The Wasteland
April is the cruelest month...” begins T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, considered one of the most influential modernist poems of the 20th century. Elusive and enigmatic, it’s a swirling, haunting search for meaning in a jumbled and fractured world. Profoundly beautiful and devastatingly moving.
Produced at the 2012 Edmonton Fringe. |
A solo show performed by Beth Graham. Directed by Dave Horak.
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Set and Lights by Scott Peters
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Press
Liz Nicholls, Edmonton Journal August 20, 2012
April may be, as the poet says, the “cruellest month.” But August is definitely the weirdest.
T.S. Eliot is at the Fringe, and not with dancing felines but with his dense, enigmatic modernist 1922 poem The WasteLand. It has struck scholars, readers and assorted brainiacs as being about everything, including nothingness. On the page(s), it doesn’t exactly cry out to be theatre. But, as this fascinating theatrical experiment demonstrates, something quite strange happens onstage when a director (Dave Horak) and an actor (Beth Graham) get their mitts on it. They envision Eliot’s clusters of fragmented images as scenes, and put the words in the mouths of actual characters.
A sad-eyed woman opens the door of a memory room full of dust-covered furniture. And she suddenly finds herself conjuring scenes from 19th century aristocratic life one second, and her own romantic encounters of a year ago the next. Ancient Britain, Greece, the grimy streets of London, and its once-mighty river that carried down to Greenwich. Graham channels juicy characters from music hall scenes next to the drowned Phoenician sailor and riffs from Shakespeare, alongside the odd indecent proposal of her own recent past. The poem is a free-associative jumble of cultural fragments coaxed out of the arid modern postwar earth. And Graham also coaxes vivid snapshots from The Waste Land. If “memory and desire” can make “lilacs out of the dead land,” as the opening has it, then a wonderful actor can spin a solo show out of a poem. An original idea, impressively executed.
April may be, as the poet says, the “cruellest month.” But August is definitely the weirdest.
T.S. Eliot is at the Fringe, and not with dancing felines but with his dense, enigmatic modernist 1922 poem The WasteLand. It has struck scholars, readers and assorted brainiacs as being about everything, including nothingness. On the page(s), it doesn’t exactly cry out to be theatre. But, as this fascinating theatrical experiment demonstrates, something quite strange happens onstage when a director (Dave Horak) and an actor (Beth Graham) get their mitts on it. They envision Eliot’s clusters of fragmented images as scenes, and put the words in the mouths of actual characters.
A sad-eyed woman opens the door of a memory room full of dust-covered furniture. And she suddenly finds herself conjuring scenes from 19th century aristocratic life one second, and her own romantic encounters of a year ago the next. Ancient Britain, Greece, the grimy streets of London, and its once-mighty river that carried down to Greenwich. Graham channels juicy characters from music hall scenes next to the drowned Phoenician sailor and riffs from Shakespeare, alongside the odd indecent proposal of her own recent past. The poem is a free-associative jumble of cultural fragments coaxed out of the arid modern postwar earth. And Graham also coaxes vivid snapshots from The Waste Land. If “memory and desire” can make “lilacs out of the dead land,” as the opening has it, then a wonderful actor can spin a solo show out of a poem. An original idea, impressively executed.