REVIEW: Silence screams #MeToo from a thousand years ago
Silence, the season closer for the U of A’s Studio Theatre, takes us back 1,000 years to the time of King Ethelred, known to history as “The Unready” – who ruled the English from 966 to 1016 AD.
Moira Buffini’s sprawling saga is set in the shadow of the end of the world. Like many a people after them, they believed that Armageddon was imminent. The playwright is right at home as ringmaster at the centre of a torrent of ideas. More than a historical pageant, Silence is a fizzy, often cheeky mash-up: It’s a cross-dressing romantic comedy with lots of gender confusion; it’s about suffocating practices
of early Christianity; and there’s a bit of Monty Python in there as well.
The playwright is one of a British cadre called the “Monsterists” who have turned away from what used to be called “kitchen sink” realistic dramas to write large-scale works.
Silence is an ambitious undertaking for Studio Theatre director Kim Mattice Wanat as a thesis project. She’s best known locally for her work in opera, and here marshals Buffini’s spectacle, roiling ideas and sly sense of humour with conviction and clarity.
The Norman Princess Ymma (a fiery Emily Howard), has been given in marriage to the 14-year-old “Silence of Cumbria” (Shannon Blanchet – whose character is from “the frozen North” which gives her a chance to perform in an effective Scottish brogue). This leads to a hilarious scene as the haughty bride compares her plumbing with her flighty new “husband” to discover that “his” is the same. Probably for succession reasons, Silence has kept her sexual identity secret. The scene continues for some time and just keeps getting funnier. Turns out it’s OK with both of them, because as a couple they can now function in a man’s world, no longer with the “meagre souls” of single women.
The two set out on a road trip to the North – in a cart. Along for the ride is Ymma’s long-suffering ladies-maid Agnes (a robust Ruth Alexandera), a guilt-ridden priest named Roger (Joshua Meredith), and the King’s stout right-hand man Eadric (Griffin Cork), who has developed a yearning of his own for Ymma.
Apparently, the mad and immature King Ethelred (Michael Anderson) has discovered his inner Lannister and the joy of slaughter and torture – as well as a latent carnal interest in Ymma. He gets out of bed and begins to butcher local Vikings on his way to pursue Ymma to the North.
Act II unleashes anger, executions and even resurrection and dashed hopes. After a meal that includes “magic mushrooms,” it all comes together in a hallucinatory dream. The men pictured here are all wanting in some way, and the woman seem on their way to rule. In fact Ymma is based on Emma of Norway – who did go on to get very rich and rule much of that part of the world. When the characters tire of speaking to each other, they are not above turning to the audience to make their points.
The entire cast is superb, as is Bailey Ferchoff’s black box set which includes large props that descend from the ceiling, or come together on stage. With effective lighting from Lee Livingstone, they create some quite lovely and often quite startling visual images. Surprisingly, Buffini manages to pull all this together, and most of the intrigues are resolved in a semi-upbeat if improbable manner.
Silence may not be a great play, but Kim Mattice Wanat as director is in full control, and her clever two-and-a-half hours (with intermission) is never dull, and often challenging. The play may be set a millennium or so ago, but its attitudes are more #MeToo than The Lion in Winter.
It plays at the Timms Centre for the Arts until May 25.
Photos by Ed Ellis
