Co-written by Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan and directed by Lauzon, and originally produced in 2022 at the Stratford Festival, this Canadian Stage remount depicts the story of a fictional residential school in Northern Ontario in 1939. An English teacher, anticipating a visit by King George VI, enlists her students in a production of All’s Well That Ends Well.
The script’s premise is clever: here we have a play within a play, a very Shakespearian trope. Furthermore, within a theatrical tradition that historically had men playing women playing men, the Indigenous students likewise can (are forced to?) navigate their relationship to these characters within a culture that is trying to strip them of their cultural traditions, while offering them very little place within white society. They are Indigenous, trying to play the role of white kids in a society that will never quite recognize their identities. In the final stages, the students are made to dress up as faux-Indigenous characters (replete with grotesquely inaccurate costumes) in a way that was both absurd but also disturbingly realistic, given their cultural precarity.
It’s also an incisive critique of stodgy, old-fashioned approaches to Shakespeare, in which the words have to be delivered in a very particular kind of ‘proper’ English accent, with very particular rhythm, treating the characters stiffly and with a kind of misplaced reverence. The students, on the other hand, recognize the range and malleability of Shakespeare. One student remarks that if you like fart jokes, you’ll like Shakespeare – humour that is echoed unwittingly by Father Williams in his performance due to the unfortunate fact that performance anxiety results in a rather extreme form of flatulence.
Beyond the silliness, the students’ deft interpretations of their assigned roles start to come through: Susan Blackbird (Brefny Caribou) bases her clown on impressions of her famously goofy uncle, and Evelyn Rice (Merewyn Comeau) appeals to her familial knowledge of healing for her role, wearing her medicine pouch underneath her costume. Jean Delorme (John Wamsley) uses his Métis identity in his performance of Paroles.
Joanna Yu’s set includes a backdrop of chalk boards, which function as a literal cue we’re in a school, but a metaphorical tool as well. Characters write words and phrases in chalk, only to have them erased, a reminder of how transitory our personal (and cultural) narratives are, especially when they exist within institutions that are determined or designed to obliterate them.
The schoolteacher with a ridiculously Welsh name, Sian Ap Dafydd, provides bittersweet irony as she dismisses half of her student’s names as unpronounceable, while demonstrating the ways in which previously colonized people will continue cycles of colonization and oppression.
The ensemble cast has good chemistry, especially in the scenes in which the students are commiserating or collaborating with each other over both the script and their personal struggles. Grace Lamarche is great as Beth, the student currently most motivated to do well and play by the rules, and her anxiety about being in a play with her brother (Richard Comeau) and her insistence on tradition adds pushback to the desire of the others to continue mining and sharing their cultural traditions.
Ap Dafydd’s character is a bit underdeveloped and I found myself wanting her to demonstrate either more of the the real fear and repulsion so many Indigenous students bore regarding their memories and cultural identities, or to care more for her students and the production itself. As it is, she ends up kind of doing neither as she’s being batted around by various forces, reactive to vague pressures from Father Williams and the press, to her students continual pleas to contribute their ideas, stubbornly correcting people’s grammar but resigning herself to being inevitably ineffectual.
I also found myself wanting more development of the students – Evelyne’s impressive talent and depth of thought is apparent in how she talks about the script and in how she treats her peers, but I wanted more of her backstory, and of the pain she felt being isolated from a long tradition of healers. I also wanted more tension between Beth and her brother, one of whom feels pulled home, the other finding meaning in carving out a new identity in a white man’s world. By contrast, Jean’s reading of his mother’s letter was one of the poignant moments of the production, evoking in a short span of time both her character and the greater context in which she fought to communicate with the son who’d been taken from her
The tone of this production remains light, but don’t let that fool you into ignoring its depth. While not every element of this production comes together as strongly as it could, this is a charming production of a clever script that spans draws shrewd connections and offers pointed critiques of the darker elements faced by the Indigenous cultures that have fought to survive violent attempts at erasure.