Elinor Holt and Julie Orton star in To the Light, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse.Benjamin Laird
How do you set the stage for a story that takes you on a tour inside a woman's head?
That was the first question to be answered at the English-translation premiere of To the Light, playwright Évelyne de la Chenelière's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, which opened Friday at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary.
Stage right, a pianist (Bryce Kulak) performed a sonata – I don't really know what sort of musical arrangement it was, but sonata is such a pretty word – while centre stage, a video screen played out a lightning storm against a gauzy set (designed by Narda McCarroll) that was sheer and sensual, suggesting, if anything, the inside of a dream.
It was drop-dead beautiful – in a Stevie Nicks, seventies folk-rock video kind of way.
Eloquently directed by former ATP artistic director Vanessa Porteous, To the Light is Chenelière's – whose drama Monsieur Lazhar was adapted into an Oscar-nominated 2011 film – highly literary take on adapting stream-of-conscious, expressionistic literature into spoken-word theatre.
How well it succeeds probably depends on how much lyricism you want to let into your life.
Set over three decades, To the Light tells the story of the friendship between the Ramsays, particularly Mrs. Ramsay (Elinor Holt), a mother of eight children, and Lily (Julie Orton), a painter determined never to marry, who arrives at the Ramsays' summer home to paint a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay.
Lily's resistance to marriage runs counter to the matriarchal world of Mrs. Ramsay, who, engulfed by children, particularly her beloved son, James, feels awash in human connection, even if not so much of it comes from her relationship with Mr. Ramsay, an (unseen and unheard from) author who has his head lost in the literary clouds most of the time – except when he's making infuriating, misogynistic comments about how women can't live creative lives of any kind.
To the Light isn't much of a domestic drama, though. It's more of a theatrical meditation, told through Chenelière's poetic monologues, against a soundscape and visual backdrop that's so pretty, and so vivid, that you almost forget that after a while, you can't really figure out what's going on.
It kind of reminds me of the late 1980s and early 90's, when Peter Greenaway films such as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover were cool, even if they were also virtually incomprehensible – visual feasts that scoffed at our craving for a good story, well told.
To the Light isn't Peter Greenaway incomprehensible. It's actually smart and poetic and reasonably compelling to listen to Orton's Lily, a kind of stand-in for Woolf, as she challenges and questions the role society has assigned women.
Holt – who in real life has four children and a musician husband – gives us a Mrs. Ramsay who's every bit as committed and passionate to the idea that there could be no higher achievement for a woman than raising a family.
Lily is determined to challenge those boundaries, even though there's a sense of longing and loneliness that she suggests she also craves a little bit of the world Mrs. Ramsay occupies (it turns out Woolf's own mother died when she was 13).
Orton is an intelligent, funny actress who almost invites the audience inside her head, and there's nothing not to like about Lily, who's ready to challenge the conventional wisdom of her day at every turn.
Things are poetic, civilized – and by design, a bit dull – in the early going of To the Light, as Mrs. Ramsay and Lily take turns articulating their world views in monologues that aren't scenes so much as they're glimpses inside their hopes and wishes for what life might one day become.
Then the First World War breaks out, which Porteous stages with a thunderous bit of stage bedlam that feels right, and it shatters the calm and reverie and high-mindedness.
In fact, as challenging as the text is, and as evasive as the narrative that renders To the Light as more of an 80-minute-long spoken word performance than a drama, it's also a virtuoso bit of stage directing by Porteous, assisted by McCarroll's impressive set design, Murrell's translation – and Kulak's musical underscore, which gives the whole experience a touch of grace and beauty.
A shout out to Alberta Theatre Projects, as well, for the central role it has played, over three decades, translating French-Canadian plays into English and giving them a second stage life – something Porteous has been at the forefront of since she first started working at the theatre years ago as a literary manager.
Maybe the thing to do is think of To the Light as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.
And hey – if James Joyce is allowed to be considered a literary genius even though he ignored punctuation, why can't Virginia Woolf be one, too, even if she doesn't do plots?
Neither would recognize an act-ending plot twist if one landed on their head, but once you come to terms with the fact that To the Light just isn't that kind of a show, it delivers its own, unique brand of theatrical pleasure.