THEATRE REVIEW: AGE OF AROUSAL
16 Aug'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE -- The only thing wrong, by some lights, with Jackie Maxwell's new production of Linda Griffiths' AGE OF AROUSAL is that it might just be over-aroused.

Known to Toronto audiences largely through Maja Ardal's wonderful and more constrained 2007 Nightwood production at the Factory Theatre, the Shaw Festival's production of Griffiths' "wildly inspired" stage adaptation of George Gissing's novel, THE ODD WOMEN, leans so heavily, although never inappropriately, into the world of Victorian melodrama that it flirts on occasion with hysteria.

And one would assume hysteria to be a condition directors might avoid in mounting a work too often mistakenly and patronizingly dismissed as feminist polemic. It is, in fact, so much more, spinning out as it does a tale that documents the beginning of the struggle of a major portion of humanity, long dismissed as mere subtext, to move centre stage and become a vital part of life's text instead. AGE OF AROUSAL opened on the Court House stage Friday.

In late Victorian London, the work is set in a school where women are taught the mysteries of the newly-invented typewriter by Mary Barfoot (Donna Belleville), a fictitious feminist pioneer, and her same-sex lover, Rhoda Nunn, played by Jenny Young.

But their idealistic existence and their school are both threatened when Rhoda reunites with Virginia Madden (Kelli Fox), a childhood friend fallen on hard times, and brings Virginia and her two sisters -- the fey Alice, played by Sharry Flett, and the sexually curious Monica, played by Zarrin Darnall-Martin -- into the school. Their arrival coincides with the return of Mary's nephew, Everard (Gray Powell) from abroad, and his attraction to both the earthy charms of Monica and the more intellectual charms embodied in Rhoda, serve to complicate things.

Played out on a beautiful, if somewhat overelaborate, set by Sue Lepage, lit by Alan Brodie -- AGE plays out on two levels, affording the playwright the opportunity to reveal to her audience what her characters are saying and what they are thinking as well -- a process Griffith's has reinvented as "thoughtspeak" for all that it is a variation of what Shakespeare was more than content to simply call a soliloquy.

It is also something of which Maxwell and her production make far too much, flirting with overblown Victorian melodrama. Where Ardal's earlier production made no big deal of her characters speaking from both the world of text and subtext - her actors speaking internal thoughts as simple asides, Maxwell and choreographer Valerie Moore impose an overblown operatic sensibility that serves to obscure a story that remains nonetheless utterly compelling.

Maxwell's love affair with Victorian melodrama colours many of the performances too, transforming the three impoverished sisters whose arrival sets things in motion into refugees from a Dickensian poor house rather than women struggling to survive in genteel, if abject, poverty, while Powell's Everard is transformed into a Dudley Do-right rather than simply a confused man trying to find his way in a world of women.

Happily, however, Griffiths still comes out a winner and her play - one for the ages.