Gaslight illuminates psychological abuse

Gaslight

By Patrick Hamilton

 

Directed by Brian Richmond

Blue Bridge at the Roxy

October 21 to November 2

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Thankfully, I have never been involved in a psychologically abusive relationship, but, as United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” I saw it – and heard it – last week at the Roxy Theatre.

If you think Gaslight, set in the London of the 1880s, has no relevance in today’s world, I urge you to catch this Blue Bridge production directed by Brian Richmond. Five minutes into the play, you will be disabused of that silly notion as Mr. Manningham, the abusive husband, played by Vancouver actor Adrian Hough, sets out to undermine his wife’s sanity. Hough’s demeaning tone rings with authenticity and pierces like an ice pick through the heart.

Hough wasn’t solely responsible for this chilling effect. He was given his lines by playwright Patrick Hamilton, who wrote Gaslight in 1938. Hamilton, whose father was a financially inept drunk, was raised in relative poverty (and, one suspects, abuse). His formal education ended in 1919 when he was just 15, but he published his first poem that year and kept on writing. Gaslight made him rich. After six months at the Apollo Theatre in London, the play went on to a four-year run on Broadway. In 1940, it was made into a film in England, and in 1944, MGM released the Hollywood version starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton. Bergman won her first Oscar for her nuanced performance as the abused wife.

Thea Gill, who plays Mrs. Manningham in the Blue Bridge production, does not, unfortunately, follow Bergman’s fine example. Gill’s interpretation seemed stuck in the high hysterical range. Still, when she got her revenge at the end of the play, it was a satisfying denouement.

Wes Borg, who plays Rough, the retired detective who solves the case of the husband’s long-ago murder of another woman in the same house, provided welcome comic relief as he bustled loquaciously through the mystery with a Scottish accent. (Iris Macgregor Bannerman, who played Elizabeth the maid, doubled as dialect coach.) When he handed Mrs. Manningham a flask of Scotch whiskey and said “It’ll give you faith in your reason like nothing else,” I couldn’t help but laugh.

The technical aspects of the production were mixed. The hiss of the gaslights when first lit provided an ominous touch, and the rise and fall of their light as the mystery progressed was timed to perfection. The blurred black-and-white film of a pianist projected onto the piano at the beginning of both acts puzzled me until I watched the 1944 film and discovered that the husband was a pianist. The film projection coupled with recorded music set a sinister mood and eliminated the need to have a live actor playing. Attention to these technical aspects enhanced the play’s theatricality. The sound design, however, was flawed, or else the microphones were faulty. Volume fluctuated distractingly as the actors crossed from one side of the stage to the other.

When the actors took their final bows on the night I saw the play, Hough seemed momentarily shocked as he was roundly booed. He needn’t have been. The boos were not directed at him but at his character. Booing the villain in early melodrama has a long tradition. Although the practice was less common in later, psychological melodramas like this one, Hough’s superb depiction of the quintessential abusive husband earned him this tribute.

If you need to be reminded that psychological abuse is still a problem; if you want to see an abused wife get revenge; if you want to let off some steam by booing a villain, go see this production of Gaslight at the Roxy through Nov. 2.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover. 

Butler Prize winner M.A.C. Farrant on The World Afloat

M.A.C. Farrant has been a mainstay of the Victoria literary scene for years. Born in Sydney, Australia, and raised on Vancouver Island, she’s written more than 10 books, ranging from memoir to short fiction. On Oct. 15, Farrant took home the Victoria Butler Book Prize for her latest work The World Afloat. Up against four other finalists — Dede Crane (Every Happy Family; fiction), Audrey Thomas (Local Customs; fiction), Catherine Greenwood (The Lost Letters; poetry) and Micheal Layland (The Land of Heart’s Delight; non-fiction) – jurors praised The World Afloat for its grace, humour and creativity. M.A.C. Farrant discusses her book with Erin Anderson.

You told a great anecdote in your acceptance speech about how the last time you won something, it was a box of black hair dye given out as a door prize at a school fun fair. What was it like to be recognized with a literary prize? How did your book fit in with the other finalists?

I was really surprised! I’ve been at this business a long time – I’ve written a lot of books and received a lot of nominations. It’s wonderful to be nominated for a prize but I’ve never actually won one. I was nominated for the Butler Book Prize in 2010, so it was déjà vu coming back. Going in, I reminded myself that it’s great to be included in the finalists and to get attention for the book but I really wasn’t expecting to actually win something. Having said that, I’m quite enjoying it!

As to where my book fits in with the other nominees, I like to think that we are all producing good writing whatever the genre and that this is what has been recognized. The World Afloat is a hybrid of fiction and prose poetry and humour.

You’ve often taken an experimental approach to your writing — I’m thinking of your unusual, fragmentary approach in The Strange Truth About Us specifically. The World Afloat is a collection of 75 miniatures or microstories, which are typically one to two pages in length. Is your Butler prize win recognition of risk-taking in pioneering a new form?

I can’t say what the Butler Prize jury might have been thinking as far as my taking a risk with the book, but they did say some very nice things on the Victoria Book Prize website. But, yes, I like to play with form; the process engages me aesthetically. I did this with my memoir, My Turquoise Years, which I wrote as a non-fiction novel, and I did this with The Strange Truth About Us, which I called a “Novel of Absence.” This latter book was about attempting to predict the future and to pin down the universal confusion of mind that is the main feature of contemporary life, which is, we are afraid. I used fragments, annotations and notes to try and get at the subject.

As to writing miniatures, I’ve been doing that for some time now — they appear in a number of my books. The World Afloat is the first time, though, that I have brought a group of them together with a single-minded focus. I like what U.S. poet Charles Simic has said about the writing of a short poem: “Be brief and tell us everything.” I have tried to do that with each miniature.

Your collection straddles genres. Among your fellow finalists, there were novels, poetry and short story collections, non-fiction — all forms you’ve worked in. How important do you think it is for writers to work in different genres?

I’m afraid I’m not very good at giving advice. Choosing a genre to work in is such an individual thing; you find one or several that you feel comfortable in, or excited by. A lot depends on where your reading takes you, what you admire. As to working in several genres at once, that’s certainly the case with The World Afloat – fiction, poetry, essay, memoir, humour. The book is constructed as a collage in that I mixed together all these things plus found sentences, random images, fragments of heard conversation, and so on. The process actually felt like sculpting, or what I think sculpting must feel like: tactile. I’d take a mound of clay-like material and then I’d work it. For each miniature, a sentence or a sequence of sentences would stand out, excite my attention, and so I’d work with that until things started clicking into place. For much of the writing I was working intuitively, making things up on the fly, changing things, fiddling, re-writing, shaping to the demands of each piece.

The World Afloat is, among other things, very funny. Much of your writing has an element of humour to it — why do you think that’s so important?

There’s a curious attitude about humour in this country, especially humour written by women. It isn’t generally regarded as serious work. The comic view of life is something that isn’t often seen as serious enough to win prizes. I’ve tried to take philosophical, sociological and environmental images and ideas and infuse them with humour. Then again, I seem unable to not write humour; it’s a big part of my baggage and I don’t deny it.  The World Afloat was certainly a delight to write, and an adventure. I was having a lot of fun trying to mix those genres together and still have the work be accessible to readers. I wanted the book to be enjoyable to read but also cover more serious aspects of existence – love, mortality, and the necessity to live fearlessly, to float above the terrible times. We could, after all, become drowned in doom, and deny ourselves the experience of wonder, joy, expansiveness, love.  I think of these things as our cheerleader gene kicking in, our survival technique.

You have already started your next book. How will your new work compare to The World Afloat?

After The World Afloat came out in February, I took the summer off, which was a lovely thing to do – one of the best summers ever. You know, just enjoying summer things. In June, I had written half of a new book and now I’m working on finishing it.

It’s another book of miniatures because I’m not through with the form yet, though the slant will be different. Talonbooks will be bringing it out in the spring of 2016.

Read Marjorie Doyle’s review of The World Afloat.

Ordinary Hours sings with quiet wisdom

Ordinary Hours

Karen Enns

Brick Books

71 pages, $20

Reviewed by Carla Funk

The opening line of “Prelude,” the first poem in Karen Enns’ second collection, states: “Nothing is happening.” Yes, “Rachmaninoff plays in the other room / but there is nothing here.” What pours forth beyond the “nothing” is a litany of negative images within the white walls of this room: “no burning cities,” “no communists in sight, high priests / or seers,” “no dark horses / taking to the hills,” and even “no moon.” What’s not present, the poet names as “absence, not emptiness/ and something close to echo.”

