The Secrets of Primrose Square a play by Claudia Carroll
Claudia Carroll, the author of “The Secrets of Primrose Square”, travelled 5,000 miles from her home in Dublin to attend the official premiere of her play at the Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa May 26. Quite a treat for the audience and especially for director John P. Kelly who after two years of not being able to work on stage, clearly felt that her presence was a much-deserved reward for all the bad luck his company has had during the pandemic as well as all the effort and love he poured into this extremely difficult play. Her remarks gave us to understand that she too found the event a treat.
This critic found that the written text held my interest by creating a microcosm of a certain Irish society y represented by three women living alone in a certain area in Dublin. The events are all captured on a single set split into several spaces that need no change of scenery, one great material advantage of the play.
As the lights come up. Susan, a mother raging with anger played by the most powerful Robin Guy, is sitting in the street howling insults at the upper floor of a window where light seems to indicate the presence of a young scoundrel whom she hates with a passion because she blames him for the suicide of her eldest daughter. However, the answer to that is not obvious until the second act and that to my mind was already a weakness in the play because the justification for her anger came too late and I’m not sure whether it was a problem with the text or perhaps with the screaming of the actress that made the scene a bit difficult to understand.
Nevertheless, the point is soon explained as the play evolves.
These three women are bound together by a personal tragedy or a terrible loss that is not necessarily obvious to the others at first but from which the “Secrets” of the title draws its name.
Melissa (Isabelle Kabouchi) , Susan’s youngest daughter, tells us of the disintegration of her home now that her father and mother are both away. The father is on military service in Lebanon and Susan, her mother, is having a mental breakdown. She needs drugs, she disregards the house and leaves piles of smelly laundry stinking up the place. Susan is the central figure here and Robin Guy captures her perfectly with all her rage and destructive behavior. She needs psychotherapy and there are some very emotional scenes of group therapy in a psychiatric ward in a local hospital which might bother anyone who has ever gone through that form of treatment.
Melissa, a disturbed youngster tries to survive the taunting by her snobby classmates by turning to a kindly neighbour Jayne, (Rachel Eugster). The result of this was a dramatic and depressing picture of this society indeed but I barely felt any emotion during the evening except towards the end. It could be that the style of the dialogue purposely prevented me from becoming personally involved.
What happens here is that the characters speak as though they were not confronting any one of their neighbors directly but rather speaking about what had already happened or was going to happen but not in the process of happening even though they were standing in front of the individuals they were addressing. Thus, the link between these three characters and the spectators was more intellectual than emotional.
Although, this indirect form of the dialogue was fascinating, it seemed to lessen the emotional relationship with onlookers by separating us from direct confrontation with the characters’ feelings that might have made more of an impact. There was much emotion during the scene with the psychiatric patients, and at the end , the dialogue assumed a form of reconciliation which also offered a feeling of relief. However, apart from these moments it was difficult to feel anything at all. Perhaps this is what the author intended?
More difficult to understand was the weakness of the acting. Rachel Eugster as Jayne the kindly neighbour who tries to help Melissa, flattened the emotional intensity of her character and really did her best with the Irish accent, but it did not work. This is an ongoing problem in Ottawa with accents and it seems to me that actors should either all speak their own form of English (if they are anglophones) or some form of language they can handle easily and not pretend to speak the way that is not normal for them. Most of these performers have not had professional stage training which would have solved that problem and the result is that we get such a mixture of accents that nothing is really satisfying, especially in a play that is ‘naturalistic’ and not stylized, where accents actually produce specific meaning. In fact, all three of the actors had the same problem and it made me uncomfortable.
Melissa the disturbed daughter was particularly weak. Her delivery was monotonous to the point that one wonders what she was doing in that play. It is clear from her bio that she had much less experience than the others and this, added to the weakness of her reactions in these difficult situations. In any case, the question of accents brought down the level of the show to a nonprofessional evening which was a shame.
Still, I was glad to have the occasion to discover this very sensitive author whom I did not know, and the audience seemed to appreciate the performance judging from their applause at the end. No standing ovations but those reactions are overdone in Ottawa and often don’t mean anything! A fine evening to bring Ottawa audiences back to the stage with a world premiere of a thought-provoking play.
The play is a coproduction by ‘SevenThirty Productions and Three Sisters Theatre Company . The Secrets of Primrose Square continues at the Gladstone until June 1, 2022. www.thegladstone.ca