by Erin Shields
Directed by Alan Dilworth
At Tarragon Theatre
April 14-May 23, 2010

   I never saw Groundwater Productions’ version of this play at the 2008 Summer Works Theatre Festival. I am not unhappy about this because often the most praised summer works pieces come to grief in larger venues or in full-blown productions. Good will alone does not suffice to create great or even good art. But having now seen Erin Shields’s If We Were Birds in a mainstage production, I can claim confidently that Toronto has a new genuine playwright and Tarragon has its biggest artistic hit since Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched. Poetic theatre has often taken a bad rap for strained artifice, but as Erin Shields demonstrates to magnificent effect in If We Were Birds, there’s good reason to celebrate a genre that can look back at Christopher Fry, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, and the Greeks as ancestors. Shields is nothing if not daring. Not only does she elect to write poetic monologues for women who have fallen into depths of chaos and destruction, she refracts dastardly contemporary issues through the prism of a classic fable. Her metaphorical lode—the tale of sisters Procne and Philomela—is inherited from Ovid but recast in such a way as to encompass the horrors of Nanking, Berlin, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and other less known places where women have survived unspeakable atrocities committed against them. The Ovidian allusion was well known to Shakespeare who spun it into his barbaric Titus Andronicus, and Shields uses it to her own advantage, playing up its primal stakes with her extraordinary intuitive and visceral intelligence.

   The fundamental tale is a woven tapestry of horrors. At its centre is a family tragedy, where one sister (Philomela) from Athenian royalty is raped, mutilated, and left for dead by the husband (Tereus) of the other sister (Procne). However, the violated one survives and finds her way back to a reunion with her married sister, where the two plot a hideous revenge. That the revenge entails the sacrifice of the infant son of the married sister somehow is extenuated by the circumstances of the plot, and the playwright is willing to defy moral convention by extracting a full measure of revenge for the sisters. In Ovid, retribution takes the form of a transformation as the rapist and two sisters are all turned into birds by the gods, Philomela into a nightingale.

   I have flattened the play in my synopsis, so I am quick to add that the text is anything but flat. From the stark stylized opening in the manner of a Greek tragedy (a cyclorama effect in the set, a startling opening tableau, strong choric work, and the sense of Fate beyond the gods) where the bleeding figure of Philomela becomes the frame for the story,  to the interesting domestic episodes (full of variety and different textures of language), the pithy characterizations, and the stylized violence (lit by Kimberly Purtell in a clever mixture of amber, red, and blue) and blazing rhetoric of the sisters, If We Were Birds is a huge development in the craft of Canadian playwriting.

   This is a production where the elements cohere impressively. The stage, in Jung-Hye Kim’s design, resembles a cage—a point extended by Thomas Ryder Payne’s recorded bird sounds. The chorus of five women (in somber black) uses posture and other body language to suggest birds in distress, submission, appeal, or triumph. And at the end, after the terrible revenge has been exacted, the entire acting corps assumes the configurations of birds in flight. To some, this expressiveness might seem overdone, but I thought it supremely fitted to the central metaphor. This is, after all, a tale about distress yet hope, an upward flight to liberation after terrifying suffering. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson, and some of us may recall Aristophanes’s “By words a man is uplifted and his mind is made to soar aloft.”

   The playwright’s mind soars in this play, and director Alan Dilworth ensures that the cast takes flight as well with performances that gleam like icons. Though physically restricted by the concept of wounded birds, the chorus of Barbara Gordon, Karen Robinson, Stephanie Jung, Daniela Lam, and Shannon Perreault lends solid support to the mood and texture of the story. David Fox as King Pandion, father to the two sisters, does reprise some of the mannerisms of his Donald Rumsfeld from Stuff Happens—or, perhaps, it is just a matter of his physical mannerisms—but he has a pettish authority and sense of obsession that are well suited to his role. Geoffrey Pounsett’s Tereus is physically imposing and ultimately nastily brutish, and he combines these aspects with a desperate attempt at self-justification or exoneration, blaming his crimes on his “blood.” The two most riveting performances, not surprisingly, are by Philippa Domville as Procne and Tara Rosling as Philomela. Domville, who is usually at her best when allowed to be dramatically neurotic, begins with sanguine confidence and progresses to the point of utter rage. Rosling, one of the most accomplished of our dramatic actresses, delivers a performance of elemental force, combining embarrassed innocence with excited awareness, feminine vulnerability with primal anguish, and carrying the character to a height of pathos. 

photo: Cylla von Tiedemann

pic: Philippa Domville (Procne) and Tara Rosling (Philomela) with Chorus (Shannon Perreault, Karen Robinson, Barbara Gordon, and Stephanie Jung) in "If We Were Birds"



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