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by Vern Thiessen with Yvette Nolan, directed by Krista Jackson with Geneviève Pelletier

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

August 24-October 2, 2024

Royland: “There are many ways to divine”

The Stratford Festival is presenting the world premiere of The Diviners, a stage adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s 1974 novel of the same name, now considered one of the indisputable classics of Canadian fiction. The adaptation for the stage by Vern Thiessen with Yvette Nolan presents the complex work with admirable clarity reinforced by the imaginative direction of Krista Jackson with Geneviève Pelletier. The cross-casting of The Diviners with this season’s productions of Cymbeline and Something Rotten! gives the directors a chorus of twelve actors beyond the play’s nine core characters. This chorus the directors use to heighten the theatricality of the action and its themes. The entire cast give exemplary anchored by Irene Poole’s magisterial performance as the central character Morag Dunn.

The play, like the novel, begins in a log cabin in a small town in Ontario in 1972. Successful 47-year-old writer, Morag Dunn, wakes up to find her 18-year-old daughter Pique has left to go west to Morag’s hometown, Manawaka, Manitoba, to try to understand her identity. Pique knows she is half-Métis but Morag has told her nothing about that side of her family.

Meanwhile, Morag is trying to write a novel that her agent is pressuring her to finish. Morag realizes that the reason she is having trouble with her writing is that the novel is autobiographical and she is still having difficulty confronting certain events in her past. While the novel flashes back to Morag’s past, narrating her life up to the present, the play uses frequent, separate flashbacks from 1972 to various times in the past.

Orphaned at the age of four when her parents die of polio, Morag is sent to live with a family friend Christie Logan in the town of Manawaka, Manitoba. Thiessen and Nolan omit Christie’s wife Prin, likely to create a stronger parallel between Christie and Lazarus Tonnerre – the one Scottish, the other Métis. Christie, a garbage collector, is looked down on by the townsfolk and so is Morag by association. Christie, who inhabits what is called the Nuisance Grounds, has the power to read people by what they throw away, one of the many sorts of divining that appear in the story.

Set designer Bretta Gerecke has taken this as the key image for her design and has hung a wide array of garbage or generally unwanted objects above the entire length of the stage and stuffed more garbage them under the bleachers placed far upstage. The presence of all this refuse reflects the remnants of the past that sorts through in her attempt to find those moments that made her the person she is.

Growing up in Manawaka, the young Morag meets the young Métis boy Jules. Both feel an immediate sympathy with each other as fellow outcasts from society. Jules’s father Lazarus brews moonshine for the town and he and Christie both are famed as storytellers. As with many people who grow up in small towns the main goal for both Morag and Jules is to get away. Jules does so by joining the army. Morag does so by going away to university in Winnipeg.

At university Morag falls in love with her English professor Brooke Skelton, who is 15 years her senior. Brooke’s continual treatment of Morag as a child rather than an equal becomes a source of contention that leads eventually to their separation. When Jules re-enters Morag’s life they rekindle their love and their affair produces the child Pique, whom Morag names after Jules’s sister Piquette, who died in a fire at her father’s still.

When Morag’s daughter Pique returns from her sojourn in Manawaka and when Morag finally tells her about her dual heritage, Pique feels that she at last knows who she is – neither Scottish nor Métis but Canadian. Morag’s confession to Pique and her acceptance of her past helps her break the block that has prevented her from writing.

Director Krista Jackson with Geneviève Pelletier have given the upstage and downstage areas of the stage symbolic functions. Downstage represents 1972, the present in which we meet Morag as she is writing. Upstage represents the past. When Irene Poole as Morag moves from her typewriter on a pedestal downstage to the bleachers upstage, she sheds years as she metamorphoses from her adult to her childhood self. In a play that constantly shifts back and forth in time, using such symbolic areas makes it very easy to know when an action takes place.

Jackson and Pelletier used the large chorus they have to amplify the play’s story. The chorus becomes the classmates of Morag and Jules in Manawaka. They act out the stories that both Christie and Lazarus tell. The fact that the group become Scottish for the one and Métis for the other already hints at the merging of dual identities that occurs with Pique at the conclusion.

The chorus’s movements are beautifully choreographed by Cameron Carver, who often leads the chorus from orchestrated movement into actual dance. The step-dancing and jigs that the cast perform on the side of the thrust provide some of the most visually and aurally exciting moments in the show. Plays about writers often fail because it is so difficult to make an internal process interesting when its only outward manifestation is person sitting still and writing by hand or typing. Carver solves this problem when Morag breaks through her writer’s block near the end by having the chorus move about the stage casting sheaves of typing paper into the air looking like an explosion of water when a dam breaks.