The act of casting back into memory, of calling back the absent underscores the poems in Ordinary Hours, and tints the language with loss. But what moves the elegiac bent of this poetry into a more dynamic music is Enns’ attention to beauty within the commonplace. Sometimes, this beauty arrives as stillness, the pacing of the lines slowing down the hectic mind within time’s rush. In “There Are Words Carved in Wood,” the poet catalogues the human life, childhood to deathbed, but uses the sentence rhythms, fragments and caesura to arrest and intensify the fleeting and the temporal:

“There is desire. Lingering desire. Lingering. White trillium and fern.
Dry heat in the poplars. Solitude.

There are voices in the wind. Small stone bowls filled with water
underneath the dripping tap. Bird nests. Clay.”

Throughout these poems, beauty also arrives through the alchemy of metaphor. A rooster ia “featherweight evangelist.” Grief possesses a “stone-white tone that [holds] its pitch.” An old man stands smoking in the evening, “the tip of his cigarette a firefly above the lawn.” Enns’ imagination is alert and deft as it exalts life’s small details.

Ordinary Hours is divided into three numbered sections whose ideas and images overlap and repeat like variations on major themes. Wind, trees, shadows, whiteness, flowers, sky, mothers, fathers and music echo in the poems. Childhood, rural farm life, family, the poet’s Mennonite ancestry, spirituality, devotion, beauty, loss — these subjects and concerns recur throughout, but each iteration strives to bring something new to the page. At times, some of the poems’ endings echo too cleanly, with light relied on heavily as a final image. Still, the larger effect of these repetitions is one of unity, stitching the collection into a longer musical score.

For me, the major delight of Ordinary Hours is the quiet wisdom with which it sings. Enns’ poems do not challenge in form and style, do not push the boundaries of convention and language. Her diction is precise. Her images arrive via a sharp, intuitive mind. But she writes poetry embering with essential truth. Even a “Suite for Tools” becomes a meditation on physical work that gives rise to transcendence. Even when writing about chimney repairs, bus stops and crows, the poet’s eye practices the art of deep seeing, lifting up from the humble context a high thought. In the opening lines of “What I Was Told to Do with My Soul,” Enns writes:

“Leave it in the hands of someone who knows best
what to do with its dark folds and mystery,
someone who can see its possibilities
without bias, even from a distance,
and shape it into something leaner
with a purpose, who can take it from you easily
as if it were a simple loaf of bread you’d offered
or a song.
Let it go.”

To read Karen Enns’ Ordinary Hours is to wake up to the extraordinary within the ordinary hours of daily living, to open the door to a room of music that’s quiet, spare, honest. In the hectic barrage of this world’s noise, these poems counter with their stillness and clarity, illuminating what beauty breaks out when the mind pays attention, the eye finally sees and the ear leans in to listen.

Carla Funk’s most recent book of poetry is Apologetic, published by Turnstone Press.

Mother-talk diverse and challenging

The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood

Edited by Kerry Clare

Goose Lane Editions,

314 Pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Janet Ralph

The thoughtful, honest and sometimes humorous voices in this anthology speak from a wide array of perspectives. Featured writers range from a woman who presents her rational argument for why she chose to say “no” to babies to the woman who followed her instinct and produced four children with no regrets.

Readers will learn about the agonizing decision of whether to continue an unexpected pregnancy and the disappointing lack of results from months of treatment at a fertility clinic. Other essays report on twins, miscarriage, grieving the death of babies, step­parenting and the contemporary development of single and gay women choosing to have children with the aid of a sperm-donor clinic.

Some voices are as warm as a “heart to heart” with a close friend; others carry an undercurrent of anger or defensiveness because their choices are still criticized by some segments of society. One story feels aloof, another sad; one is sarcastic, another funny. Editor Kerry Clare’s compilation fittingly ends with a story written by a grandmother.

One of my favorite essays, because of its creativity and journalling of personal growth, is 
“Junior” by Maria Meindl. She tells a story about illness, daughterhood, self­knowledge and Junior, who is a unique kind of baby. I also admired Heather Birrell’s “Truth, Dare, Double­Dare” because of its superb style and ruthless honestly. Birrell eloquently clarifies the essence of the struggle in deciding to continue or end a pregnancy: “We found ourselves grappling with this perhaps most fundamental and mysterious intersection of biology, emotion, instinct and great complicated need.”

