Lizzie (Valerie Planche, L) and The Actress (Jan Alexandra Smith).

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Blood Relations presented by Vertigo Theatre
Vertigo Theatre
Saturday, September 19 - Sunday, October 11

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With the exception of Agatha Christie, it’s hard to think of a woman whose name has become as synonymous with murder as Lizzie Borden. The unmarried daughter of Andrew Borden, a well-to-do patriarch of Fall River, Massachusetts, her alleged involvement in the brutal murders of her father and stepmother — they were hacked to death with an axe — haunted her. Her guilt was never proven but the suspicion was never dispelled.

Murder mysteries are Vertigo Mystery Theatre’s stock in trade, so Sharon Pollock’s 1981 Governor General’s Award-winning play, Blood Relations, is on one level a natural choice to open their 2009-2010 season. In true murder mystery style, the play begins with the unnamed “Actress” (Jan Alexandra Smith) asking her friend, Lizzie (Valerie Planche), whether she was actually responsible for murdering her own parents. What follows is an enactment that unearths and elaborates a motive for the murder, with the finger pointing inevitably toward Lizzie.

Despite being intelligent and ambitious, Lizzie is crippled by the social limitations of her gender, watching as her stepmother, Abigail (Valerie Ann Pearson), conspires with her step-uncle, Harry (Robert Klein), to wrest control of the Borden estate. With her sister (Heather Lee McCallum) a complicit lapdog and her father (Stephen Hair) growing increasingly unsympathetic, Lizzie is backed steadily into a corner as the audience watches.

Ultimately, the play, despite its murder mystery conceit, is less concerned with the “who?” than with the “why?” It’s here that the real twist of the selection is revealed: Pollock is no Agatha Christie, and that’s exactly why Vertigo’s artistic director, Mark Bellamy, selected the play.

“[Blood Relations is] about the psychological factors that would lead someone seemingly well-bred and rational to take a hatchet and commit two insanely brutal murders,” he says, adding that Borden’s acquittal likely depended heavily on this inability to connect the woman to the crimes. “In 1892, looking at the brutality of the crimes and then looking at this gentile, upper-class woman, a jury could not equate those two together.”

Originally produced as My Name is Lisabeth, with Pollock playing the title role, the play was not a success until it was rewritten as Blood Relations to incorporate the metatheatrical device of the Actress’s performance. Instead of the naturalistic limitations of an Agatha Christie script, the play provides an essential theatricality that Bellamy is embracing as director. With characters capable of stepping into other characters’ scenes and commenting from the wings, reality is as malleable as the truth in Lizzie’s world.

“There are two sets of rules for the two different levels of the characters,” says Bellamy of the play’s double nature, which sometimes sees characters breaking the fourth wall. “I think it’s going to be kind of interesting for an audience to watch and realize they just watched [characters] walk out of the wall of the house onto the sidewalk.

“The whole play takes place in the imagination of the two characters, of Lizzie and the Actress,” he adds. “That allows you to break the rules and not adhere to naturalism as you normally would. This is a game inside someone’s mind. You’re in a world that is governed by imagination.”

Just as importantly, the “performances” in the play allow it to actively comment on itself, denying a simple interpretation of the murder. Rather than just watching a series of events unfolding, the audience is asked to understand what could drive a well-mannered, upper-class woman to commit a pair of brutal murders. And while Bellamy isn’t interested in dramatizing a social indictment (“I don’t think [Pollock] labels it as a feminist or a social play,” he says), he sees a ready-made, even familiar murder mystery trope in a game being played for the usual stakes — money and power.

“There’s the game [Lizzie and the Actress are] playing in that they will switch roles as human beings, and there is a game being played within the family dynamic of the Borden house,” he explains.

And in a game with stakes like the Borden household’s, the inevitable result is a messy one.

“The way Sharon has constructed this play, the way the information is delivered to the Actress and to the audience is very clever in how it’s layered,” says Bellamy. “As we build and build to a point where Lizzie has no choice, somebody’s got to go.”

As Bellamy proudly points out, Blood Relations is a play that could be staged in any major Canadian theatre. Combining historical drama with a sharp theatrical sensibility, it is an originally Canadian work steeped in critical acclaim and continuing scholarship. Multi-layered and grippingly intense, it’s the kind of fare that Vertigo’s artistic director hopes to continue to bring to his audiences. After all, Agatha Christie hardly holds an exclusive right to murderesses.