Preview
THE LADY OF LYONS
University of Calgary
Starring Kate Pakarnyk and Jonathan Love
Directed by Barry Yzereef
Written by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Runs May 14 to 16
Reeve Theatre (U of C)
When you’ve just impressed an audience of international Goethe scholars with a lively production of the complete Faust, what do you do for an encore?
Barry Yzereef’s answer: go to England and introduce the English to one of their least-appreciated playwrights.
This month, Yzereef, artistic director of the University of Calgary’s drama department, and a troupe of 16 young actors are travelling to Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, ancestral estate of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, to present a rare modern staging of that Victorian writer’s 19th century hit, The Lady of Lyons.
The occasion is the 200th anniversary of Bulwer-Lytton’s birth, and the U of C’s production will be a primary theatrical component of a festival that includes readings, academic papers and the launch of a newly published biography. The Lady of Lyons will run May 20 to 23 in the manor’s Jacobean banqueting hall, where Bulwer-Lytton and his good friend and fellow author, Charles Dickens, once put on private theatricals.
Before they cross the pond, however, the company is giving three local performances of the play in the Reeve Theatre.
Like Faust, which Yzereef directed for this winter’s Faustival at the U of C, The Lady of Lyons is seldom staged these days – although for much different reasons. In his time, novelist-playwright Bulwer-Lytton was one of England’s literary lions, but his reputation did not survive into the 20th century. Today, his work is dismissed as Victorian tosh and his name is synonymous with extravagantly bad writing. (He was the man responsible for that immortal opening sentence: "It was a dark and stormy night.")
However, the tide has been turning of late and Yzereef, a Bulwer-Lytton expert, is among those campaigning to have his plays reassessed.
"I’ve always thought his work might not be great literature, but it’s certainly good drama," he says. After all, he points out, The Lady of Lyons was a huge success with audiences in the 1800s, and a star vehicle for the legendary actresses of the time, from Ellen Terry to Lillie Langtry.
Yzereef calls the play "an upper-class melodrama dealing with the idea that virtue must triumph over pride." Its heroine, Pauline Deschapelles, a socialite in post-Revolution France, is tricked by a spurned suitor into marrying Claude Melnotte, a poor gardener’s son who has pulled himself up by the bootstraps. Yzereef says that Bulwer-Lytton’s popularity lay in his ability to express the sentiments that Victorian ears wanted to hear: that "love levels all ranks" and nobility is not a matter of birth but of natural endowment. "He had his hand on the pulse of his audience."
While we may no longer buy Bulwer-Lytton’s idealism, Yzereef believes his dramaturgy still holds up. "This play is extremely well-constructed," he says, "and the characters are very strong. We’re having a lot of fun with it."
The U of C was invited to tour the show to Knebworth House following an initial visit in 2000, when Yzereef and his students brought over a production of another Bulwer-Lytton play, a lost work called The Captives, as part of a University of London conference. The author’s descendants, Lord David Lytton Cobbold and his son Henry, were so pleased with it that they insisted Yzereef return with another show for the bicentennial.
"I kept getting phone calls, letters and e-mails asking, ‘Are you coming back?’" says Yzereef. "Finally, we had to say ‘Yes.’"
The cost of the trip is being covered partly by the university and partly by money raised from a series of fund-raising cabarets. "Those helped pay for the sets, props and costumes since the drama department doesn’t have funding to do projects like this." Unlike traditional Victorian theatre, his Lady of Lyons will employ minimalist scenic design, and Yzereef says that, given the university’s latest round of budget cuts, that could be the order of the day for future department shows as well.
"Minimalism is the way we’re going to have to go with almost anything we do." |
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