In “Dog Days,” Diana Fitzgerald Bryden beautifully sums up the experience of caring for babies when she writes of the “early days of constant interruption and blinding love, visceral engagement with the life of an infant as well as the attendant boredom, frustration and fatigue.”

Two additional perspectives I would have liked to see included in this conversation: those from an infertile couple (or single) who desperately wants a child but can’t afford the expense of adopting a baby from another country; and a woman who chooses to continue a pregnancy and give the baby to a person who wants but cannot produce a child.

The adoption choice is briefly touched on by Clare in her story “Doubleness Clarifies.” She uses the words of a young protagonist in Lynn Coady’s novel Strange Heaven to dismiss the option:  “Yes, but real human beings shouldn’t have to go through that.”
 In Clare’s story of choosing abortion to end her pregnancy, she defends her choice on an intellectual level but doesn’t give readers insight into the emotional aspects of her experience. Modern motherhood is complex in ways our grandmothers could never have imagined, yet the deeper elements of the experience remain the same.

The M Word is a book I would have benefited from reading when I was a young mother more than 30 years ago. I have recommended it to my daughters now as they ponder their motherhood choices.

Janet Ralph is a Victoria reader and writing student. 

A new WorkPLACE at Open Space

WorkPLACE

Curated by: Lynda Gammon

Until Oct. 25

Open Space, second floor, 510 Fort Street

Reviewed by Adam Hayman

Lynda Gammon has turned Victoria’s Open Space into a WorkPLACE. Not her own work place, but a curated exhibition examining how we have worked and continue to work in the modern world. Gammon, a Victoria artist and associate professor at the University of Victoria, is known for questioning both space and place. At Open Space, she showcases eight works from four artists.

The idea of WorkPLACE was not to accumulate a large selection of work, nor was it to question how an artist works. Instead, a small collection of quality pieces examines the word work.

I found it easy to absorb the entirety of each piece in 90 minutes, including the time it took to watch Christine Welsh’s hour-long documentary. This is why Open Space’s admission by donation policy is perfect for exhibitions such as this. The gallery on lower Fort Street is a simple stop to make if you have the extra time during a visit downtown.

The theme of  “work” is  clear throughout the majority of the pieces with the exception of the beautiful Eyeless Dragon by Dong-Kyoon Nam. Nam is a Korean-born artist who works with found or everyday objects. He received his MFA from UVic and now teaches at the University of Manitoba. In Eyeless Dragon, a halogen light stares down at the exposed innards of copper wire and electric cord, but the piece doesn’t register as easily with the theme of work as the others. It is, however, still powerful and can absorb a large amount of the viewer’s time.

Tommy Ting is a London-based artist who works in many mediums, and his pieces, ‘Machine’ and Workers Posing as Workers, brought political weight to the show by looking at workers in the past. Swiss born photographer/filmmaker Thomas Kneubühler provided a collection of photos titled Absence, which were a series of shots of people staring at what we assume must be a computer screen. This depiction of modern society provoked self-conscious thoughts—how do I look when I’m sitting in front of a screen? The photographs were also perfectly situated next to Ting’s Workers Posing as Workers, a reproduction of a photo showing faceless Asian and Native Cannery workers from the turn of the century. The proximity of these pieces poked at my social conscience, which was a great choice by Gammon.

Gammon’s decision to present two videos, and where she placed them, however, needs re-examining. Christine Welsh, Metis filmmaker and women’s studies associate professor at UVic, had her documentary about the Coast Salish women who make Cowichan sweaters displayed prominently in the exhibition. It proved a fitting choice for this collection and the film runs just under an hour. This isn’t hard to sit through, unless, of course, you’ve just watched the shorter documentary, Currents (six and a half minutes) by Thomas Kneubühler, which is situated just to the left of the stairs when you enter. Sitting through seven minutes of a film, and then more than 50 minutes of a separate film is not easy on a millennial’s attention span. So if you are like myself I would recommend starting with Welsh’s film, and then moving around the gallery to end on Kneubühler’s.

WorkPLACE runs until Oct. 25.

