Opening night at the Fringe with Laurie Fyffe: The Geography Teacher’s Orders
The best Fringe shows arrive on the heat wave of a summer storm and hit just as hard. The lighting strike of revelation contained in the first three Fringe upon which I binged Thursday night was that the Fringe is thriving as a forum for plays that pack a political punch or grapple with challenging source text and big themes. New artists make their debut, while experienced professionals push boundaries.
The Geography Teacher’s Orders
Marta Singh has been circling the theatre scene via the storytelling circuit for a number of years. I was immersed in an earlier version of The Geography Teacher’s Orders in 2015 when she performed the piece for Ottawa StoryTellers at the National Arts Centre’s Fourth Stage. But the startling relevancy of Singh’s tale of a truly terrifying teacher is even more compelling, funny, and chilling now than it was then. This story is a sword of truth that cuts with a sharp edge. Singh’s flash from her adolescent past, played out in the shadow of post Junta Argentina, is a haunting memory that vividly brings to life the epic struggle between teacher and student. Will the geography teacher succeed in bringing her class to order? More to the point of her twisted, dictatorial understanding of education will she bend their individual and collective will into blind compliance as she assaults the sacred bastions of collective action and solidarity. Or, will the students succeed in staging a counter rebellion of compassion, fighting, in the case of one, with words mightier than her sword of oppression. You really do start to feel the rise of an inner democratic cheering section.
Throughout this narrative Singh, her entire frame vibrating with the energy of the tale that must be told, recalls images with arresting sensuality. Her geography teacher is tall and elegant, sporting high heels that – like unwelcome artillery – offer a clicking count down to her arrival. One can just see the students rushing to their seats, faces turned toward the doorway, hearts pounding as sweat breaks out on the brow of anyone not prepared for the next test of not just facts, but character. And there she stands, wreathed in a perfumed cloud of Eve St. Laurent Opium – remember the days when teachers of all sexes were thus crowned with cologne. (If you do, you also remember when Argentina fell to the Junta.)
While their country goes through the televised process of addressing its torturous history – replacing military uniforms with men in suits – the class learns that “what happens in geography class stays in geography class”. This is one instructor who won’t take criticism at parent teacher interviews. But behind that perfectly turned out façade hides the shadow of this teacher’s past. One senses some daemon she needs to exorcise, perhaps her own complicity, or simply disappointment that Argentina’s triad of strong men and their ‘dirty war’ is now suffering its downfall. Confident in her supremacy over young minds, the geography teacher issues the bell weather warning that democracy is “no more about voting every four years than geography is about memorizing names on a map”. Load that in your Juul and vape it.
In this classroom battle lines have been drawn with a perfect piece of white chalk. Compassion and deference to ‘the other’ have no place. Like any sly interrogator, if she can’t break you, the geography teacher will intimidate those you trust into delivering the soul-destroying blow of betrayal. Or will she? Come for the lesson, stay for the outcome of the revolution.
There are only two caveats to this excellent show and performance. Whatever the liminal border between theatre and storytelling it is not defined by annoying lighting. There are too many cross-fades in random pattern. Are we following changes of characters, or shifts in the narrative? And, alas for those pesky headset microphones. Amplification of the tellers’ voice is a staple of storytelling, but that intimacy is undermined when the microphone calls attention to itself by not responding to the fact that no performer consistently faces in one direction.
But these are quibbles and easily fixed. They in no way impinge upon the fact that The Geography Teacher’s Orders is simply one of the most captivating stories you are likely to hear at the Fringe, or elsewhere. So, hear it now. The delicate understatement in some beats of this narrative, plus Singh’s tightly constrained delivery, is at times riveting. Her constraint adds to the intensity and suspense.
Marta Singh’s tale is a lesson from the past that shatters the mirror of our disrupted present with a message of clarity. We stand both warned and reassured. Solidarity can be undermined, from sources exterior and from those close to the beating heart of democracy. But hope rises when the young instruct their elders.
Studio Léonard Beaulne .
A Two Women Production
Created and performed by Marta Singh