A post-apocalyptic ringmaster
Margaret Atwood’s latest book tour finds her narrating the end of the world
The Year of the Flood
When I meet Jan Irwin for our interview, she’s sitting in a small coffee shop in the Glebe on one of the last warm mornings of a fading summer. On the table in front of her is a standard-sized binder full of printed pages, and spread on the bench beside her, a small five-fingered fan of coloured highlighters.
“It’s a new script. The author sent it to us yesterday.” The script she’s referring to is the one-hour play that is the centrepiece of the book tour for Year of the Flood, and which Irwin is preparing to direct. And the author is the ubiquitous Canadian genius Margaret Atwood, who plays the role of narrator herself.
The format for Atwood’s latest book tour is a play performed in small venues across the world. Each venue is a small-scale, community-rooted location (“in order to keep down her carbon footprint” according to Jan Irwin), and each has a local director and local talent performing her dialogue (according to the fascinating blog of the ongoing tour: http://marg09.wordpress.com). That goal is certainly achieved here, with local actors Mary Ellis, Todd Duckworth and Kate Smith taking the central roles, and St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities is fitted out and decorated for the performance.
Atwood’s career has been monumentally long and varied in genre. In an era of authors as specialists, Atwood remains one of a small breed of always-mutating authors who seem to seek new challenges. This time, she’s written the script for the show based on this new novel, and is adapting it on the fly for this global tour.
“The script can change depending on who’s directing it, who’s in it, where it’s being performed,” says Irwin. From her account of it, the process seems to be an almost evolutionary one. “In some places, they’re doing it in a church, in others different community buildings. In one part of the script it says ‘the choir processes in,’ but she obviously found that in some places there was no processional area.” Unlike myself, Irwin is clever enough to find this practice familiar, and almost expected: “Theatre people are in the same process of storytelling, so she’s just chosen another way to look at it. When she’s doing a book tour, she’s still performing the book… It’s a natural stretch.”
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Sept. 17, 2009
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=18305