Adam Hayman is an amateur woodworker and fourth year writing student at UVic with a passion for visual arts. 

Alumni production packed with energy

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Adapted by Ron Reed from C.S Lewis’ Novel

Starring Mark Gordon and Kaitlin Williams

The Phoenix Theatre

Two added shows: Oct. 24 and 25 

Reviewed by Madeline McParland

Phoenix Theatre alumni Mark Gordon and Kaitlin Williams have been touring The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe for the past two years and now have brought it to the theatre that shaped their careers. The first book of the Narnia adventures is compressed into a famous two-hander play, but for me, C.S. Lewis’s hearty narrative is not well served by the play’s format.

The story is told in retrospect on behalf of brother and sister characters Peter and Lucy, who are revisiting the Wardrobe eight years after leaving home. The two actors recreate 10 different characters between them, including Mr Tumnus, Mr and Mrs. Beaver, the Queen and Aslan the lion. They did an impressive job navigating the play’s entire dialogue  — not an easy feat.

A simple set keeps the characters reminiscing in one room furnished by a chair, a lamp and a wardrobe, with a few fur coats for costume. Minimal props and lighting are used to indicate shifts in character or scenes. However, I found the constant switching back and forth between characters to be underwhelming. Peter and Lucy would talk — and with only a small accent adjustment and a white fur coat they’d become brother Edmund and the Queen.

The first half of the play had a steady pace — Narnia was nicely introduced and all the familiar references were there. Gordon’s portrayal of the Beavers was my favorite, as he hunched and waddled with vigour. I found Williams’s portrayal of the Queen to be her best character: she had the perfect cackle and looked just as irritated with Edmund as the rest of us felt.

Unfortunately, the second half of the play seemed rushed: all the best action was funneled into a whirlwind of shifting characters. Some of the best moments, the battle or the stone table, were undercut with overwhelming narration mixed with hurried dialogue. I was most looking forward to seeing the great lion, Aslan, but alas, he was only portrayed with a small throw blanket the actors passed back and forth.

The book has many beloved magical elements that create its fantastical narrative, and although I admire the play for taking on such an endeavor, the story calls for a performance that is a little more larger than life.

Madeline McParland is a UVic student and freelancer.

Hush Little Daisy

Baby with the Bathwater

By Christopher Durang

Directed by Clayton Jevne

at Theatre Inconnu

Until October 18

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Welcome into the cozy crib of the Dingleberries, the most dysfunctional couple on the block. In this dark parody on parenting, Helen and John start out terrified of raising their child the wrong way. But not to worry. Very quickly, the Nyquil and Quaaludes take over as they relax and ruin him in innovative ways. Though family tension is nothing new in storytelling, Baby with the Bathwater certainly serenades the audience with an unexpected lullaby as we follow Daisy’s life, from his first moments to his 30th birthday. Baby Daisy somehow grows into both the centre of their world and a painful afterthought as his parents switch moods faster than the settings on a blender.

Things complicate further when Nanny marches uninvited into their home– a scary Mary Poppins who is part “Auntie Mame” and part “antichrist.” Lorene Cammiade delivers the character’s warped lines with such a cheerful English accent that I couldn’t help cracking up. The surprise Nanny and her startling antics subvert the saccharin stereotype, and she seems to chastise parents for hiring strangers to raise their children.

This hyperfamily is hilarious. To pull off a hundred-minute play whose entire plot spotlights a baby doll is quite a theatrical victory for both playwright and production. And the audience laughs all the way through. It’s fitting that the baby is a physical prop since the child in the story is treated as more silent prop than person. Durang’s witty dialogue is anything but clichéd as one character reads Mommie Dearest to the poor thing as a bedtime story. And speaking of props, a great one was the red rattle that comes with a warning label: made with lead, asbestos, and red dye no.2. It sums up the toxic love in this story and the universal risks of naïve parenting.

As Daisy ages and sprawls unresponsively on the playground in existential malaise and his neurotic mother goes into passive-aggressive catatonia on the floor at the feet of her drugged-up husband, one can’t help wondering who drove whom crazy – the baby or the parents? The psychology of child development around early trauma and learned behaviours gets fully exploited here. This is a love/ hate relationship as illustrated when Helen yells “I love you. I hate you!” at Nanny before they all go to bed. In the same bed. Ahem. Since Helen always yearned for either “a baby girl or a bestseller” and her writing career never surpasses Spark Notes, Daisy is raised as a girl until 15 years old when his masculinity can no longer be denied.

