Shaw Festival
Through October 11
THE DIVINE: A PLAY FOR SARAH BERNHARDT Royal George Theatre/Shaw Festival
Lord Acton was right: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
And that’s what Michel Marc Bouchard’s “The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt,” is about, a time when the absolute power of the Catholic Church in Quebec corrupted the province, the people and the church.
Bouchard was born in the last years of the old Quebec before the “Quiet Revolution,” the Quebec where the Catholic Church ran everything, the Catholic Church portrayed in “The Divine,” a province where a great actor could come into town in Quebec City to be greeted by a message from the archbishop forbidding her to perform and the public immediately cancelling its ticket purchases.
This is a play about the outside world colliding with the insular world of Quebec, of seminarian Talbot (Wade Bogert-O’Brien), whose father is a cabinet minister, and seminarian Michaud (Ben Sanders), son of a poor working mother, and Bernhardt.
They are in the Grand Seminary, high above the city, controlled by Brother Casgrain (Martin Happer).
Talbot is a mystery, transferred in from somewhere else late in the ordination process for reasons which aren’t clear.
There is a backstory which gradually becomes clear and the corruption of the soul becomes very clear.
Bouchard unfolds the story almost in tableaux, of the seminary dormitory, backstage in the theater, a shoe factory with a sleazy owner.
There is a problem with the script, not the story, but the script.
Bourchard writes in French and the Shaw Festival is using a translation by Linda Gaboriau and it’s stiff and formal, perhaps wonderful in French.
There are too many set pieces, speeches of great symbolism.
Director and dramaturge Jackie Maxwell has been workshopping the script for several years, which suggests everyone was aware of the problems early on and has worked many of them out.
Not all.
It’s not that the characters are stereotypes, although some are.
It requires real acting to overcome some of this, Happer’s Casgrain, Ric Reid’s The Boss, Fiona Reid’s Bernhardt and Mary Haney’s Mrs. Talbot.
They can overcome some of the show’s weakness on a really wonderful set from Michael Gianfrancesco.
My guess is that stories like this appear now because so many churches and so many denominations and so many religions have been diminished by pedophile clerics who were, in turn, covered up by their superiors.
The challenge to the archbishop in “The Divine” is what all of Quebec ultimately did to the theocracy which ran the province for so long, really right up to the corporate resort death of Maurice Duplessis and the deluge which followed.
The show runs nearly three-hours and needs tightening and a little smoothing of the script wouldn’t hurt.
With Maxwell leaving after next season, one of her legacies is presentation of more Canadian and French Canadian plays and successor Tim Carroll should continue that.
What the festival does is present thought-provoking plays, certainly Shaw’s but others like this season’s presentation of J. M. Barrie’s short “The Twelve-Pound Look.”
Even when a play is uneven and certainly Shaw’s can be, a show can benefit from the on-stage and off skills of the festival, here with work from Happer, Reid, Reid and Haney and Gianfrancesco.
That’s why it’s worth seeing “The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt.”
A.W.
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