Brenna Campbell, Julia van Damme, Ellen Chorley in A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Walk into the theatre, and you find yourself in a shadowy candlelit domain enclosed by velvety drapery, a grand staircase overhung with twinkling lights, the odd burnished head, and a monumental silvered trunk. Ah, or is it a sarcophagus? And the music of the spheres is filtering through the air.

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There’s more than a touch of Vegas nightclub or old-school Hollywood about that chamber (let’s just say it’s a lot more fun than the tomb of the Capulets). And both the woman pacing fretfully and the woman sleeping on the floor, bling-festooned and draped in black gauze, are kitted out for showbiz too.

That’s the setting (by Alison Yanota) for Northern Light’s season-opening production of A Phoenix Too Frequent, a 1946 rom-com in blank verse, a first hit by the Brit playwright/screenwriter Christopher Fry (better known for The Lady’s Not For Burning).

The room is another magical transformation of the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, courtesy of the imaginative intervention of director Trevor Schmidt, assisted materially by Yanota’s set, Larissa Poho’s lighting, and Amelia Chan’s sound. And it turns out the ladies are dressed for success (costumes by Schmidt) — in the Underworld. All lipsticked-up for what one director of yore has called “a meet-cute in a mausoleum.”

Verse drama — and Fry’s lush poetic exuberance — dropped precipitously out of fashion in the 1950s when minimalists like Harold Pinter and kitchen-sink snarlers like John Osborne took charge of matters theatrical. A Phoenix Too Frequent is an unexpected choice for a company that leans, in appealingly original ways, into the obscure reaches of the contemporary repertoire. But let no one say NLT rushed into reviving A Phoenix Too Frequent; there’s been a gap of 45 years (and more than a few company identities) since its last production.

Brennan Campbell, Julia van Damme, Ellen Chorely in A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianna Jang

The dramatic situation, borrowed from Petronius’ Satyricon, is this: Dynamene (Julia van Dam), a high-toned widow grieving the recent death of her husband Virilius, has determined to follow him across the River Styx to the kingdom of the dead. So, accompanied by her comical and earthy servant Doto (Ellen Chorley) — talk about a women’s support network — they’re in his tomb starving themselves to death. For her part Doto isn’t against a venture to Hades, but she’s getting bored with the prelims. “Honestly I would rather have to sleep/ With a bald beekeeper who was wearing his boots/ Than spend more days fasting and thirsting and crying/ In a tomb.…”   

The pair are interrupted by the arrival of a handsome young Roman soldier (Brennan Campbell), who has stepped  away from his shift guarding six recently hanged prisoners when he sees light coming from the mausoleum. His attractions, which include the bottle of wine he has with him, are instantly obvious to Doto. They grow on the bereaved, as she gradually falls in love with him, and with life. And as for Tegeus, he is much struck by Dynamene’s display of human fidelity beyond the grave. Until, that is, he launches into a courtship (OK, that’s a rom-com spoiler alert).

Julia van Dam and Brennan Campbell, A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang.

The Fry wry humour is juiced by a kind of formal grandiloquence, undercut by Doto’s bawdy reductive deadpan . And Schmidt’s production updates the kooky comedy of it, boldly, by heightening it: the self-conscious histrionic delivery and posturing of the widow who flings herself onto the sarcophagus and the soldier who finds himself desperate for a kiss. Amusingly, the guy is instantly eloquent. The performances by van Dam and Campbell relish in earnest the old-fashioned self-important artifice of their positions vis-a-vis love, loyalty, and grief, which rotate 180 degrees, on a dime (er, denarius?), and then take flight.

When they fall for each other, they immediately leap full-throttle into the playfully inflatable poetic rhetoric of that state. Is there an element of mockery of the classical notions of honour and duty? Definitely.

Chorley is very funny as the endearingly earthbound common-sense Doto, who undercuts their verbal and physical flights into the stylized great beyond. “Here we are, dying to be dead….”

You could, I guess, make a case for this being a theatrical reaction to and embrace of the life-centric possibilities for the post-war world. That’s theoretical, though. And this is theatrical. It’s more about delight in language and its giddy excesses, the rom-com amusement of seeing characters with a gift of the gab fall for each other, in the presence of a natural skeptic. “Life and death is cat and dog in this double-bed of a world.”

An odd, fun 70 minutes of theatre.

REVIEW

A Phoenix Too Frequent

Theatre: Northern Light

Written by: Christopher Fry

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Julia van Dam, Brennan Campbell, Ellen Chorley

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 21

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com