Trevor Leigh and Angela Cavar in Judith Thompson’s Enoch Arden in Hope Shelter.
Finding someone who can act, sing with a voice good enough for opera and play the music of Richard Strauss is no easy task. No wonder director Simon Mallett calls it his “casting challenge of the year.”
The role in question is that of Ciel, one of two homeless lovers in Judith Thompson’s play Enoch Arden in the Hope Shelter. The play, set in a halfway house for people with mental illnesses, opens Downstage’s season.
Mallett found his Ciel in Angela Cavar, a Calgary concert pianist, singer, instructor and musical director. Trevor Leigh, as Jabber, is Ciel’s lover.
Whereas Jabber talks virtually non-stop throughout the 70-minute production, Ciel is catatonic, communicating entirely through music and brief, sung phrases. Music — particularly that of German composer Richard Strauss — plays a key part in the production, but not in the typical theatre musical sense.
Jabber and Ciel are rehearsing Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1864 poem Enoch Arden for the shelter’s talent show. The poem tells the story of three childhood friends: Annie Lee, Philip Ray, and Enoch Arden. Annie and Enoch marry and Enoch heads to sea to make a living. Years pass, he doesn’t return and, thinking him dead, Annie marries her other childhood friend, Philip.
Years later, Enoch, who had been stranded on an island, returns home to find Annie living a new life with Philip. Not wanting to destroy her happiness, he doesn’t reveal his identity and, instead, watches her and his children carry on their lives, as he languishes in sorrow.
The play’s score came to be in 1897, when Strauss set Tennyson’s poem to music. Strauss and actor Ernst von Possart, went on to perform the melodrama, as the form was called. “Before melodrama took on the negative connotation of overacting that it does now, a melodrama was just a text set to music,” says Mallett.
The text-and-music combination has been performed more recently by such luminaries as Glenn Gould and Claude Rains, as well as Patrick Stewart.
What Thompson has done with Enoch Arden is re-contextualize it and make it more relevant for contemporary audiences. “It’s not just the story of Enoch Arden, but the story of Enoch Arden as it relates to the outcasts of society,” says Mallett.
Thompson interweaves Tennyson’s poem with Jabber’s life story and the audience discovers many parallels between the two.
“There’s a really interesting blend in and out of the poem and the music and also coming to realize how someone we think we understand when we see them on the street — because they’re talking to themselves and so we think they’re crazy — how, in fact, it’s a much more complicated story. It questions perspectives we have on people and is, ultimately, about how redemptive art and storytelling can be,” says Mallett.
Thompson is known for her raw, gritty dramas, so Enoch Arden is a bit of a departure for her.
“It is quite unique in her body of work,” Mallett acknowledges. “However, when we understand Jabber’s anger about being seen as an outcast of society — and being invisible in the same way Enoch Arden was to the people around him — that’s when we open the door to a bit more of the anger and harshness that Judith is well known for,” he says.
Ciel plays portions of Strauss’s original composition throughout the production as her method of communicating. “The music provides an underscoring, the same way it would in a film, but it’s incredibly specific,” says Mallett.
Besides writing tone poems, (another form popular at the time that involved composing music to evoke images from a novel or poem), Strauss was also known for his operas and vocal lieders. With the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Strauss faced controversy about his relationship with the Third Reich — Joseph Goebbels appointed him to the head of the state music bureau. While in that role, Strauss composed the official music for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
While some of his contemporaries saw Strauss as co-operating with the Nazis, there is evidence to suggest otherwise. Strauss was fired from his post as the state music bureau head because he refused to remove the name of his Jewish librettist from posters and playbills for one of his operas. He also composed an opera in 1938 that advocated peace and was critical of the Third Reich. Moreover, his daughter-in-law was Jewish and he intervened several times on her behalf to save her from Nazi terror.
Strauss died in 1949 at the age of 85.
He left behind a lasting musical legacy including Enoch Arden, which Thompson has re-invigorated with her powerful writing and strong social conscience, making it all the more interesting and relevant today.
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