There Goes the Bride: Heritage without Heat

Morpheus Theatre is staging There Goes the Bride at the Pumphouse Theatre from the 3^rd to the 11^th of October. The play is a standard British Farce with all of the double entendres to be expected in a Ray Cooney zinger. On the day of his daughter’s wedding, advertising executive Timothy bumps his head, and this results in him hallucinating a vivacious flapper (from the 20’s) named Polly. Timothy’s obsession with Polly leads his family to assume that he has lost his head or is having an affair.

What happens then? I am not sure. I left halfway. I must state that this was not done out of malice or disrespect to the cast and crew, but out of sheer exhaustion with the presentation itself. There are arguments for unflinchingly supporting Amateur theatre, to applaud anything and everything, even if one feels differently. The arguments for it are rather powerful; theatre revivifies our civic life, renews the terms of our cultural contracts, and allows for the development of spaces that foster inclusive social compacts. Alexis de Tocqueville (French writer) stated that the health of a democracy depends on the civic associations that social participants share. It is this theatre of life (outside of formal institutions) that allows for the cultivation of responsibility, compromise, and cooperation. Associations require individuals, working at cross-purposes, to come together and build shared meaning from enterprises that require labour, work, and effort. So, yes, there is a very, very powerful argument to be made for sticking it out, as an audience member, and issuing an uncompromising ‘yes’ to the total demonstration of theatre we witness. Alexis de Tocqueville would probably say that it is the theatre behind the theatre (unseen drama of human collaboration, where actors rehearse the art of living together) that is so much more important than whatever we see on stage.  There is also another interesting argument; it doesn't matter if you pay $25 for a ticket, you are paying for the beautification of civic life. Maybe it is best to funnel that money into an association that gives human beings meaning and purpose through art, instead of spending it on algorithmic distractions or disposable forms of entertainment. Not everything can be reduced to questions of fungible value in a modern society; there is more, so much more than predicating everything on expectations around transactional exchange. Participating in art is to resist the reductive logic of the market, to affirm that some experiences will, and should, always be ends in themselves. Even if the play falters, the act of showing up will always affirm something larger and more important than the inherent quality of the performance itself – it is the communal promise that art still matters, that it will always matter to us, and that our participation in it is a quiet and powerful form of social democracy.

Yep, powerful, and certainly the axiom that I walk into every Amateur performance with. That being said, we know that it does not end here, that it cannot end here. Why? Because art is not a passive activity, it will stimulate our faculties, invoke worldviews, and elicit a form of social cognition that will always see art as more than just the bare demonstration of civic life, but as a demonstration of aesthetic vitality. This is the living pulse of imagination that keeps a culture awake to itself – its possibilities, its failings, and its achievements. Now, this is a farce, and we really shouldn’t be expecting anything other than a farce, but what we can expect is novelty, newness, imagination, vulnerability – in other words, the vitalism of the theatre behind the theatre should always find its way on stage. When I see and review a play (not a professional review, as I am a member of the audience) that fails to invoke the imagination, I cannot help but think that important risks, choices, conversations, and deliberations were never made or had. Now, of course, this is all a wild surmise, but if that is the case (which I think it is in this production), then the argument for theatre for theatre’s sake does not hold, because it becomes an expression of association for association’s sake. What is the problem here? It is the flower without the nectar.

Tocqueville warned of this (in another context), but the relevance is salient – the necrotic pull towards habit and comfort. When the Theatre ceases to be a dialogue with our aesthetic imagination and is reduced to the bare act of participation, it risks losing its pulse. The very, very hard work of the actors and the crew notwithstanding, there is something deeply amiss with the creative vision of this production. It is civic activity unmoored from artistic and creative daring, it is the comfort that Tocqueville warned against.

Elizabeth Greenwood as Ursula Westerby exhibited a lovely naturalism, not entirely suited to the genre, but someone I would love to see in a different production. Her choices were interesting, and she seemed very grounded on stage, assuming the lived tension of the stage with aplomb and confidence. Bruce Fraser, as Bill Shorter, was suave and funny, exhibiting minor behavioural quirks that were humorous. The beginning of the play starts well (first 10 minutes); there is a naturalism to it that is very interesting to see, but unfortunately, that is the tone that it maintains throughout the first act. By the end of the act, I was uninterested and could not find it worth the time to stay, because the play had become stuck in a performative register that never evolved beyond its opening rhythm. What has happened to these characters is pretty incredible; Timothy is hallucinating, his daughter is about to get married, his wife has no idea what the hell is going on, his best friend watches the chaos in disbelief and tries to play his part in mitigating the damage, and Ursula’s mother watches all of this madness unfold with disbelief – but you would never know that by watching the play, the action and tension is so understated as to be non-existent at times. There are some great lines, and they are at times delivered well, but they are delivered in isolation from the dramatic rush that is beckoning these characters to unravel. The performances are caught in a static holding pattern; we feel none of the mounting pressure that should accelerate the farce towards relative delirium (by end of act 1 at least). There is no chaos or combustion, only a cold and gentrified presentation of dramatic action. The characters react, but they never ignite, and without this, the play increasingly starts to feel inert.

If a fresh perspective is not brought to these plays, there will certainly be no audience for them, in Calgary, in 5-10 years. The creative vision behind the play evidences a perspective that has not sincerely engaged with the riotous energy that defines a farce like this. This is heritage without heart, heritage without heat. The performative energy that audiences expect of theatre will change, with the ascendancy of digital entertainment, the room for Complacency with a capital C will diminish, not because of reductive transactional expectations but because the imagination of a younger public will swell beyond the confines of an outdated heritage aesthetic. Velocity, presence, depth – this is what they will come to see. Do small stages not deserve the voltaic energy of risk that keeps the theatre and our social imagination alive?

This is, unfortunately, ceremonial theatre – theatre for theatre’s sake – association for association’s sake – a beautiful demonstration of the hard work of the cast and crew, but one entombed in a calcified vision of the theatre. Productions like these are mausoleums, maybe comforting to some, but nostalgia without vitality mummifies the very art it claims to liberate - this is preservation mistaken for life.

Rating 3/10