Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 2 March 2012, and touring

WE’RE three-quarters of the way into this Scottish-Canadian co-production when Selina Boyack takes to the stage in laidback hippy mode.

SHE’S playing a zonked-out performance poet at a Vancouver rock concert, circa 1970, delivering her pseudo-meaningful verse in a perfectly observed caricature of earnestness and cool. It’s very funny and brilliantly done. It’s also the point at which the play seems to lose the plot.

Ana Lisa Gardner, Dominique Leduc, Magalie Lepine-Blondeau, Selina Boyak (photo credit Tristan Brand)

Up until this scene, director Serge Denoncourt, working with playwrights Clare Duffy and Pierre Yeves Lemieux in a joint venture between Scotland’s Stellar Quines and Montreal’s Imago Theatre, has created a beguiling vision of Ana, a woman with the capacity to split in two and become, in effect, Everywoman.

As the scenes jump freely from the Isle of Skye to the Ancient Greece of Medea, from a psychiatrist’s couch to the barricades of Revolutionary Paris, we may not be totally on top of what the play is trying to say, but it is performed with such a sense of theatrical possibility that we’re more than willing to stick with it.

The Ana we meet at the start, in clothes of startling red like all her multiple selves, is the first of a mythic line of women. In turn, they wrestle for their individuality against their mothers and their own motherhood, against the social pressure to conform and against the tide of history. This Ana is a life-force that ploughs on through time, manifesting herself as Joan of Arc, an artist’s muse or the daughter of Sigmund Freud. Whatever terrible events befall her, all she can do is carry on.

Much of this is gripping. There is a particularly knotty sequence in which Ana appears as a freedom fighter in the French Revolution before being hired by a brothel where she gives the aristocratic punters the thrill of having sex with a participant in the Terror. It’s like something Howard Barker would write, not least because she then becomes the model for the breast-bearing figure of Liberty waving the French flag in the famous painting by Eugène Delacroiz before cutting out her own tongue rather than share the secrets she has learnt in the intimacy of the bedroom.

Performed in English and French, frequently switching by the line, it looks striking as the six women and one male ring master emerge from a set of movable boxes. It’s theatrically and thematically adventurous, but once Ana turns into a Vancouver hippy and eventually a shopping mall bag-lady, it feels as if we’re being strung along. What starts off purposeful, if strange, ends up a little silly, and the show becomes steadily less meaningful as it goes on. At it’s best, it’s great, so it’s well worth seeing; just don’t expect enlightenment.

© Francis McLachlan, 2012

Links

Stellar Quines