The statistics say it all: of the 15 mainstage productions at this year's du Maurier World Stage Festival, held between April 16th and May 3rd in Toronto, five were Irish. That the only festival devoted exclusively to theatre in North America was so heavy with productions from these shores is testament to the renaissance that Irish theatre is enjoying worldwide.
It was an Irish production, the Gate Theatre's consummate and well-travelled Waiting for Godot, which scored the biggest all-round critical and popular success in the festival's first weekend. Strong word of mouth and a coveted five-out-of-five-star rating from the local paper guaranteed full houses for the length of its six-performance run in the 900-seat Winter Garden, a baroque old barn of a theatre that usually houses touring mega-musicals. In that context, Walter Asmus's Irish-inflected production played like the crowd-pleaser it is - the night I attended, the audience listened acutely, laughed loudly, and took to their feet for the curtain call. The Gate's other offering, Barry McGovern's solo Beckett piece, I'll Go On, was sold out before it opened in the festival's second weekend. It was rougher going for the festival's other first-weekend Irish offering: Corcadorca's Disco Pigs, in its North American premiere. Though Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh's performances are as fresh and dangerous as ever, the production suffered from mixed reviews, a too-large and ill-located venue, and poorly targeted marketing; it seemed unlikely to find an audience in its brief run. The Disco Pigs juggernaut continues nonetheless, with its next stops including the London West End and New York.
Other than Godot, the talking point of the festival's opening days was the world premiere of Quebec director, Robert Lepage's Geometry of Miracles, a collaborative creation about the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff. A premiere from Lepage (whose solo version of Hamlet, Elsinore, played at last year's Dublin Theatre Festival) is big news anywhere, but particularly in Canada, and tickets to the Toronto run were sold out long before the festival began.
Lepage makes theatre using a work-in-progress approach; his first performances are always rough, and his recent premieres have sparked debate about whether he has grown over-indulgent and is mounting work that is simply not ready for an audience. The Toronto opening of Geometry only added fuel to the fire: some local critics had high praise ("Lepage pulls off a miracle" read the headline in the Toronto Star). Others, particularly the Quebec press, were savage in their criticism: Lepage was "embarrassing himself", according to the Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor; and the Montreal-based Le Devoir put its pan on the front page. As is typical of Lepage's productions at this stage in their development, Geometry features strong images rather than coherent plotting, but I was impressed, heartened, and often swept away by the Toronto presentation, particularly its hypnotically-paced and visually lyrical first act.
The production's narrative backbone is Wright's third wife, Olgivanna, a long-time Gurdjieff disciple who introduced Wright to the mystic's philosophies of movement and spirituality, which profoundly affected Wright's theory and practice of "organic" architecture. We meet Olgivanna in her waning years, and the action plays out largely in flashbacks. In a classic, and classically effective, bit of Lepage stagecraft, the actress playing the older Olgivanna (Marie Brassard) also plays Wright, donning his signature trenchcoat, hat, and cane in the flashback scenes, with another actress (Tea Alagic) then playing the younger Olgivanna.
Lepage's approach here is very low-tech, appropriately enough for a story about organic art forms. The setting (designed by Carl Fillion) is a massive sandpit, backed by a large, rectangular, white canvas screen which is pulleyed up and down by stagehands in full view of the audience.
The dance background of several members of the young and international ensemble is reflected in the production's ingenious use of movement: one of Gurdjieff's sacred dances is layered against the scene of a tragic car crash; a Johnson Wax executive tap-dances a letter while his secretary mimes typing; an actor scales a rope and spins in the air to represent the painting of the Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum. Even a complex segment of Russian history - Lenin's death and Stalin's accession - is given a succinct, surprisingly funny, and completely wordless staging here. The other two international offerings in the festival's first weekend were of the "sounded-better-on-paper" variety. The Gogmagogs, a British ensemble which performs contemporary classical music in theatrical settings, were long on perkiness but short on original staging ideas. The Brazilian duo, La Troppa's adaptation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth featured a nifty central set piece - a spinning, unfolding locomotive - and some clever perspective-shifting bits of stage business, but came across as a disconnected layering of commentary and sincerity.
In addition to the other Irish offerings in the festival's final two weeks - the Royal Court production of Conor McPherson's The Weir, and comedian Owen O'Neill's Off My Face - other intriguing-sounding programming included Caryl Churchill's Blue Heart in its original Out of Joint production; Monster, a new piece from Toronto's own da da Kamera, whose Here Lies Henry was an under-appreciated gem of last year's Dublin Festival; and Elswhereless, a new opera by Atom Egoyan (the Oscar-nominated director of The Sweet Here- after.)
Ancillary festival events included a series of talks and readings by major visiting artists; a mini-festival of four local fringe companies; and an impressive training initiative for young Canadian directors by internationally regarded directors, including Joseph Chaikin, Simon McBurney, Katie Mitchell, and Deborah Warner. What the festival lacked was a viable forum for the local theatre community to mingle with visitors; even the valiant late-night drinking efforts of the Gate and Corcadorca companies failed to wrest any craic out of the charisma-free festival club.
That it is the only North American festival of its kind makes it all the more alarming that this World Stage might be the last: nearly a third of the festival's $1.65 million budget comes from the cigarette manufacturer du Maurier, and new Canadian laws are scheduled to come into effect this October which will limit the amount of advertising that tobacco companies can garner from sponsorships. It's unlikely that du Maurier will renew its support of the festival if these laws are passed; lobbying efforts are underway to urge the government to help fill the impending financial gap.
