HELEN’S NECKLACE - REVIEW OF 2018 CANADIAN REP THEATRE PRODUCTION

James Karas

Helen’s Necklace can be subtitled “The Education of a Shallow, Ignorant Tourist from a Northern Peaceful City in a War-torn City in the Middle East.”

Carole Fréchette’s play has six characters (two women and four men) but all of them can be played by as few as two actors or three. Ken Gass in his Canadian Rep Theatre production has chosen to stage the play with three female actors who play the characters interchangeably and not necessarily to good effect.

Initially, Helen appears as a wide-eyed, shallow, self-absorbed woman in a crowded, bombed and very busy city looking for her lost necklace. In the opening scene she is played as a blonde Caucasian by Helen Taylor and she is approaching people on the street in her search for her lost treasure.

She describes the piece of jewelry in very precise and glowing terms as a priceless treasure that has deep meaning for her to people who may speak little, if any, English. She seems impervious to her surroundings and our reaction is “how dense can this woman be?”

 

Akosua Amo-Adem,  Zorana Sadiq and Helen Taylor 

The role of Helen as with the other five characters, as I indicated, will be played by all three actors, the other two being Akosua Amo-Adem who is black and Zorana Sadiq who has a dark complexion and can pass for someone from the Middle East.

The place where Helen searches for her necklace and displays her blindness to her surroundings is by all descriptions a site of death and devastation.  She can’t recall what day it is, where she has been, to whom she has spoken or much of anything. She is completely absorbed by her necklace and describes it in excruciating detail.

By this time we have lost it with this bimbo but reality will soon visit her in ways that even she cannot completely ignore. In the meantime she meets Nabil, the taxi driver, who simply wants to know where to take her, as she continues jabbering about her necklace. A construction Foreman gives her a brief lesson on the effects of demolition and tells her to go home to her place which has never been bombed.  She understands almost nothing.

Helen meets a Woman looking for a red ball and hears her description of a little boy killed in the cross-fire. The Woman gives her a powerful dose of reality which has some effect on her. The Woman is looking for her son; Helen is looking for a bauble.

Then she meets a Man who has lost everything. It is a difficult concept to absorb but the Man knows it all too well. He tells her to scream “we cannot go on living like this” and she seems to have understood a bit more of reality. I will not spoil the end for you and you may want to see where Fréchette takes us.

The play can deliver a powerful punch to the self-absorbed middle class which has scant idea about what is happening in the Middle East and in other war-torn places in the world. How can we know what it means to lose everything?

But Gass muddles the emotional impact of the play by having three actors perform all the roles interchangeably. It shifts our focus from one actor to the next as we try to keep up with who is doing what and the emotional impact is almost lost or at least seriously diminished. A bad choice.

The actors show that they have the emotional depth and talent to do the play if only Gass would let them do it.

The set consist of an empty stage with some white boxes which can be used as seats in a taxi or to represent the other venues in the city.

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Helen’s Necklace by Carole Fréchette played at the Berkeley Street Upstairs Theatre, November 8-11, 2018 and will continue at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre, 440 Locust Street Burlington, ON L7S 1T7 from November 15 to 18, 2018. (905) 681-2551 bpac@burlington.ca/