The ’80s flavour this play, yet it still rings true for today. Sometimes the tragic bolts that strike border on being too random. Strangers run in and out of their lives with disturbing intimacy at first sight. People just happen to be run over by buses. And characters can seem a tad one dimensional at times. But, this is a satirical tribute to all the magical nannies and fairy godmothers of childhood fiction. Instead of a big bad wolf, you get the baby-eating German Shepherd. So it makes strange sense.

Tea Siskin was fabulously funny to watch as a designer mother at the playground. She was Marisa Tomei meets Snow White on valium, as sweet and flaky as homemade apple pie. As Helen and John, Rebecca Waitt and Jack Hayes unravel comically before our eyes, from uptight and spring-loaded to loaded with amphetamines and ambivalence. Still, somehow these extreme characters represent the fumbling of every family with every child.

The giant baby blocks that make up the set spell out small, subtextual words during the play like die and def, and add an increasingly menacing tension between innocence and pain. One can’t help feeling these grown adults raising this child have all the common sense of a baby themselves.

This play arcs beautifully from the absurd to sane. Matthew McLaren plays adult Daisy and brings a needed counterpoint to all the outrageous chaos. When he appears, it’s a wonderful turning point in the play where reality bleeds through and we feel the darkness of the irony – comedy melts into tragedy.

But just when it could sink too deep, the end is a relief, the proverbial diamond ring that should come since the mockingbird refused to sing throughout Daisy’s unfortunate childhood. Despite the traditional lullaby being perverted in every possible way, it somehow ends on a final note of hope and that is so rewarding after the emotional mess that poor Daisy endures. This ending is earned. Normal has never been so refreshing. If there is one positive message you can take home with you from Baby with the Bathwater, it is this: you can survive your childhood and rewrite its song.

Leah Callen is completing her MFA in playwriting at the University of Victoria.

Debut collection embraces female experience

Gone South and Other Ways to Disappear, Julia Leggett’s debut collection of short stories (Mother Tongue Publishing, 188 pages, $19.95) is both polished and compelling. She was born in Calgary, but grew up in Zimbabwe, which she left at age 18. Leggett makes her home in Victoria now and is pursuing a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Her poetry has also appeared in Force Field:  77 Women Poets of British Columbia (Mother Tongue 2013), edited by Susan Musgrave. Leggett recently answered Lynne Van Luven’s questions for Coastal Spectator. Gone South will be launched in Victoria on Saturday, Oct. 18 at 8 p.m., at the Martin Batchelor Gallery.

Julia, this is such a strong first collection of stories, and you have an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Is Gone South an aspect of your master’s thesis?

The collection is essentially my thesis. Though a few of the stories are in quite different places than they were when I submitted. The entire collection is longer too. I went into the MFA program really only writing poetry and so my fiction tended to be tightly wound. I had to learn to elaborate. The opposite I think of what a lot of writers struggle with. I know when I started my MFA, there was more talk about how “writers aren’t taught, they’re born,” but without doing my MFA, I do not think I’d have ever written this book. The MFA not only gave me permission to focus on writing, it demanded I do.

The title story of your collection is incredibly powerful, a relentless epistolary record of a young woman’s diagnosis of melanoma. In your Acknowledgements, you thank your “fellow melanoma warriors,” so I’m deducing this work is based upon personal experience. Can you talk a little about that?

It is a deeply personal story. I was diagnosed and underwent treatment for melanoma when I was 28. Luckily, I am currently [showing] no evidence of disease because melanoma has a pretty appalling survival rate, and not very exciting or effective treatment options. I thought I understood what it meant to be mortal before my diagnosis but I don’t think I really had any idea.

“Gone South” was a very challenging story for me emotionally. I wrote the first draft in two intense weeks about a year after my treatment ended, and in hindsight, too soon. In visualizing Ruth’s progressing illness in such detail, I felt as if was staring into my own future. I had to rewrite the story in short bursts or else I became consumed with anxiety, convinced I would experience a reoccurrence. Not all writing, it turns out, is therapeutic. I did write letters about my own illness when I was sick, as Ruth does in “Gone South,” and that was helpful. The act of telling people the story of my cancer enabled me to make meaning out of my illness.

