FFWD Weekly
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| THEATRE Clever as Paint: The Rossettis in Love There's just something about artists that makes them rich sources of material for character studies. Over the past year and in the coming season, Calgary audiences have been and will be treated to several bio-dramas about the lives (always troubled, natch) of actress Sarah Bernhardt (Memoir at Theatre Calgary), writer August Strindberg (When They Stop Dancing at Theatre Junction) and silent film star Nell Shipman (Moving Pictures later this season at Theatre Junction), among others. They're manic depressive, put-upon, self-absorbed or just plain evil - not great friends, lovers or parents, perhaps, but fabulous conversationalists. And great characters, too. There may not be a more colorful circle in the history of the arts than the Rossettis - painter Dante Gabriel and his poet sister Christina - and their friends, the trend-setters of the Victorian age. Three of their number - Dante, his wife Elizabeth Siddal and their friend, the painter William Morris - are the trio whose lives make up Clever as Paint: The Rossettis in Love, by Canadian Kim Morrisey. "At one point in his life, Dante Gabriel Rossetti came home and his wife was dead in his bed, and an inquest was held," says Barry Yzereef, who will direct the play for Downright Canadian Theatre. "The idea was that it was perhaps mischance that occurred, but rumors always flew that it was also suicide. Rossetti himself had a very difficult time dealing with that and the play focuses around that incident - what led up to it and what happened afterwards." What may have led up to it, Yzereef says, was Siddal's feeling of inadequacy. An accomplished artist and poet in her own right, she was and continues to be overshadowed by her much more famous husband and sister-in-law. "The belief was that maybe she was just so overwhelmed she couldn't live with it and started taking laudanum, had a miscarriage and then eventually committed suicide - or died by mischance, who can tell," the director allows. "Morrisey certainly says that it was by suicide." Morrisey's portrait of Rossetti is an unflattering one, focusing on his self-absorbed inattention to Lizzie. "The play itself is a study of the artistic temperament," Yzereef reflects. "I would think that if the play has a theme, it's sort of the idea of the sensitive artist, who is totally insensitive to everyone around him or her.... (Morrisey) presents the artist who is so ego-dominated that they can destroy rather than create, and I think that's a fascinating investigation of the artistic temperament." Yzereef says that the playwright doesn't shy away from casting blame in the case of the Rossettis in Love. "(The play presents) Elizabeth Siddal as being a woman who had ability, but wasn't quite up to it, as were the people surrounding her, and perhaps had she been fostered more, loved more, appreciated more, we wouldn't have had the tragic result that we do in this particular play," he says. "Kim Morrisey is very strongly a feminist writer - she likes taking kicks to the shins of cultural icons." |