Riffs on Shakespeare: The queens
Canadian Stage
The Globe and mail

I am reviewing this show against the expressed preferences of the Canadian Stage Company. The production inaugurates a scheme of Advanced Workshopping: audiences will be canvassed for their opinions so that authors, directors and performers may learn from them. To keep these reactions free and uncontaminated, critics are being discouraged until late in the run. There is much sense in this. Spectators can be conditioned by reading reviews, though the logic of CSC's position would be to ban critics altogether. There is a lot to be said for this, though less than there is to be said against it.

Normand Chaurette's The Queens is an odd candidate for trial-by- perpetual-preview, having already been done in Montreal. (It is played here in an English translation by Linda Gaboriau.) The production is extremely assured; and Friday night's audience obviously felt it to be in no need of fixing. They laughed in what I imagine were the right places, and they cheered and stamped at the end.

I don't want to spoil anybody's fun, but I thought it was terrible. The Queens is an extension of the scene in Shakespeare's Richard III in which the female survivors gather to lament their fallen husbands, sons and grandsons, nearly all of whom seem to have been called Edward.

The play brings together six women intimately involved with the soon- to-be-crowned Richard: Anne Warwick, the Crookback's own consort; Elizabeth, wife of his brother, Edward IV, and mother of the princes in the Tower; his mother, the Duchess of York, ancient mother-in-law of both the above ladies; Isabel, sister of Anne and wife of his brother Clarence, the one who drowned in a butt of malmsey; Anne Dexter, his (and everybody's) silent sister, who mutely patrols the stage looking sorry for everybody including herself and - from the other side of the rose garden - Margaret, widow of Henry VI and last spark of the House of Lancaster.

They are corralled together in a tower in London (maybe even the Tower of London) on a snowy day on which Edward IV may or may not be dying; time is compressed here and whole lives are meant to be passing before us. But what lives? For much of the time Chaurette's women behave just like their Shakespearean namesakes: that is, they complain and they insult one another.

In the original Margaret does nearly all the bitching but here she takes refuge in zaniness. Instead of talking about going home to France she sets out for China but soon comes back. And despite the play's calculated unreality, I have to ask: what is she doing here anyway, sharing a house with her sworn enemies?

This is a literary-historical fantasia that ignores the rules. When the source-material runs out, the author draws on his own store of black whimsy: We are told that Clarence has not spoken in years, and Richard's Anne is ambitious rather than resigned. Well, why not? But, more importantly, why? None of these inventions establishes itself as dramatic fact. They are merely talked about; everything happens off-stage or in the past. Recrimination is these characters' game, and - adrift between history and Shakespeare's distortion of it and Chaurette's distortion of the distortion - they can say whatever they like. Since it's all arbitrary, none of it matters.

Yes, they talk well; or at least they make long speeches with images in them. I can see the attraction for a director, even without Peter Hinton's printed assertion that he loves the play. And if it were as good as his production thinks it is, it would be a masterpiece.

Naked firelight gilds the walls, which are done up in a rich golden shade of perspex-baronial; a soughing wind yields musical punctuation, and real musicians do the same.

The actresses revel. Marion Gilsenan has the best and most authoritative time as a tyrant Duchess of York with a face like a bleached skull and a presence to match. Margot Dionne is an imposing Queen Elizabeth - she looks about seven feet tall - and Tanja Jacobs' Queen Margaret, sounding more Scots than French, is the tartest vinegar.

At the end they all go very reverential, suggesting sisterhood. But, beside the charity of Shakespeare's Duchess, it pales. Think too of his Margaret scattering men with her curses, and his Elizabeth blithely double- crossing Richard when he wants to marry her daughter.

Those women did things. Chaurette's regal victims merely chatter. Instead of griefs they have grievances. Politically I sympathize. Theatrically I am bored to tears.