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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The title will make you smile. In its way The Oculist’s Holiday, the 2009 Stewart Lemoine comedy with the whimsically archaic handle, is all about optics — vision, perspective, focus, correction.

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And in the play, set in the impossibly picturesque lakeside town of Lausanne in Switzerland in the early 30s, that vision is constantly adjusted, as you’ll see in Belinda Cornish’s crack revival — its first in 15 years — at Teatro Live!.

The opening scenes are powered by the exhilaration of being on a holiday, an ocean away from the prosaic, the sensible — in a guest house run by an exotic American emigré, Princess Volodevsky (Cathy Derkach) on the lam permanently from all of the above. Chantal Fortin’s design is a kind of oasis (foreign booze bottles, cocktail glasses, amuse-bouches involving caviar) that seems to have landed in a glow of magical horizon-less lighting by Narda McCarroll.

The eyes through which we see the world belong to Marian Ogilvy (the terrific Beth Graham), a congenitally practical Canadian teacher and writer of school textbooks, with all that that implies. We meet her, in her sensible shoes — Leona Brausen’s costumes are a ’30s story in themselves — delivering an inspirational address to the new grads of the Southern Ontario Business College For Women. The play that follows is her story, remembered and set before us: like a Henry James heroine, Marian will shed her old myopic self in the magic of budding romance, in parallel to the seductive views of the Old World.

The characters do repeatedly refer to the awe-inspiring views, which get better and better the higher they climb from the lake through the hillside town. The play opens with Marian’s ‘morning after the night before’ observation that the lake is best observed without the filter of sunglasses. But the sheer dazzle is too much. And she and the genial young American optometrist Ted (Oscar Derkx) she’s met the previous day (and night!) re-apply their shades. A romantic comedy is unfolding, and with it the rom-com obstacle of new arrivals at the Maison de la Princesse.

Mathew Hulshof and Rachel Bowron in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Charlie Hastings (Mathew Hulshof) and his aggressively loud, vulgarian wife Laurette (Rachel Bowron), at first amusingly ignorant, are of the post-war generation chronicled, as playwright Lemoine has noted, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Did you know that this is the same lake as they have in Geneva?” Like the Divers of Tender Is The Night, they seem to be paid-up members of the Lost Generation post-Jazz Age generation that drifted around Europe after the war, purposeless and extravagant, flinging their money around, drinking too much till they’re not quite so charming.

As The Oculist’s Holiday and Cornish’s five-actor ensemble production calibrate, the bright buoyancy of the European holiday that never ends gradually reveals a dark, surprisingly dark, underbelly of damages: through a comic lens darkly. The choice of music, as specified by Lemoine, is Old World classical (a Mendelssohn piano trio) that’s a light lyrical shower of notes on top with more moving undertones. It’s a capture of how the play works.

All the characters of the play, strangers who intersect at the guest house, are from somewhere else, propelled by their own stories. Only Princess Volodevsky, née Dorrie, from Indiana via Paris and marriage to a Russian nobleman doomed by that revolution, is happy to be candid about revealing the secrets of her route to Lausanne. In Derkach’s performance Dorrie, amused and amusing, breezy in delivery, enters and exits at a trot, talking and always bearing libations.

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

The quintet of actors are expert at riding the humour and articulate nuance, and the funny rhythms, of Lemoine’s dialogue. Graham’s smart, appealing performance as a someone unused to being perplexed or  impulsive charts the gradual erosion at the edges of Marian’s sturdy self-possession and clear perspective (ah yes, the question of focus). Marion is evidently not someone who normally answers “why not?” to a “should I…?” question. Has her vision been blurred by a new on-location attraction to a young man of unthreatening good humour? Derkx’s performance as a doctor, open-faced, professionally devoted to improving vision, captures an unforced, unflamboyant ease and charm.

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

The train wreck American couple who crash into the budding romance at the Maison de la Princesse are vividly set forth by Hulshof and Bowron. The crazy hilarity of Laurette, who has neither idea nor  interest in knowing where they are, turns vivacity into something else, something more imperious and more dangerous, in Bowron’s performance.

Hulshof, making a welcome return to Edmonton theatre, captures with great comic precision a kind of fragile sophistication, poised precariously over an abyss.

Lemoine’s comedies have expanded their emotional palette (and the more predictable sightlines of ‘comedy’) over the years since 2009. But in a production unafraid of double-vision, that gives full weight to disappointment, confusion, and desperation, The Oculist’s Holiday still stands out. That’s a realization that qualifies as a sense of distance. Put on your specs; you can, you should, get the close-up view at the Varscona.

Have you seen 12thnight’s preview interview with Belinda Cornish? It’s here.

REVIEW

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: through June 16

Tickets: teatroq.com