Women’s lives – their struggles minor and major – are the focus of these stories, and that’s wonderful to see. Do you have a list of women whose writing has given you the courage to create your own characters with such humour and insight?

My literary influences are a little odd for my age I think.  I am up to date on the one-hit-wonders and the best sellers of the 1930s. Zimbabwe was under sanctions before 1980, and after independence, Mugabe kept the country insular and self-dependent until the mid-1990s, and so the library had very few books from after about 1960. I read Elizabeth Goudge, Daphne De Maurier, Stella Gibson, Miles Franklin and the modernists; Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf. I read my mother’s books from the ’60s and ’70s too, like Lynne Reid Banks, Doris Lessing, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Angela Carter and Marilyn French.

Readers who know you grew up in Zimbabwe might expect African images in your fiction, but there is not a one in this book that I can find. Is that part of your life going to be a whole other story?

I imagine I will come around to writing about Zimbabwe. I know Canadians are often surprised and, perhaps, disappointed my work does not directly address Zimbabwe. Particularly Canadian writers, who I suspect view a childhood in Africa as the equivalent of a literary pot of gold! But the truth is I find Zimbabwe very hard to fictionalize. For me, it’s not really a place where imaginary things happen. The story of Zimbabwe itself (colonialism, independence, dictatorship, violence, economic collapse) is so big and still unresolved — Mugabe remains in power and the country remains in a state of uncertainty and suffering — that, at this point, Zimbabwe could never simply be a setting for me.  It would always be the protagonist.  The human experiences I was interested in exploring in this collection would have been dwarfed by Zimbabwe.

I do feel some guilt about not setting my fiction there as I think it is vital for a country to tell stories about itself. Our literature connects us to each other, it shows us what it is possible and points out alternative ways of living. And if the fiction you are reading is all about America or somewhere else, your own country, in an odd way, can lose it’s sense of “realness,“  become ersatz to you.

I left in 2000 during a time of extreme political and economic turmoil. I was 18 and leaving home for the first time, and felt exiled, orphaned by my country. My parents have stayed on in Zimbabwe, which isn’t in fact reassuring, as the situation is often dire. For years, I was homesick. As a child I had never thought I would live anywhere else. I was Zimbabwean, where else could I go? I lived in England in my early twenties, as though I was in a waiting room, just killing time, hoping eventually I would go home. Losing your country was a trauma I talked to death and at some point, without really noticing, I simply let go of that story and moved into the present. And presently my life is here in Victoria.

I understand you are now working on a master’s degree in counseling psychology.  How does that inform your pursuits as a writer, especially your poetry?

Poorly. I am beginning to believe the more therapy you go to, the less poetry comes out of you.  I don’t actually buy into the “insanity makes good art” myth but there is pragmatism to the therapeutic outlook that I think is better suited to short fiction or the novel.

Collection’s energy, depth springs from B.C. history

What I Want to Tell Goes Like This

By Matt Rader

Published by Nightwood Editions

256 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Erin Anderson

After three books of poetry, Matt Rader has unveiled his first fiction collection, the title of which conveys the sense of purpose behind each work in this enthralling assortment of stories.

Rader’s stories inhabit a land dominated both by natural beauty and industry. Despite events being set 100 years apart in some cases, what binds the stories is a shared – if altered – landscape. Rader populates his vision of western North America with characters who seem estranged not only from the people closest to them but from their own selves. Yet, they question unrelentingly their own place in the world and their ultimate legacy.

His protagonists, mostly male, are miners, truck drivers, activists. Living often simple existences, these men doubt their own goodness, their motivations, even their most basic identity. Rader reports on them with a distant, objective eye that never aspires to omniscience. When he does explore a female’s experience, he does with acuity: “First Women’s Battalion of Death” is enlivened by a well-crafted character who connects Russian history to her sister’s determination – while sitting in a beauty salon.

As the collection’s stories vary in length (from three to 43 pages), they range also in depth; some consist of a single scene in a girl’s life while others traverse the first and last years of romantic and familial pairings.

