Theatre Projects Manitoba’s Age of Arousal offers up a hilarious look at love, lust and sexuality in 19th-century England

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AGE OF AROUSAL

Theatre Projects Manitoba

Until March 29, Rachel Browne Theatre

Linda Griffiths’ uproarious take on the Victorian era, Age of Arousal, has found a perfect home with Theatre Projects Manitoba.

Loosely based on the George Gissing novel The Odd Women, the play is a subversive, slightly surreal tale of lust, love and feminism in late 19th-century England which the cast and crew have artfully crafted into a delightful mix of comedy and pathos.

Set in an age in which women vastly outnumber men, Mary Barfoot (Patricia Hunter) and her lover Rhoda Nunn (Krista Jackson) run a school to teach women secretarial skills in order to support themselves. Enter the Madden sisters: the two spinsters Virginia and Alice (Carolyn Gray and Maggie Nagle), and the beautiful young shop girl Monica (Erin McGrath). Add Mary’s dashing cousin Everard (Eric Blais) to the mix and all hell breaks loose.

Rooted in sublime performances, especially those of Hunter, Gray and Nagle as women all on the edge of oblivion as far as the world is concerned, Age of Arousal turns the morals and repression of Victorian England upside down and sets them ablaze. In Griffiths’ hands this could barely be a more raucous and subversive romp.

While all of the characters struggle with their own inner passions, Griffiths cleverly allows us a first row seat into their psyches with her creation of ‘thought speak,’ in which the characters’ innermost thoughts are blurted out seemingly uncontrollably. Though it is not always a perfect device - there are occasions when characters’ voices are overlapping to such an extent it’s difficult to hear what is being said - but overall it’s illuminating and often downright hilarious.

The implementation of ‘thought speak’ also adds a pleasingly visceral element to the proceedings. The characters are often at odds with themselves within the realms of the inner/outer world, and the brute force of the tug-of-war between inner passion and outer duty is fascinating. It also leads to some exuberantly physical and comic performances, most notably by the marvelous Gray, whose tortured Virginia is an absolute wreck who transforms into a whole new person. Nothing or no one in this play is set in stone - sexuality, desire and passion are almost living, breathing elements which transform from moment to moment.

Leanne Foley’s design for the show, including the set and costumes, carefully bring about notions of the Victorian age, bustles and all, but yet, as with the characters, things are not quite as they seem. The design evokes the era while keeping it fresh and modern.

Special kudos must go to Eric Blais, the lone male in the production, who manages to be both dashing and sympathetic and not get lost among the whirling force of female passion. Blais is a brave man to undertake the task, which includes having to fake a pelvic exam with the luminous Hunter, and both manage to make it seem perfectly casual and absolutely hilarious.

Age of Arousal is a gorgeous melding of old/new, political/personal and passion/ repression into a heady mix of wit and intelligence. It’s a delight to watch.

- Barb Stewart

City’s Anglo ears finally get chance to enjoy Franco-Manitoban’s voice

By Kevin Prokosh
from the Winnipeg Free Press - Oct 30, 2008

For English theatre-goers, francophone playwright Marc Prescott has been lost in translation.

When he attempted to make contact with les anglos across the Red River, interested but unilingual artistic directors were unable to read his plays, which had been produced en français all across the country.

“For the longest time, I was arguably Winnipeg’s most produced playwright and least known,” says the bilingual Prescott. “It was pretty lonely.”

That will begin to change with the English version of Prescott’s 2003 romantic comedy Encore, opening Theatre Projects Manitoba’s 2008-09 season tonight at the Rachel Browne Theatre in the Crocus Building (211 Bannatyne Ave.).

With his translation, Prescott becomes the first local playwright to single-handedly bridge the city’s linguistic and theatrical divide. That was his stated objective five years ago and it’s taken all this time for an English theatre to want to crack the language barrier.

“I wondered why we didn’t have anything to do with each other,” says Projects’ artistic director Ardith Boxall. “I really wanted to know what was going on over there. English and French theatre are like these two ships in the same water but never meeting.

“I think this is the first English translation of a French-Manitoban’s play here.”

Encore was the one play — he has written more than 15 — with which he wanted to introduce himself to English Winnipeg. It is by far his most conventional script — about a couple who meet in a bar and fall in love. The hook is that the scene is replayed over again each major anniversary.

“In order to not make it boring, I had to have lines that were flexible enough to convey at least two different meanings,” says Prescott, a graduate of both St. Boniface College and the National Theatre School, where in 1998 he was the first Manitoban to complete the playwriting program. “It seems easy to recreate the scenes, but there’s a lot more going on.”

No one seeing the expletive-free Encore in English will guess that its author was once considered the enfant terrible of Franco-Manitoban theatre. Prescott’s 1993 work Sex, Lies and Les F-M’s, was penned in a Franglais language that he purposefully used to unleash his displeasure with his community. His black comedy Poisson had a swearword for a name until he was pressured by Cercle artistic director Roland Mahè to change it to something more socially acceptable for a season brochure.

“I’m known as the bad boy for writing about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” says Prescott, who is working on a new French play called Eclipse. “I wrote Encore to prove to the Cercle I could write in proper French.”

After premiering at the Cercle, Encore was produced in Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton. Prescott says his English translation will open doors into theatres more familiar with Shakespeare than Moliere. And he hopes to take some local writers with him.

Prescott, who married last summer and lives in Norwood Flats, is planning to establish a new theatre company called Vice Versa, which will present plays that have been translated from English to French and vice versa. He says he would like to introduce the works of Rick Chafe, Brian Drader and Ross McMillan to French Winnipeg and beyond.

“It’s all because of Encore that we see all the possibilities,” he says.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca