You Fancy Yourself
- Written and performed by Maja Ardal
- Directed by Mary Francis Moore
- Produced by Contrary Company
- At Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto
Maja Ardal, playwright, performer and former artistic director of Toronto's Young Peoples Theatre, was born in Iceland and schooled in Scotland, but she has made Canada her home since she landed in Toronto in 1970 at age 21.
Nonetheless, it's the landscapes and culture clashes of her childhood that have fuelled her writing.
Her 2001 play, Midnight Sun, was set amid the Allied occupation of Iceland in the Second World War, with the locals encountering real specimens of the American people they had only seen depicted in Hollywood films. Ardal's latest play, the solo show You Fancy Yourself, is more directly autobiographical: It concerns a young Icelandic girl named Elsa, who emigrates to Edinburgh with her family. (It's the sixties, so they are not fleeing a financial collapse.)
Elsa views Scotland the Brave through a veil of Icelandic myth and fairy tales. She sees her shy best friend Adelle, who lives at the top of the stairs, as an elf; her snot-nosed, potato-eared classmate David MacDonald as a troll; and the frightening lady who scrubs the stone tenement stairs as a mountain witch who steals and eats children.
All the characters in You Fancy Yourself — which premiered at the SummerWorks festival in 2006 and has been touring — are incarnated by Ardal herself, a stout woman with large, expressive eyes and a facility with the freestyle body language of children. She is especially adept at accents, equally comfortable singing Icelandic lullabies, or going full brogue on poems by Robbie Burns. She also occasionally slips, along with Elsa, into the international argot of American movies. Like the characters in Midnight Sun, Elsa uses Hollywood as a cultural touchstone: Her mother's dress transforms her into Rita Hayworth, while the boy Elsa fancies looks like James Dean.
Underneath the exotic Nordic-oil and Celtic-vinegar dressing, Elsa's salad days are very — perhaps too — familiar. She betrays the awkward Adelle to fit in with the popular girls who ride imaginary ponies at recess, but eventually discovers the value of true friendship and being yourself. Then, there's the subplot of Elsa's first crush, the object of her affection being a boy who can blow a piercing, authoritative whistle when he puts "his four fingers to his glistening lips." (When he spits in her presence, Elsa swoons: "Oh, I wish I could pick up his gum and chew it.")
In addition to the usual schoolyard politics, Elsa must navigate xenophobia from all corners. Her teacher patronizes her as a foreigner, while the children have a special taunt for her: "Why don't you go back where you came from?" Elsa herself is embarrassed by her roots, declining to go to the market with her mother because she pronounces fish as "fiss."
Under the direction of Mary Francis Moore, Ardal skillfully creates this waist-high world that once was by using only a wooden trunk as a prop and Julia Tribe's subtle lighting. But while Ardal is a fine performer, capable of hilarious caricature, her gentle childhood memoir has little to keep you hooked beyond its charm, which eventually wears thin. Elsa ages and grows more confident, but promising plot threads are left dangling. What, for example, happened to Adelle's bedridden mother, painted so pitifully in the opening scenes, asking her little daughter to light a cigarette for her between gasps of breath?
The stakes are decidedly low. Bullying, ostracization and first heartbreaks can, of course, be extremely dramatic material. Elsa herself continually compares her and her classmates' tribulations to the Massacre of Glencoe, a 1692 Scottish tragedy that she becomes fascinated with on her first day of school. From the audience's perspective, however, everything is shot through the soft focus of childhood reminiscences. It's the kind of thing, personally, I'd rather listen to on public radio while doing the crossword on the weekend.
About halfway through You Fancy Yourself, I'd had my fill of spending time with a seven year old who sounds like Bjork and who, in her blue jumper and adult body, looks like a children's television host. But tolerance will vary. Certainly, however, the intermission should be cut — one could easily handle the 90 minutes of content without it.
You Fancy Yourself runs until Feb. 14 (416-504-7529).
