Talk about the willing suspension of disbelief. Derek Benfield’s Beyond a Joke requires acceptance of a concept stretched to the limit of credibility and beyond.

Six people have died suddenly while working at Jane and Andrew’s country house in England. Unfortunate accidents, it seems, but little wonder their daughter’s fiancé suspects murderous intent. And when the body count goes up, his suspicion seems justified.

It is extremely challenging for actors trying to maintain a semblance of normality in such a setup, even with a realistic and workable indoor/outdoor set, designed by Paul Gardner. All but one of the cast of the Ottawa Little Theatre production directed by Dorothy Ann Gardner rise to the challenge to some degree, but only one is entirely believable throughout and completely at ease with the Oscar Wilde comedic style of making the insignificant important and vice versa.

Sarah Hearn plays Andrew’s sister with total assurance as a pragmatic, no-nonsense woman, ready to roll up her sleeves to dispose of dead bodies or sit in an oasis of calm reading the newspaper.

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Yves Jacques in The  Anderson Project

The productions of writer, actor, and director Robert Lepage remain works-in-progress as they travel the world, often over a period of years. This is the case of his one-man show, Le Projet Andersen/The Andersen Project, first created in French in Québec City in 2005, and now playing in a largely English adaptation at ArtsEmerson’s Cutler Majestic Theatre. In many ways it is dissimilar from the French version I saw in Montreal in 2006.

Robert Lepage has been replaced by his alter ego, the bilingual Québécois actor Yves Jacques, and a layer of cultural significance lost in translation. In Lepage’s semi-autobiographical works, a Québécois leaves home and encounters the outside world.

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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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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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I confess. I make snap judgments all the time, whether with people or shows. I know it’s not good and we should allow time to make up our minds, but I can’t help it. The truth is, I trust my instinct. Having said that, I love nothing more than being surprised and proven wrong in my judgments. The Two Little Birds’ production of and then it happens, ironically all about the tension between giving the audience what they want while still staying true to oneself, does exactly this.

The piece started with information gathered at last year’s Undercurrents and Wakefest festivals through the group’s interactive installation, The Lab, which asked participants what they liked about theatre and what they wanted to see. and then it happens starts off by choosing an answer for each of the question from The Lab and enacting them. The result is a mess. There are bits of musical theatre, a one woman show, a toy helicopter, and many other unfinished pieces.

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WeeTube 5400 is a multimedia performance which uses popular YouTube videos and the comments found under them for the basis of its narrative. The story seems to revolve around everybody and, at the same time, nobody in particular. Or is it so? First of all, is it a story at all?

For about 80 minutes, the actors explore weird videos posted on the popular site YouTube and interpret visitors/subscribers’ comments, in a cold and somewhat detached tone. They choose different settings for “commentators,” such as a home, research laboratory, beach, etc. Why is it so? Are they trying to tell the audience something about certain types of people, about a new generation, new time or, about anything? While the audience laughs at the profanity of the dialogues and weirdness of the videos (this type of humour always works), there is nothing under the surface of this long and repetitive play.

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How much does cultural identity depend on language? No, this question is not sparked by Justin Trudeau’s recent musings about Quebec separation. It is about the theme at the heart of Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations.

Set in the fictional village of Baile Beag, Ireland, in 1833, this ensemble drama can be taken at many levels — as a social history of hedge schools, the recounting of historical events shortly before the potato famine when British soldiers did create an ordnance survey map bearing anglicized place names, a description of Ireland’s transformation from rural Gaelic society to colonial nation, an attack on colonialism, a love story or a murder mystery (without a definitive answer), or a metaphor for communication..

Take it as you will, but Friel has said that Translations is “a play about language and only about language.”

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Even with the latest census pointing out Canadian’s migration to the West, Alberta can still sometimes seem like a wilderness, especially outside of Edmonton. Images of the adventure-hungry and young pouring to work for its oil companies abound. Yet, there’s much more to the place than meets the eye. This is exactly what Toronto’s Architect Theatre points out in Highway 63: The Fort Mac Show, set in and around For McMurray. Based on interviews with long-term residents and those passing through, Highway 63 show that, behind the stereotypes of oil, drugs, and desolation, lie very human stories.

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Photo: Phantom Limb

69°S. or The Shackleton Project, a sixty-five minute multimedia performance piece created by the touring Phantom Limb Company, brings Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition to the stage. The story of misadventure and rescue is “told” through puppets, music, dance, and images which, while impressive, occasionally leave the spectator as lost as the explorers. A program insert gives a terse description of each of the nine “tableaux,” a surprisingly ineffective and untheatrical device given the creativity of the Phantom Limb’s artistic directors Eric Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff.

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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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