Jackson and Pelletier have drawn outstanding performances from the entire cast. Principal among these is that of Irene Poole as Morag. Audiences will know that Poole has been one of the finest actors in the Stratford company over the past ten seasons. Though she has played Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew (2008) and Katherine in Henry VIII (2019), this is the first role she has had at Stratford that allows her to display the full range of her talent. Poole wonderfully distinguishes the frustrated Morag of 1972 with Morag as a little girl and Morag as a university student. This she accomplishes through major changes in voice and gestural language. Poole’s ability to slip from the 1972 Morag, sometimes sober, sometimes not, back and forth between these earlier versions of herself is acting at its finest. The fact that each of these Morags experiences a wide range of emotions is a further challenge that Poole masters with ease. Given that the 1972 Morag also keenly observes her own thought processes, Thiessen and Nolan have created in their stage version one of the finest, most complex roles for a woman in Canadian Theatre.

Stratford could not have chosen a better actor to play Morag’s soulmate, the Métis Jules Tonnerre, than Métis actor Jesse Gervais. Patrons of London’s Grand Theatre will have seen Gervais as the Butler in its hilarious production of Clue this year. Gervais’s mode of acting is so different in a serious play like this than it was in comedy that watching The Diviners I did not realize I had seen and praised Gervais before. Here Gervais uses a warm, resonant voice both in speaking and in singing the moving songs Jules has written. Though Jules has ample reasons to be downcast, Gervais brings out the unfailing optimism, stemming from a pride in his heritage, that keeps Jules going. Gervais and Poole make Jules’s reunion with Morag after years of separation the emotional highlight of the play.

Two important people in Morag’s childhood in Manawaka are Christie Logan, her foster father, and Lazarus Tonnerre, Jules’s father. Jonathan Goad gives a masterful performance as Christie that that combines Christie’s irritation and defiance of the community’s contempt of him with the joy raising Morag gives him and his pleasure in telling stories of his and Morag’s Scottish forebears. In telling epic tales of the downtrodden Scots, Goad gives a perceptible wink to his voice as if Christie wonders how far he can stretch the truth before Morag cottons on.

Thiessen and Nolan have not characterized Lazarus as an abusive father as he is in the novel and try to make him more of a kindly Métis parallel to Christie. This is the best role Métis actor Josue Laboucane has ever had in his eleven seasons at Stratford, and it is a pleasure to see him bring it off with such aplomb. Laboucane has Lazarus relish his storytelling as much as Christie does, even if his topic is the mistreatment of the Métis in Canada. Lazarus, like Christie, relishes the power of using words to bring the past, or at least his version of the past, alive. It’s a further pleasure to hear Laboucane sing so we can note how Jules has inherited his musical talent from is father. Laboucane also allows Lazarus to show his unfathomable grief at the death of Piquette.

Julie Lumsden, excellent as Morag’s daughter Pique, carefully traces the stages of Pique’s journey from defiance of her mother and her mother’s secrets, to a greater understanding of her mother and, hence, of herself.

In other roles, Anthony Santiago, as the 1972 Morag’s neighbour, confidant and water diviner Royland, gives his best-ever performance, mixing Royland’s kindness and joking with a feeling of real concern for Morag and her daughter. Santiago makes Royland a wise man who wears his wisdom lightly. Dan Chameroy shows his enormous versatility in playing Morag’s husband Brooke Skelton as an increasingly obsessive and controlling creep. Anyone who thinks of Chameroy as a comic actor will be surprised by his powerful performance as Morag’s despicable professor. Caleigh Crow gives a sensitive performance as Piquette, Lazarus’ daughter. Even though we can predict what will happen when she runs away with a man who wants to “marry” her, Crow makes us sympathize with the tumult of betrayal and self-accusation Piquette feels after the incident. Among a group of characters who bear various sorrows, Lachlan McLachlan, the editor of a small town paper who gives Morag a chance to be a writer, is one person at ease with himself and who wants to do good. Christopher Allen fully brings out Lachlan’s admirable qualities and gives us glimpse, along with Santiago’s Royland, of the kind of inner peace that Morag and Pique long so much to achieve.

Thiessen with Nolan have necessarily cut dozens of characters and incidents in adapting the novel for the stage. Both are conversant enough with the theatre that they know, unlike so many adaptors, that the way a story works on stage is quite different from how it works as a novel. In focussing on the novel’s essential points, they have managed to create a group of characters rich and deep enough to challenge actors and to intrigue audiences.

The main question that the production raises is what effect the play will have for companies that do not have a chorus of twelve at their disposal. Exciting and theatrical as they make the production, the chorus is not strictly necessary to telling the story. The real test of Thiessen and Nolan’s work will come when the work is presented in a less extravagant manner than that at Stratford. Until that second production comes along, enjoy the Stratford production in its run at the Tom Patterson Theatre. If anyone tells you that Canadian literature or drama is boring, send them to The Diviners as a show that thrillingly refutes that notion.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Irene Poole as Morag and Julie Lumsden as Pique; Irene Poole as Morag and Jesse Gervais as Jules; Irene Poole (centre) as Morag with ensemble; Irene Poole as Morag and Jonathan Goad as Christie. © 2024 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca.