The Swanne: George III (The Death of Cupid)
Written and directed by Peter Hinton
Starring Lucy Peacock, Diane D'Aquila, Sarah McVie and Bernard Hopkins
At The Stratford Festival
in Stratford, Ont.
Rating: ***
As the Stratford company hurtles across the stage of the festival's new Studio Theatre, periwigs, rhyming couplets and the detritus of history flying, it is impossible not to be instantly impressed by the sheer theatrical audacity of Peter Hinton's 58-character play, The Swanne: George III (The Death of Cupid). Figuring out what it's about, however, is going to be anything but instantaneous.
This play, the one full-length piece on the studio's inaugural playbill of new work, is partly a good ol' historical potboiler and partly a postmodern reflection on history. It's over three hours long, occasionally confusing, often frustratingly circuitous, but never boring thanks both to the exuberant range of Hinton's cast of characters and to his own dashing direction of the piece. Hinton, a Montreal director and dramaturge, has been working on this play, which is only the first part of a trilogy, for a decade. It reflects epic ambitions very seldom seen in Canadian theatre: The obvious precedent is from the United States, Tony Kushner's Angels in America.
Like Angels, The Swanne features a great deal of soap opera framed by meta-history, as well as some fantastical apparitions. The main story is a speculative fiction about the heirs of the mad King George III in which The Regent (the future George IV) suppresses the truth about his daughter Charlotte's stillborn baby, the family's only hope for an heir: the child was black and he lived.
This is the occasion for a twisting tale of baby-swapping, buggery and whoring that follows Regency degeneracy from England's corrupt court to its filthy streets.
The story is then framed by the figure of the young Victoria confronting her destiny -- the daughter of one of the Regent's many younger brothers, she was only 18 when she succeeded two uncles to the throne -- and asking what would have happened if Charlotte's child had claimed the crown instead.
Even if you are happy to entertain that fantastical question -- in fact, the child would have been illegitimate and no more likely to take the throne than any other royal bastard -- there are problems with this scheme. With Bernard Hopkins leading the charge as the puffy and put-upon Regent, the satire of the court is richly funny, but the ins and outs of the relationships are often difficult to follow despite the bold theatrical language that allows each character to announce who he or she might be.
The play charts the transition from the aristocratic abandon of the 18th century to the bourgeois respectability of the 19th: Its chief concern and chief interest is the suggestion that history, and in particular the Victorian version of civilization on which our own times were then founded, is not inevitable. But the emotional path of Victoria herself is less than engaging. Perhaps if Sarah McVie's stiff young Victoria looked less like a deer caught in the headlights and Lally Cadeau's iconic older Victoria projected more gravitas, one could care a bit more about her dawning transition from a questioning youth to frozen inevitability.
The least satisfactory element in this thematic scheme is a second metaphorical frame and the one which gives the play its subtitle, The Death of Cupid. Played by Derwin Jordan with a nifty little pair of white wings on his black, this Cupid's occasional appearances have more panache than purpose.
Hinton is talking about something more than romantic love here, but the myth's relationship to Victoria remains fuzzy.
What is, on the other hand, awe-inspiring, is the way in which the playwright subtly develops his themes while building up entire subplots around all the colourful figures -- most of them the working-class characters who might at first appear to be outrageous digressions. If the orphans Jeremy and William are to escape the horrible orphanage and discover their true aristocratic identities, they must first hide from the older boys with a taste for buggery: It's an occasion for Hinton to brazenly expose the cruelty of this society.
Meanwhile, a confrontation between the royal whoremaster St. John Voranguish and his ill-spoken but outraged wife Proserpine lets the playwright chart the progress from the language of Shakespeare to modern English before asking why the lady can't be a lesbian if she wants. Benedict Campbell and Margot Dionne pull this one off with great comic aplomb, and finally Diane D'Aquila appears magnificently as the "Scarecrow" a disfigured actress about to play the part of Venus. It is her fabulous staginess that in the end becomes a mirror for -- and provides a conclusion to -- the very theatricality of The Swanne itself.
Many theatre-goers are going to find The Swanne long and confusing, but the appearance of a show this ambitious at Stratford -- which despite its current state of artistic confusion is probably the only company in the country with resources to mount something that demands such historical sweep and classical grasp -- is truly heartening. It is not a perfect play, but it is an important one that deserves to be seen by anyone who cares about Canadian theatre. The Swanne: George III (The Death of Cupid) continues to Nov. 2 at the Studio Theatre in Stratford, Ont. For information call: 1-800-567-1600.
Kate Taylor