First Mutant's Mutant X Warehouse

Canoe Jam Theatre 7/7/00: Tom McCamus

Mill On The Floss cooks to perfection
July 7 2000
By JOHN COULBOURN

TORONTO -- It was one of the most unusual evenings in the recent edition of the duMaurier World Stage Festival.

The occasion was the opening-night performance of Soulpepper Theatre Company's The Mill On The Floss -- and expectations were high. A typically high-octane Soulpepper cast, an adaptation of George Eliot's gothic novel by Helen Edmundson and, perhaps most exciting of all, another chance to see Robin Phillips -- arguably one of Canada's most compelling stage directors -- strut his stuff one more time.

The first person the audience saw on stage wasn't one of the cast members, however. Instead of an actor from a group that included Steven Sutcliffe, Stephen Ouimette, Tom McCamus, Brenda Robins and Roberta Maxwell, it was Phillips himself.

The acclaimed director then proceeded, in a most charming way, to apologize to his audience, informing us that what we would be seeing was a production still in development. He then invited us to come back and see the show when it was fully "cooked."

But the show that played out that night was mighty impressive. Still, with its re-opening earlier this week on the stage of Harbourfront's Premiere Dance Theatre, it seemed only fair to accept Phillips' invitation and take a look at the show in its "cooked" form, even though we figured it would be hard to improve on what had already been served.

Obviously, when we are wrong, we are very wrong indeed.

Working with much the same cast -- only one of his actors was unable to return to the production -- Phillips has taken Edmundson's script and made of it something that wildly transcends Eliot's rather schlocky novel.

To accomplish this, he's added flesh to the impressive skeleton he'd built for his World Stage audience.

John Thompson's set is largely the same -- a double riser on an essentially bare stage, intersected as occasion demands by a series of three scrims. Pottery urns, filled with water, placed at every corner from which the cast constantly dips serve as effective reminders that we are on the banks of a river called the Floss.

Sue Lepage's costumes, Louise Guinand's lighting and Marc Desormeaux's sound have been refined but are otherwise unchanged as well, although John Lott's work with body microphones is more obvious, and, in early scenes, intrusive.

But it is in the performances that Phillips draws from his hugely talented cast that the work makes its most amazing strides. From Torri Higginson, Julia Arkos and Robins, cast as the three incarnations of Mill's heroine, Maggie; from Sutcliffe, as the deformed young man with whom she falls in love; from McCamus, as the raffish man who steals her heart; from Ouimette as her twisted brother; from Maxwell, as both her mother and her cousin and from Oliver Dennis, Anna Hagan, Terence Kelly and Jack Wetherall in supporting roles, Phillips draws performances of amazing depth and simplicity, each perfectly balanced with the other.

Best of all, each performance is so finely tuned that is serves not just Eliot's narrative but her underlying messages as well.

It's "cooked' to perfection.

© Canoe Jam

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