Young Lady in White: History and Memory That Don’t Connect!
An impressive set by Patrice-Ann Forbes immediately arouses our curiosity; it exposes levels of an old house in Berlin with a photo lab, dark room, sleeping areas and a rooftop space where one can watch the world go by. The place is “haunted” by a living negative, a young girl, played by a perky, passionate and strong Catriona Leger, whose picture was taken by an anonymous photographer in 1932 at a resort on the Baltic Sea. The subject of the picture returned to England but her photo was never developed…and so the living negative wanders through the house like a ghost, visible only to the audience. Thus begins her story which she performs with her white hair and black dress, waiting for someone to come along, reverse her negative appearance, develop her , bring her back to her paper reality, so she can become herself in that beautiful white dress she was wearing when the photo was taken. The enigma of the photographer, the quest for a developer, the memories of that girl who sees the world passing, from 1932 to the present, create layer upon layer of narrative levels that build up this monologue. Catriona Leger is a strong presence, shifting her tone, her rhythms, moving about the stage with much ease, capturing all the nuances entrenched in that text . Yes it is a captivating performance because of the difficulty of the monologue and the complexity with relation to her gaze on history. Projected images move across the back to illustrate what she captures through her seeing eye window as she peers into the street. watching history roll by.
Nevertheless the play poses many problems. . The sequence of images taken from WWII, this brief and rapid look at important moments of European and German history as seen from the window, was not particularly engaging even though the Young Lady brings to her special gaze the distance of someone who is trying to understand what is happening , who was not involved, and who was not able to intervene because she is not really there.
To add a different perspective, the author places a creature of fantasy on stage, a foulmouthed street-cat, and a left over from the radicalized politics of the Berliner Dada movement (Chada) who pops out on the wall and starts spewing the angry language, in German. to announce his resistance to everything. I wish the cat (Zach Counsil) sounded as though he really meant it because he wasn’t nearly nasty enough. No mind , this vision of history is seen from the unconventional vantage point of a woman who is helpless and cannot communicate with anyone. So she is trapped in her choppy bits of memory that only make sense from her perspective because she cannot see the real horror that is taking place not only in the streets of Berlin but also in the death camps at Auschwitz , or the battlefields in Russia . There is no sense of perspective because her vision is shrunken, limited by the size of the window as if she were that character in the Alain Robbe-Grillet novel La jalousie where the protagonists vision, limited by the size of the window , becomes voyeuristic . But this “Young Lady” is not voyeuristic, the only problem is that in spite of her surprise and astonishment , what she tells us seems cliché-ridden, because those projected images on the wall are ones we know too well. We have seen them over and over again. Hints are dropped, such as the arrival of a German soldier looking for his documents , wanting to create false documents so he can flee to France as a phony French resistant. In spite of moments when others walk in to give a more immediate feel to the situation, I could not get involved in this portion of the play because what the “negative” tells us and the pictures show us are historical documents emptied of emotion by the narrator’s distance from events , and by our own historical memory that images no longer have any impact. .
The atmosphere of the play changed slightly with the building of the Berlin wall (1961) and its destruction in 1989. These events brought history right into the house because Berlin was at the centre of those events and at that point something changed. Tension permeates the performance . There is an expectation that someone will come in, searching for memories of a shattered past, looking for negatives that will be developed, especially the negative of our protagonist. We sense the Young Lady’s growing excitement which breeds more dramatic tension. The character is closer to her material and our attention shifts from the historical vision to her own personal involvement in these events. She becomes linked with the history unfolding around her. This is no longer a scrapbook of familiar images but a state of growing excitement that makes us care.
Memory, history murders and crimes of human destruction are still with us she tells us but it is very difficult to build a sense of empathy in this work which has kept us at a distance for more than an hour, without inscribing a critical dialectic in the text, something that Brecht knew how to create so well.
The writer has created a dramatic situation where the memories linked to the characters own contemporary presence are the most important. Thus memory appears to be most closely linked to the character’s needs to be recognized as a whole human being , rather than giving deep meaning to the potential horrors of ongoing human destruction.
Chris Bedford has articulated the elements of the text beautifully so that it all runs smoothly. Nevertheless, the play is an enigma and it left me with a feeling that something was incomplete. One could say that is shows how memory and personal testimony , notions accepted by historians (especially since the war), are the underlying material of history. Given the fact that all is destroyed (and we see the chaotic pile of pictures and documents scattered around the floor) , memory is often the only material that allows the individual to recover one’s own being from the past. But if one takes the trouble to write a play about this question, there certainly must be more involved in the whole process.
This first presentation of Theatre Artists co-operative: the Independent Collective series (better known as TACTICS), is definitely an event that forces us to recognize the relationship between theatrical form and a difficult content linked to current debates of human horror. Such engagement is what makes theatre a relevant art form in our contemporary world. This is an important development in the Ottawa theatre scene and I congratulate Tactics and Evolution Theatre for their work. Keep an eye on the upcoming productions of TACTICS
Young Lady in White plays at Arts Court until November 15.
Young Lady in White by Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf, directed by Chris Bedford, a production of evolution Theatre.
With Catriona Leger, Zach Counsil and John Doucet