Canada Reads contest. Of course the book did not show us the slinky beautiful actress, sauntering out on the stage in her jeans, her t-shirt, black hair and long black boots. But the actress is very much there and her monologue takes us away on a revolutionary fantasy that somehow reflects the erotic dreams of a young girl more than the desire to blow up things.

Actually Blue Box is a well written narrative that delves into the fantasy life of the actress. And I found myself charmed by the text more than by the performance which I think the actress might have taken even further.

Aguirre’s own life becomes the experience of a young woman involved in the Chilean resistance against Pinochet, crossing borders into Argentina, escaping the secret police, all the things we heard about after Pinochet came to power in 1973 after Allende was murdered. At that point Chileans began fleeing to Canada and many of them settled in Ottawa, enrolled in literature courses at Carleton University, began publishing books, poetry, even opened a publishing house (Split Quotations) and became close friends of all of us interested in Latin America. Chile’s loss was our gain. They were a wonderful contribution to the literary and artistic community of Canada. Mme Aguirre was obviously very young at that point and stayed in the country to contribute to the Pinochet resistance . I kept trying to locate her activity in all that madness that followed Allende’s death , all those events that touched us so deeply in Ottawa.

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Cyrano de Bergerac : a good translation but a staging difficult to defend.

By Alvina Ruprecht | February 7, 2012

David Whiteley should be congratulated for his translation of one of the world’s great theatre classics.

Theatre translation, as an art form, has not been given the attention it deserves, from people who analyse plays in this country, given the need for translations between the two official languages that allow all plays to circulate from one linguistic group to the other. The Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD) in Montreal even works regularly with Mexican translators to encourage exchanges between plays from Quebec and from Mexico, an important initiative that was highlighted by a special issue on Canadian Theatre (English and French) published by the Cuban theatre review Conjunto in 2009. A group of us contributed articles about the theatres in this country for the benefit of Hispanophone readers throughout the Americas.

Behind this activity there exist a vast number of theories of translation that guide and orient the translators according to their intentions. Are they trying to remain as “faithful” as possible to the original? Are they trying to capture what the author “intended”? Does the translator try to capture something “universal”. Is the translator responding firstly to the expectations of a contemporary audience even if it means changing the original radically? Because of all the different possibilities, translations easily slide into adaptations. All of these are of course acceptable and nothing is really “wrong” as long as the translator is aware of his or her own particular process.

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