The Diviners – Review of 2024 Stratford Festival Production

It is officially autumn and the Stratford Festival is entering the last weeks of its season. This is a good time for a few comments about the one dozen productions Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino has offered us. It is an eclectic and well-thought-out list that covers the classics and modern plays but with a sharp eye on Canada’s multicultural population as well.
Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Cymbeline are chosen wisely from the Shakespearean canon. One of the most dramatic and unforgettable tragic love stories, one of the best comedies and the infrequently produced Cymbeline took care of the bard. The outstanding Something Rotten and the excellent La Cage Aux Folles satisfied the taste (and need) for musical entertainment.
For classic works, he reached to the 19th century for Hedda Gabler and London Assurance and only people who don’t go to the theatre can complain about those choices. Edward Albee’s The Goat. Or, Who Is Sylvia is outstanding theatre with an added shocker when you find out the plot line. Wendy and Peter Pan, the Schulich Children’s play, fulfilled the need for a production for younger audiences.
Salesman in China, aside from being a superb play, deals with the meeting of east and west and the cultural differences that many of us are not aware of. It is a bilingual play with subtitles in English and Chinese. Get That Hope deals with the lives of Jamaican immigrants in Canada. What was the last play you saw about them?
And finally, we got The Diviners, an adaptation of Margaret Laurene’s novel by Vern Thiessen with Yvette Nolan. dealing with Canada’s Metis and indigenous people, a big story told well.
The adapters use a large canvas to paint a complex story that has borrowed or real memories going back to Louis Riel, Sir Joah A. MacDonald, the two world wars and the lives of ordinary people in western Canada. The connecting link is the story of Morag (Irene Poole) a woman of Scottish origin and her Metis daughter Pique (Julie Lumsden) in Manitoba and other parts of Canada in mid-twentieth century.
The plot begins in 1972 and Morag is trying to write a novel. Her parents died of polio when she was a child and she was raised by Christie Logan (Jonathan Goad), a decent Scotsman and friend of her father. She struggles with alcoholism and has great difficulty doing what she desperately wants to do – write.
She manages to go to university and married unhappily Brooke Skelton (Dan Chameroy), her professor. It is an unhappy marriage because he mistreats her and she leaves him. She meets Jules (Jessie Gervais) a decent man who loved her in the town of Manitoba, they connect and she has a child by him. She avoids telling Pique her background or the identity of her father and her daughter leaves her, distraught, to go and seek her background. Irene Poole has the toughest role as a mother, wife, lover, ambitious writer with a serious writer’s block and a struggle with alcoholism. She gives a stunning performance and faces all those complexities with superb control.
The complex story has about twenty people with different backgrounds. Christie, a proud Scottish immigrant, oversees the town dump and is ridiculed for it. Jules is a troubadour who rarely sees his daughter. His father Lazarus (Josue Laboucane) peddles moonshine to survive. Royland (Anthony Santiago) is the diviner who can find underground water wells. The cast is outstanding and they give superb performances,
The play features an ensemble of tap dancers that sing and perform with gusto the steps choreographed by Cameron Carver. As befits an epic, there is also a violinist on stage. The Metis Fiddler Darla Daniels. Superb performances,
The play is of epic proportions and and it covers a lot of historical and personal tales. I admit that I found it somewhat confusing at times but the grand interconnected tales of the epic kept moving on with personal stories and historic episodes of the immigrants, the Metis and the Indigenous people.
The spacious stage of the theatre-in-the round Tom Patterson is ideal for the epic play. A few steps at one end of the stage, a small table and most importantly a typewriter as a symbol of Morag’s passion to write are about all the props needed. Bretta Gerecke handles the set and lighting designs with aptness and assurance.
Director Krista Jackson with Genevieve Pelletier do superb work with a large cast and a demanding plot that plays homage to Canadian history and is a credit to the Stratford Festival.
The Diviners, based on the novel by Margaret Laurence and adapted for the stage by Vern Thiessen with Yvette Nolan runs in repertory until October 2, 2024, at the Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. www.stratfordfestival.ca

‍

Irene Poole and Jesse Gervais in The Diviners, 2024. Photography by David Hou.

‍