Lost in Translation

Nicola Lipman as Gwen, Tara Hughes as Sally, Elizabeth Saunders as Annette, Nicola Cavendish as Reta in the CanStage production of Unless. Photo by Tim Matheson. Courtesy CanStage.

Reading Carol Shields’s Unless was a treat; watching its stage adaptation – written shortly before her death by the novelist and her daughter Sara Cassidy – was, largely, a chore. Why? How did the book’s strengths as literature become its weaknesses as drama? It all comes down to genre – a play’s not as elastic a thing as a novel, or, indeed, as a film. New technologies in the theatre have enabled swift, almost filmic, changes of scene and means of signalling shifts in time; but, still, the most satisfying plays are those that treat the theatre’s limitations as opportunities.

Shields’s novel is narrated by Reta Winters, a writer whose eldest daughter has suddenly and without explanation dropped out of university to panhandle at a busy Toronto intersection. The book’s action takes place over roughly a year, in which Winters puzzles out her bright, attractive, formerly well-adjusted daughter’s strange choice.

Unless is a novel of vignettes, moving backwards and forwards chronologically, and through many places. Within Winters’s house, the scene shifts from the writer’s attic workspace to the master bedroom, the living room and kitchen. Outside, the action carries the narrator through a book tour, a series of high-end ladies’-wear boutiques, a gite in France, a beauty salon, several cafés and restaurants, the daughter’s chosen street corner, a hospital and a homeless shelter. Although restless, the novel’s action is unified by the narrator’s voice, and by how each scene illuminates her flowing consciousness – one of many nods the book makes to Virginia Woolf.

All of these scenes are ingeniously reproduced in the play, which premiered this past week at Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre. A massive Lazy Susan rotates furniture around the writer’s aerie; video montages illuminate the back walls with French-country scenery (for the gite idyll); urban footage (for the corner of Bathurst and Bloor Sts.) and soundscapes (of café chatter, or snarled traffic) further assist in locating the action.

On the page – at least in the hands of a writer like Shields – such swift movement never jars. On the stage, it does – by the time we’ve accommodated ourselves to a particular locale the scene has often ended, and we’ve missed its content, while noting its location. We’re always playing catch-up.

Unless is a well-populated book, including adept thumbnail and, in some cases, comprehensive sketches of the writer’s mother-in-law, her doctor husband, her two other teenaged daughters, the family dog, a recently separated friend of the Winters, a spa makeover artist, a smarmy literary journalist, the New York-based editor of Winters’s novels, and the members of Reta’s coffee-klatsch-cum-support group.

A strong cast of eight, led by one of the country’s best comic actresses, Nicola Cavendish, ably impersonates all of these individuals, as well as the hero and heroine of Winters’s light novel – the obligatory novel within the novel. It must be mayhem backstage, as the secondary players shift costumes and wigs – and it’s a tribute to the actors’ chops that they manage their many roles so well. But to what effect? Again, our spectatorial energies are diffused; we’re endlessly distracted by the innumerable walk-on, walk-off parts.

After a well-drawn secondary character is ushered on and ushered off in a book, we can put it down, then go take a bath or prepare a meal while mulling over that character’s contribution. We have no such luxury with a play, and our minds – even though accustomed post-MTV to flow – are not quite nimble enough to process such a theatrical moveable feast.

We can also drop a book to our knees after a keen, little observation is made. Shields’s novel is replete with satisfying meditations about modern life that don’t illuminate the central mother-daughter drama, but nonetheless please. Her beside-the-main-point comments – on, say the utility of charm (“It’s really a cheap trick: the calculated lift of the wrist … that trick of pretending to sit on a little glass chair, that concentration of radiance”), on introspection (“The examined life has had altogether too much publicity”) and on the lesser joys of housecleaning and shopping – all improve the book.

But it was disheartening to watch so many of these très bons mots fall flat when pronounced from the stage, under-appreciated by the opening night audience. They fell so not because they weren’t well delivered, nor because the assembled crowd was too dull. Such commentary on the passing show of life works best in a novel, where time is of little object. The novel can tolerate digressions; Swift went further, positing them as one of the fictional form’s greatest pleasures. They simply don’t work as well in plays.

Celine Stubel (left) as Nora, and Nicola Cavendish as Reta in the CanStage production of Unless. Photo by Tim Matheson. Courtesy CanStage.

A better adaptation might have selected three or four key scenes from the novel, and expanded on them, allowing us to explore Shields’s central problem – how the lives of girls and women continue to be blighted by a society which sidelines them in subtle, but nonetheless pernicious ways. In the adaptation presented, when Cavendish gets a soliloquy in her aerie – a brief exhale from the play’s busy stage business – and ruminates on this subject, her pronouncements feel like a sudden intrusion from the author, attempting to order an unruly chaos.

Worse than that, these abrupt speeches – in the form mainly of intemperate letters about various examples of sexism in the media – come off as preachy. In the book, Shields’s straightforward, first-wave-feminist arguments are well-composed, thoroughly argued, picking up where Woolf and Alice Munro left off. Reta has that rarity for women writers in former times, a room of one’s own, but she still can’t protect her daughter from feeling useless. In the book, Shields’s pointed barbs emanate from the plot, rather than seeming clumsy add-ons, as they do in the play.

Further, the book does not present many showdowns between its central characters – the wife never blames the husband, or vice versa, for the daughter’s crisis; the mother never gets rip-roaringly angry with her daughter, targeting the daughter for wounding, out of selfishness, all those who love her. Instead, in the book, Reta vents her anger on strangers, on the literary journalist who attempts to invade her privacy, on newspaper editors who’ve printed gratuitously sexist material, on her busybody New York editor.

Entry-level playwriting texts always instruct neophytes to centre their dramas on key conflicts. They go on to recommend that the major characters, each representing different types of people, butt heads. A novel can survive without it, a play cannot.

Observing a well-constructed classical play, disparate members of the audience will be drawn in because they identify with one of the chief figures; the resulting conflict will engage them as they root for their own representative. In the stage version of Unless, the vastness of the cast means that only one central perspective, Reta’s, gets full play. Unless we feel kinship with Reta, we aren’t involved in its action.

Although the theatre has the technology now to almost equal film and fiction in its swift changes of scene and time, no amount of video montage, Diligent Susans, or soundscapes can save a play which disperses its energies – as Unless did – away from elaborating on, and illuminating, its centre. A good play often goes deeper than a film or a novel can – it chews over the same bone obsessively, until it gets to the marrow. Unless was a good, almost great, novel; but its merits were lost in the theatrical translation. Sometimes it’s best to let sleepy, episodic, books lie.

Alec Scott is a Toronto theatre critic.

Letters: Thank goodness I read your article today. Last night I saw Unless and thought it was just me who couldn't follow the story. I now feel more secure about my intelligence level. My partner said we should have read the book first. You should not have to read a book in order to understand and follow a play. As always, I thoroughly enjoyed Nicola Cavendish!  She is certainly a bright Canadian star. She appeared to follow the play. I guess she read the book first. Gayle Logan North Vancouver