Rachel Bowron, Oscar Derkx, Beth Graham, Cathy Derkach, Mathew Hulshof in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live!, photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Design by Chantal Fortin, lighting by Narda McCarroll, costumes by Leona Brausen

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Stewart Lemoine play that opens Friday at the Varscona in the Teatro Live! season is certainly a comedy, says Belinda Cornish, who’s directing the first revival of The Oculist’s Holiday since its 2009 Fringe debut. And “it’s very funny….”

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The “and yet…” hangs in the air. And yet, she says, “it’s not quite like anything else Stewart has written,” Cornish thinks. “A really unique play,” and one that expands the usual dimensions of “comedy” to include darker, more wistful, more complex tones, she thinks, invoking the cadre of “beautiful plays” in the Lemoine archive, The Exquisite Hour, Fever Land, Witness To A Conga among them.

As the playwright noted in his introduction to a 2011 volume that includes The Oculist’s Holiday, “I’ve been reading a fair bit of F. Scott Fitzgerald lately.” And Cornish, herself a playwright (Category E, Hiraeth, Little Elephants, The Garneau Block, ), detects that influence and flavour in the world of the play, set in the early 1930s in Europe: “the tail end of the Lost Generation, the ‘bright young things’,  just post-Wall Street crash.”

Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Lausanne to be precise, is the romantic location where a Canadian teacher on holiday meets an American optometrist — and has her vision of the world change forever. What Lemoine and Fitzgerald share, Cornish thinks, is “an extraordinary understanding of the human condition, which they then articulate through the particularities of their own perspective…. A perspective that’s unique, but accessible and relatable.”

Like The Oculist’s Holiday, Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is The Night “has a particular character, an antagonist/catalyst who has a significant impact on everybody else’s lives, and then sort of disappears…. Without being bleak or heavy by any means — it’s a delicious comedy — within the shadow of the war, that lingering impact has an undertone.”

Belinda Cornish, director of The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

Cornish, a member of the Teatro Live! ensemble who named her own indie theatre company Bright Young Things, is drawn to that dark/light period, and its theatrical repertoire. And she appreciates the “nuanced, delicate, hard-to-describe feel of the play.… It’s not leaned into, but it’s the feeling of the Lost Generation, and the sheer joy that comes out of something so dark, with people carrying those scars. They just go forward with their lives — in discovery, in joy — carrying those experiences with them.”   

The Oculist’s Holiday is set predominantly, as Cornish explains, “in a beautiful boutique guest house in Lausanne.” La Maison de la Princesse is run, as the play has it, “by a curious sort of noblewoman of mixed pedigree,” a Lemoinian description if ever there was one. In Lemoine, “it’s never somebody with a straight-forward back story,” Cornish laughs.

Rachel Bowron and Oscar Derkx in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“It’s dealt with so very lightly, but all five people who find themselves at the Maison de la Princesse, including the Princesse herself, have been unexpectedly drawn to Lausanne. They didn’t plan to go there, but find themselves going ‘I think I’m going to stay here’.” The Princesse, for example, was en route to Geneva, “and when the train stopped she told her husband ‘O darling, I think I’m home’.”

In Lemoine comedies, strangers often seem to meet in unplanned encounters in train stations or at hotels or cafe tables. “People find themselves unexpectedly in the place they need to be,” as Cornish puts it. “There are elements of mystery and discovery, another Fitzgeraldian (feature)…. You cannot anticipate where this play is going to take you,” she says. “And yet in a beautiful arc, it makes the most sense. Very cool…. And very moving.” She cites the actor/playwright Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag fame: “when you get people to laugh they drop their defences; they’re disarmed. And it empowers the way they’re emotionally affected.”

Mathew Hulshof and Beth Graham, The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“You just play the dialogue and the moment; it’s all there, in how the characters are drawn,” says Cornish, a veteran Teatro actor herself (witness an acting archive that includes Witness to a Conga, The Exquisite Hour, Evelyn Strange among many others). And her cast, an all-star quintet of Teatro faves led by Beth Graham, know exactly how to find the comedy beats, she says. Ah, and how to ride the words and rhythms in a way that’s never laboured.

Cornish, who’s been Teatro Live!’s co-artistic director with Andrew MacDonald-Smith for several seasons — it’s always been an artist-run company — has left that shared gig (MacDonald-Smith is now artistic-directing single-handedly), but not her involvement with Teatro as an director and actor. Her lengthy Teatro resumé continues with a starring role in the upcoming July production of Noel Coward’s sparkler Private Lives, directed by Max Rubin.

Meanwhile, in addition to theatre and improv, Cornish has been exploring “a completely different world.” She’s been writing for the horror fiction role-playing adventure game Call of Cthulhu, developed by Chaosium and inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft. And it’s led to film. Occasionally she joins her husband Mark Meer who is, among his multiple talents, a professional Dungeon Master, in improvised D&D role-playing games across the continent and abroad. “A crazy old combo of theatre, improv, and (the game platform),” as she says.

It stands in high contrast to the delicate hues of the unusual Lemoine comedy that opens Friday. “Can I use the word ‘magical’?” Cornish wonders. “Or is that inappropriately whimsical?”

PREVIEW

The Oculist’s Holiday

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Starring: Beth Graham, Oscar Derkx, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, Cathy Derkach

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through June 16

Tickets: teatroq.com