James Karas
** (out of 5)
The body of a
two-year old child is washed up on the beach: a
small boy is rescued from a bombed building; hundreds of thousand risk their
lives to cross thousands of miles of water in rickety boats; millions live in
horrible conditions in refugee camps. That is the face of refugees today and a stunning
condemnation of our inhumanity. It is a story that is impossible to describe or
comprehend.
The Stratford Festival has decided to
tackle the issue head on by producing a play called The Aeneid.
Members of the company in The Aeneid. Photography by David Hou.
Let’s look at
the positive side. A title like The Aeneid
has a lot of cachet. It connects us to Virgil’s great epic, the founding
myth of the Roman Empire. Check. The play is written by Olivier Kemeid, a
French-Canadian playwright and in a nation of two latitudes we need to pay
attention to both of them. Check. The translation has been commissioned by the Stratford
Festival (Check) and done by Maureen Labonteé. It deals with a current issue of
world-wide importance. Double check and don’t say anything when you realize
that it is somewhat stale dated.
Let’s look at
the negative side. The play has almost nothing to do with Virgil’s epic. It
borrows the title and a few names but any resemblance to The Aeneid is almost coincidental. Yes, you will recognize Queen
Dido of Carthage and the trip to the Underworld but they won’t help you much.
Virgil’s Aeneid is about the founding of Rome and
if Kemeid wants to pull himself up by his
bootstraps and make it into a story of refugees relevant to today, he is whistling
up the wrong tree not to say he is misleading us. Trying to graft a modern
tragedy onto an ancient epic is bad enough but one should at least choose a
story that can resonate with current history.
Troy, Romans,
Greeks, Carthage – none of these names appear in the play. We have a burning
city and people escaping from it. This is the Fire section of the play. Then we
stop at a sandy beach (the Water Section) where a modern couple tells the
refugees to go away. From there it is to the Earth section where the refugees
try to get past an Immigration Officer.
Monice Peter
as Creusa and Gareth Potter as Aeneas in The Aeneid. Photography by David
Hou.
The penultimate
stop is in the Underworld where Aeneas meets his father who tells him where to
go – no, in the nice sense. The refugees finally reach their destination in the
Blood section, a land of freedom and plenty where they will build something
great described at some length.
Kemeid wrote his
Aeneid in 2007 and at one point there
is a lengthy catalogue of where refugees can be found. The only country not
mentioned is Syria because there was no civil war in Syria in 2007.
It does not
work. From burning city to sandy beach, we have people with Roman names such as
the familiar Aeneas (Gareth Potter) and Hector (Mike Nadajewski) to less
familiar ones like Creusa (Monice Peter) Anchises (Michael Spencer-Davis),
Ascanus (Malakai Magassouba), Coroebus (Andrew Robinson) and Achmaenidis (Josue
Laboucane).
Some of the
characters are mercifully listed simply by their jobs such as Hotel Manager
(Tiffany Claire Martin), Immigration Officer (Karen Robinson), Scavenger (E.B.
Smith) and Old Farmer (Laboucane).
Director Keira
Loughran tries to give life to the dreary and confused play without success. If
you go back to the check marks for the positive aspects of the play after
seeing it, you will discover that there are almost none.
A bad night at
the theatre.
_____
The Aeneid by
Olivier Kemeid will run until September 25, 2016 at the Studio Theatre,
Stratford, Ontario.
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