Vimy turns no man’s land into compelling everyman’s theatrical spectacle
Vimy wins the battle for hearts and minds
The first thing you will notice about the GCTC/NAC co-production of Vimy is that it looks amazing. The costumes are wonderfully detailed and, thankfully, not stylized: The greens and browns of military garb are real, the heft and clank of the props show they’re real equipment. The set and scenery are all evocative of trenches, dirty wood and burnt trees. A lot of love and care have gone into the look of this play, and it pays huge dividends in drawing you in through the senses. This is where Vimy excels, in the pageantry of theatre. There is theatre that is bare and focuses on the mind and heart, and there’s theatre that’s sumptuous and sensual and brings you into the world. This is the latter.
The ensemble is wonderful. In particular, I liked Kevin Loring’s full-throated masculinity (an appealing thing in a play about soldiers), and Nicolas Di Gaetano’s off-kilter awkwardness. Being awkward on stage is usually an accident. To play an awkward person and make him seem real requires a lot of skill.
True to his reputation as a Governor General’s Award recipient, Vern Thiessen’s writing is well-crafted. The characters are believable and interesting, their banter sometimes a little too frothy to support their heavy trauma, but always funny and engaging.
Thiessen’s intent is to create a picture of war through the fresh scars it leaves, but curiously enough, the play worked best when rolling through the historical events rather than the specific stories of any of the characters. When describing the training, the planning, the execution of the great plan to capture Vimy Ridge, the play sparkles with life, with energy and tension. The end of Act I is particularly terrific – as the fictional time until the Vimy offensive runs out, its stage time is lengthened, until the final 15 minutes prior to the attack are literally played out in full. It is a wonderful theatrical experience as the audience is allowed to be alternately bored, expectant, scared and tense.
In mythologizing this story for the whole country, to be truly capital-C Canadian, Vimy drew characters from every walk of life: a First Nations man, a French Canadian, a gay man from the Prairies, a Nova Scotia nurse and a heterosexual Caucasian from Ontario. If when you read that previous list you get a “Canadian Heritage moment” feeling, I’m afraid that’s exactly the feeling that I never quite escaped, that they were there simply to fill a niche. The stories of each character were emotional, but unsurprising. Each unfolded as their stereotype dictated, making the characters lean sometimes towards cartoon. In some ways, I think trying to encompass every possible story diminished the power of the play as a whole.
Originally published Nov. 18th in the Ottawa XPress:
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=20820
