Grade: A
Fairy of the Lake may have sold out every day last week, but it still felt like a secret.
On Tuesday night, in a studio basement three floors beneath the Rebecca Cohn, Dalhousie Theatre performed the world premiere of John Thelwall’s 1801 play. Britain banned Thelwall’s script because it was critical of the government. This year, Dal English asked Dal Theatre to perform the play as part of this year’s Thelwall conference, called The Art and the Act.
That’s how the fourth-year theatre group called shotgun. Though the edgy essence of the play was mostly lost in old-English translation, young actresses and actors resurrected the rebel playwright’s characters: the sorceress Rowenna (Allison Basha), her love interest King Arthur (Sebastien Labelle) and her raccoon-eyed servants trimmed with backcombed bushes of hair (Dana Thompson and Richelle Khan).
Though tough to chew, the plot surrounds Rowenna, a.k.a. Hillary Clinton’s personality with black hair-extensions, and her stalker-quest to do Arthur. Her roofies don’t quite work. Arthur gets with beautiful, blonde Guenever (Jessica Jerome) in the end.
Zuppa Theatre Co. (Ben Stone, Alex McLean and Sue Leblanc) teamed up with Dal Theatre this year, and the trio’s directorial signatures were all over Fairy of the Lake – students playing gods on stilts, perfectionist blocking and scenes that felt like games, sometimes flirty, sometimes competitive. Zuppa, via 300 words of Times New Roman in the program, attribute the show’s atmosphere to good vibrations and the self-explanatory “Book of What Ifs” jammed full with ideas.
The 20 actors and actresses spent mornings, afternoons and evenings in the black box that is Studio One, blocking and re-blocking scenes with several different set designs. Zuppa’s final layout cut the audience in half on two raised platforms facing each other, rectangular stage in the middle and a two-storey vine-covered scaffolding tower at one end.
Fairy of the Lake was a mostly visual experience, but choral and piano music by Jason MacIsaac of The Heavy Blinkers, plus palpitation inducing rumbles from a vibrating thundersheet, added complimentary ear candy. Caught candidly at Heartwood on Quinpool Road early last week, MacIsaac joked the play would be a yawn except for his music. His dinner companion rolled her eyes.
Instead, Thelwall’s bore of a script came alive. The play’s characters and comedy translated well, which unlike Shakespeare would not be possible by simply reading the script. I can’t imagine what will happen when Zuppa directs Dante’s Inferno featuring the same fourth-year group later this term. Auditions have already begun. Don’t miss it!
The author is friends with an actress from Fairy of the Lake.
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