The Eye Weekly 4/13/00: Tom McCamus
Triple-play carries Eliot adaptation: THE MILL ON THE FLOSS
Featuring Julia Arkos, Tom McCamus, Stephen Ouimette. Adapted by Helen Edmundson from the novel by George Eliot. Directed by Robin Phillips. April 13-16 & 25-30. $25-$45. Premiere Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay W. 973-4000.
BY KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE
A novel described by its author as the "inner record" of a woman's life is hardly the first choice for a sensational stage adaptation. But British playwright Helen Edmundson and members of Shared Experience, the renowned English theatre collective, have transformed George Eliot's 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss, into a breathtaking journey through the evolution of gender-based social and moral codes in Victorian England.
Edmundson's 1994 adaptation made its North American debut last night at the Premiere Dance Theatre (apparently renamed Groome Capital.com Stage for the World Stage Festival) in a Soulpepper Theatre Company production, directed by Robin Phillips.
Set in rural England, The Mill on the Floss explores the intertwining lives of Maggie Tulliver, a precocious child and intellectually gifted woman, and her implacable older brother Tom. You'll be forgiven for thinking of them as the Lisa and Bart Simpson of their day, but this is a remarkably intense adaptation that, overall, remains faithful to the essence of the original.
"What's so great about this adaptation," says cast member Tom McCamus, "is that they don't try to just tell the story. They chose to take aspects of the book and dramatize them." With that in mind, The Mill on the Floss features three different Maggies, each representing an aspect of the character's life -- intellectual, sensual or spiritual -- and each played by a different actor. It's an innovative approach that sidesteps awkward techniques common in stage adaptations of novels -- straightforward narration or direct address to the audience -- but comes with its own problems.
"It's liberating to share her with three actors," says Julia Arkos, who plays the "second" Maggie (alongside Torri Higginson and Brenda Robbins). "At times we're onstage together and someone will represent a certain aspect of you, so you don't have to worry about showing that side. But it's also difficult because you have to pick up the ball where somebody else left off."
While the triple dose of Maggie addresses the problem of dramatizing the character's inner feelings, it doesn't go far enough in making the older Maggie more palatable to modern audiences. Maggie's life of renunciation, her denial of passion and unwavering commitment to moral duty creates an extreme character.
The task of reawakening Maggie's passionate nature rests on McCamus' character, Stephen Guest. A member of the upper class, Stephen is instantly attracted to Maggie -- a woman who is his social inferior but his moral superior.
"It's her independent spirit," McCamus says, explaining Stephen's attraction to Maggie. "I truly think he loves her with all his heart and soul. But he's still a member of a privileged class, and if they were to get married, he would have his way and stop her from being the thing that he actually loves."
The Maggie and Stephen affair is one of several models for romantic relationships The Mill on the Floss examines. The incestuous implications of Maggie's relationship with Tom -- hinted at on a subliminal level in the novel -- are more pronounced in this adaptation. If Eliot's novel is the product of the conservative Victorian era, this version -- with its exploration of sexual taboos -- is very much about the 1990s.
"There's a love, an intense love between the two of them," Arkos says of the strange brother/sister dynamic. "He's the only one who's been there for her." Tom's omnipresence in Maggie's life is what privileges her relationship with him over other, more romantically inclined suitors.
As a novel of a struggling rural family, The Mill on the Floss has long been part of the Marxist canon, and as a study of a woman's repression, it holds an iconic status in feminist criticism. It wouldn't be spoiling things to say that their doomed fate, to drown in a powerful flood, signals the ultimate union between them. (Come on, as if you couldn't see that coming in a novel whose epigram reads, "In their death they were not divided.")
Still, that final flood scene reads like a deus ex machina in a script whose pacing is enriched by the slow unfolding of details and psychological insights (although it is foreshadowed through water imagery, stories of witches drowning and a conflict over irrigation laws). But according to Arkos and McCamus, Phillips takes full advantage of the text's natural imagery to prepare the audience for this conclusion.
"There's the inner life of Maggie, but Phillips also makes you aware of everything around her," says McCamus on the eve of technical rehearsals. "We really can't tell until we see the whole of it, but it does feel like there's going to be a constant awareness of the world outside that finally comes and takes them away."
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