Nov. 16, 2005 - Issue #526: Sex, Lust & Love
Nobody does it like Sarah B.
Brausen sparkles as Bernhardt in Lemoine's At the Zenith of the Empire
The historical record contains absolutely no evidence that during Sarah Bernhardt’s visit to Edmonton in January of 1913, the legendary actress found time between her matinee and evening performances of Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias to take a wheelbarrow ride across the half-built High Level Bridge, the way she does in Stewart Lemoine’s new play At the Zenith of the Empire. Still, it’s nice to imagine that she did—and even nicer to think that as she gazed out at the North Saskatchewan River that she spotted a potential for greatness in our still-young city that even the locals overlooked. Bundled in her furs, bracing herself against the cold, she marvels at how all the elements seem to be saying that people shouldn’t be capable of living here—“And yet they do!”
Theatre shouldn’t really exist here, either, in a city so remote and, like so many other cities in Alberta, so preoccupied with more practical matters like business, industry and building shelter from the snow. But as Lemoine’s play points out, even in its infancy, a sizable audience has always been willing to turn out for Edmonton theatre in all its forms, from the vaudeville accordion-players and “laughaloguists” who shared the bill with Sarah Bernhardt to the cross-dressing accordion-players and solo performers who fill up the Fringe. One of the characters in At the Zenith is a young actress named Azalea Claymore (Daniela Vlaskalic), who belongs to a local repertory company that presents a new production every single Monday—a backbreaking schedule of rehearsing and performing that seems unimaginable today, but which Azalea handles with the hearty work ethic of a farm girl.
But Lemoine is less interested here in the people onstage than he is in the people in the audience, especially a trio of middle-aged women whose regular visits to the Empire Theatre are some of their favourite social outings. Coralie Cairns is Celia, a hard-headed Scotswoman who can’t believe she’s expected to pay three whole dollars to watch Sarah Bernhardt perform a scene that isn’t even in English; Sheri Somerville is Lillian, a widow with a tendency to lord her superior cultural knowledge over her friends’ heads; and Davina Stewart is Winnie, a librarian with a shadowy romantic connection to a couple of local men, including architect Peter Ingram (Jeff Haslam).
Maybe it’s the sheer number of characters he has to put in place (there are eight actors in the cast, making it one of the largest mainstage productions Teatro has ever attempted), but it takes Lemoine an unusual length of time before he finally gets the play moving. He purposely delays revealing the details of Peter and Winnie’s relationship until the second act, but in the meantime, there’s not enough plot left over to fill up the first act. The play could really use a villain, or at least someone with a prickly, antisocial streak that the other characters could play off of. As it is, everybody onstage is just too uniformly nice—they aren’t interested in doing anything but exchanging polite, pleasant chitchat and musing wittily about Sarah Bernhardt’s impending visit. Naturally, Lemoine writes witty chitchat better than just about anybody, but after an hour or so you get the feeling the characters are just marking time until the play’s much livelier second half.
Still, Leona Brausen gives the proceedings a spark whenever her Sarah Bernhardt appears, a whirlwind of energy and glamour, even hobbled by age and a bad leg. Brausen plays up Bernhardt’s fun side; she’s a diva who regards her pronouncements on love, life and art as the final words on the subjects, but she’s also genuinely interested in the opinions of the “ordinary” people around her.
Other standouts in the cast include Mark Meer, unexpectedly touching as Bernhardt’s somewhat thick-headed leading man Lou Tellegen, who throughout the play experiences a series of slow-motion epiphanies; Coralie Cairns, whose Celia can be spotted in one scene switching Winnie’s still-full glass of claret with her empty one; and Davina Stewart, whose wounded performance effectively captures not just the morality of another era, but another era’s acting style as well. The Empire Theatre of 1913 would have been lucky to have her. V
At the Zenith of the Empire
Written and directed by Stewart Lemoine • Starring Leona Brausen, Davina Stewart, Jeff Haslam and Daniela Vlaskalic • Varscona Theatre • To Nov 26 • 433-3399
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