THEATRE REVIEW: THE FLOOD THEREAFTER

Pictured: Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster, Maggie Huculak

JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun
03 OCT 2013
R: 2.5/5

It's a little bit like picking out bits and pieces of your favourite clothing in your grandmother's latest quilting project, but there are, hidden here and there, recognizable elements of Homer's The Odyssey amongst the detritus of life in the modern-day Gaspé fishing village that is the setting for Quebecois playwright Sarah Berthiaume's THE FLOOD THEREAFTER.

Translated to English from its native French by Nadine Desrochers, THE FLOOD… opened last week in the Berkeley Street Theatre, a production of Canadian Stage. It's directed by Ker Wells, who also helmed CS's summer production of Macbeth in High Park and it boasts a pretty impressive cast including local stalwarts like Maggie Huculak, W. Joseph Matheson and Oliver Becker as residents of the bizarre little town in which the play is set.

Life there is pretty uneventful, it seems, save for that fact that every evening before the sun goes down, the lovely young June, (Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster), walks into the local bar and sheds every stitch she is wearing, while the assembled male audience watches and weeps. She is the daughter of a strange woman (Patricia Marceau) rescued from the deep years ago by Matheson's dispirited Homère, a fisherman being torn apart by his attraction to June and the suspicion that he, like most of the other men in town, just might be her father.

Meanwhile, Homère's wife, the hairdresser Penelope, (Huculak) waits every night for him to come home, weaving men's hair into wigs for young June to while away the time. These oddly tranquil lives are all thrown into flux with the arrival of trucker Denis (Kevin MacDonald) who want's nothing more than to get back to his sweetheart — but the fates (and his truck) conspire against him to tragic effect.

Now, lest this encapsulation makes you think this might be compelling or even riveting theatre, let's be clear. It is not. But it's certainly not for lack of trying. Working with a translation that careers madly between the poetic and the merely prosaic, director Wells tries mightily to create the atmosphere of magic realism in which the tale can breath and grow. But despite the best efforts of his hard-working cast, things seem to come up magical when they should be real and real when it should be magical, the confusion separated by long periods of the simply dull. Not even Huculak, whose voice could could turn the periodic table into a smorgasbord, can rise above this dross for long.

In fact, the most exciting things get — at least while everyone remains fully clothed — is when Yannik Larivee's helter-skelter set gets all shook up by all the running around and seems for just a few seconds like it might collapse. Once the clothing starts to fall, of course, there are one or two rather steamy, even poetic moments, but frankly, for anyone who has left puberty behind, those aren't likely to add up to a satisfying theatrical experience. Despite everyone's best efforts, in the end, one leaves the theatre wondering how an epic that has endured as long as The Odyssey could be cut up and incorporated into something as simply pedestrian as this.