>>REVIEW
THE TRUE LIFE FICTION OF MATA HARI
Runs until December 9
University of Calgary Department of Drama
Reeve Theatre (University of Calgary)
As a woman whose name became a byword for the mercenary exploitation of feminine wiles, Mata Hari leaves any performer portraying her with an ample pair of shoes and a legendary corset to fill. Unfortunately, the cast of the University of Calgary’s latest mainstage production, The True Life Fiction of Mata Hari, prove that they still have a few sizes to grow.
Diane Samuels’s play traces Mata Hari (Genevieve Bourdon) from her arrest on charges of espionage in February 1917 to her execution eight months later. The play’s first act places her in an interrogation room where she fields hostile questions from Captain Bouchardon (Christopher Duthie) and manipulates the pliable admiration of Captain Baudouin (Pat Quinn), an aspiring storyteller. Sometimes commanding control of the room, sometimes weakening under the attacks of her interrogators, Mata Hari struggles to maintain her sensual veneer and command a situation that is quickly spiralling out of her usual control.
Bourdon’s Mata Hari is bombastic and brash, a caricature of the confident woman whose liaisons crossed more borders than artillery shells. But the façade is never broken and the caricature is too hyperbolic to be a believable seductress. Bourdon’s affected enunciation and lowered voice are simply too much, playing more like a young actress trying to fill a large role than an experienced manipulator in her final performance.
As Baudouin, Quinn takes a character whose infatuation provides many of the play’s lighter moments and flattens him into comic relief that all but literally winks at the audience. Even after Baudouin has become the play’s explicit connection to the idea of narrative so central to the title The True Life Fiction of Mata Hari, Quinn practically vibrates, desperate to squeeze a few last comic drops out of the play’s final scenes. In fairness to the production’s university cast, older actor Alan Davies, playing Mata Hari’s lawyer, proves that age is no guarantee of a mature performance. Unanimated, he delivers his lines with all the inflection that his character would likely provide if thrust unexpectedly on stage.
Technically, the play is easily on par with any local professional production. Douglas McCullogh’s set transforms from interrogation room to prison cell, and finally to firing range, with striking economy and beauty. This starkness is accentuated by the sometimes arresting lighting design of David R. Smith and James Andrews, whether it is bathing Mata Hari’s tortured dreams in blue or illuminating the long, narrow march to the firing range’s post.
The play’s final images, illuminated characters lining the walls in a retreating perspective toward the defiant but deceased Mata Hari, are as bold as the woman herself. It is a shame the same cannot be said of the production’s actors.
In Mata Hari, both the woman and the play, director Samer Al-Saber has overestimated the capabilities of his cast, leaving them outclassed by a woman larger than life. The legend is large, and Samuels’s script does nothing to reduce its depth. The result leaves room to grow and an empty corset still to be filled. |
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