Toying with time itself and the fallibility of our own perceptions, Rader touches a few of his stories with a sort of magic realism, leaving the possibility that his characters see beyond the immediate and physical world. “Wejack,” one of the most complex stories, is an example of Rader’s ability to construct a narrative in murky circumstances. Rader displays a rare gift for teasing out the contradictory and incomplete aspects of the human mind and spirit.

Although dotted with descriptions of places and people that showcase a poet’s precision and imagination, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This demonstrates starkness and straightforwardness in its language. No detail feels extraneous and no phrase is there for beauty alone (however beautiful some may be).

Without shortchanging Rader’s style or sense of story, the most distinguishing feature of this collection may be its historical dimension. Apparently a ruthless researcher, Rader covers union uprisings and mining disasters through the lens of real people he found in B.C. archives, even going so far as to give the file name of photos he describes.

Such stories of early North America are linked only incrementally, yet their tiny overlaps convey the scope of movements that are summarized in a textbook paragraph. Historical events continue to intrigue readers due to the uncertainty surrounding characters and our own uncertainty of the events of 100 years ago.

“There is nothing inevitable about the future except that it’s coming,” says one of Rader’s characters. While his stories show that little in life is certain, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This demonstrates that Rader’s future ought to include a long career in literature.

Matt Rader will read from his new short story collection, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This, on Oct. 17 at 7 p.m. at Bolen Books in Victoria, Oct. 18 at the Comox Valley Art Gallery and Oct. 19 at Nightwood Editions Vancouver Book Launch at The Grande Luxe Hall. Check Harbour Publishing for more information.

Erin Anderson is a Victoria freelancer and reviewer.

Pride and Prejudice play up for scrutiny

Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austin

Adapted for the stage by Janet Munsil

Directed by Judy Treloar

Langham Court Theatre

October 1-18, 2014

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

“The movie wasn’t as good as the book” is a standard refrain. Whether that judgment should be applied equally to adaptations of great novels for the stage is currently up for scrutiny at Langham Court Theatre as it presents its production of Pride and Prejudice.

The audio book of Jane Austin’s 200-year-old novel runs about 11-1/2 hours. When well-regarded Victoria playwright Janet Munsil accepted a commission two years ago to adapt the book for a joint production by Theatre Calgary and the National Arts Centre, she had to condense the popular story to as close to two hours as possible.

There are perils attached to such drastic reductions. One is the danger of transforming a richly nuanced classic into a theatrical Readers Digest Condensed version of itself. That didn’t happen here, but the play does gallop from one plot point to the next, and the dramatization robbed the work of some of the delicate understatement of Austin’s prose.

For example, the necessity of repositioning the opening line of the novel had unintended consequences. The novel begins: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” This line, assigned to an omniscient narrator, sets the novel up as an intentional, if subtle, critique of social mores. In the play, this line is spoken part way into the first act by Mrs. Bennet, the protagonist’s mother, a foolish woman. Thus located, it is reduced to a laugh line, and the overarching purpose of social satire goes unmarked.

All 19 of the major characters are retained in the dramatization, and drawn with such distinctness that there is never an occasion to confuse one with another. The credit for this success is attributable in equal parts to the novelist, the playwright and the capable actors who played the roles. Significant emotional depth, however, is lost in the adaptation. As I left the theatre on opening night, I overheard one audience member remark that one of the characters seemed more like a caricature than a character. “Oh well,” he added, sounding unhappy, “I suppose it had to be that way.”

Costumes, designed by Merry Hallsor, cloak this production in class. Credit is also due for the set designer (Caroline Mitic), carpenter (John Taylor) and production crew in charge of set decor (Maureen Colgan) for designing a flexible set that can quickly accommodate scene changes. As a result, the story plays straight through each of the two acts.

The confines of the Langham Court stage, combined with the large cast, did lead to some awkward moments. The repeated use of dance scenes in the first act became a bit tiresome. And, at least once, a group of characters was left onstage with nothing to do while two characters engaged in private conversation.

Why turn novels into drama? Michael Billington, theatre critic for The Guardian, tried to answer that question in a commentary he wrote a few years ago. Some novels, he conceded, might acquire more “texture,” but, he concluded, the “really great novels invariably lose more than they gain.”

Pride and Prejudice is a great novel. Pride and Prejudice, the play, was a sell-out hit in Calgary in 2012 and has since won acceptance in community theatres in Saint John, N.B., and in England. It awaits your judgment here through October 18.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover.