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BELLE MORAL:

A NATURAL HISTORY

Written by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Directed by Alisa Palmer

Starring Fiona Byrne, Jeff Meadows and Peter Hutt

***

Do advocates of intelligent design have an ally in Ann-Marie MacDonald?

Ben Stein and his creationist cohorts would certainly find much to applaud in the writer's 2005 play Belle Moral, currently being remounted at the Shaw Festival. In it, the scientific method comes under spirited attack, while the boundaries between rationalism and romanticism, the natural and the supernatural, are blurred.

The Belle Moral of the title is an old stone house just outside Edinburgh on the coast of Scotland. It is the home of Pearl MacIsaac (Fiona Byrne) and her brother Victor (Jeff Meadows). The two are polar opposites: Pearl is an amateur scientist who submits papers to journals under the name "Percival," while Victor is a flighty, effeminate artist, diagnosed as a "male hysteric."

Victor, who has fallen in with the Fabians, is a vegetarian with both a fondness for and a phobia of dogs. Pearl has a cooler interest in canine matters - she keeps a deformed ear in a jar of formaldehyde, hoping that it will provide the missing evolutionary link between man and man's best friend.

The MacIsaacs' mother (French and Catholic) died after Victor was born, while their father (Scottish and Protestant) has just shuffled off this mortal coil at the start of the play, set in 1899.

Reunited at the will reading, Pearl and Victor discover a family secret that their dotty maiden aunt Flora (a sweet Donna Belleville) and father's best friend Dr. Seamus Reid (Peter Hutt, who may not be too young for the role, but looks it here) have kept hidden from them in the attic.

Belle Moral has a rigorous, suspenseful plot that stands on its own - to discuss it much further would spoil it - but MacDonald seems primarily interested in exploring the ideas that were fermenting on the eve of the 20th century. Filled with references to the likes of Freud, Shaw and Wilde, the comic Gothic mystery delights in setting up dichotomies - male and female, art and science, human and animal - and then trying to find common ground between them. (Indeed, the final word of the play is "unite.")

But while MacDonald has certainly fed on a smorgasbord of philosophies and movements, her play talks with its mouth full. Her characters often spray out undigested nuggets of food for thought, as when Victor goes off on a tangent about Impressionism, or Pearl delivers a lecture on Darwin to a dog.

These moments of over-explication are balanced by - to use one of the play's favourite words - "mythopoetical" moments: dreams of brides dancing with the jackal-headed god Anubis, magically manifesting pastry-baking servants and an immaculate conception.

Director Alisa Palmer's production deftly walks the tightrope between the divergent styles, shaking at times but never falling. Judith Bowden's swinging set is dominated by a family portrait that bleeds beyond its frame into the surrounding scenery, while composer Paul Sportelli turns Au Clair de la Lune into a spooky soundtrack. (Keep the name of that song in mind when the family secret is revealed.)

The cast is solid at the top and at the bottom: Graeme Somerville is delightful in the small role of Mr. Abbott, a solicitor with a passion for both paleontology and Pearl, while Martin Happer makes a handsome impression as the servant Wee Farley.

It's Belle Moral's ending that sits slightly uneasily with me: a feel-good plea for tolerance in which science gets dismissed as reactionary. Turned off by Dr. Reid's cruel, misguided practices and obsession with eugenics, Pearl has journeyed from passionately defending the scientific method and "facts, facts, facts," to a squishy dismissal of objectivity. She gives a speech arguing that the missing ingredient in science is "love." "Nothing, not even the merest particle, reveals itself without it," she says.

It was a follow-up comment by Mr. Abbott - "I have seen the face of God in a 300,000-year-old trilobite" - that made me link this worldview to the anti-science of intelligent design.

The problem with intelligent-design proponents isn't that they believe in God, of course, but that they take religion and disguise it as science. Likewise, Belle Moral blurs the lines between rationalism and romanticism to the point where reason breaks. What the two really need is peaceful co-existence, not this forced cohabitation.

Belle Moral: A Natural History continues at the Court House Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., until Oct. 5 (1-800-511-7429).