Metamorphoses 2023 keeps a cautious distance from contemporary discourse

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• Title: Metamorphoses 2023
• Written by: Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour in collaboration with the performers
• Director: Michele Smith
• Actors: Dean Gilmour, Rob Feetham, Daniel R Henkel, Neena Jayarajan, Sukruti Tirupattur
• Company: Theatre Smith-Gilmour in association with Crow’s Theatre
• Venue: Crow’s Theatre
• City: Toronto
• Year: To April 9, 2023

Theatre Smith-Gilmour, the respected physical theatre company run by wife-and-husband team Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour since 1980, first turned their attention to the classic narrative poem Metamorphoses back in 2018.

But then Ovid crashed into COVID.

Flash forward to our current world, both deeply changed and yet not, and Smith and Gilmour’s project is now called Metamorphoses 2023 and on stage at Crow’s Theatre.

With the current year in the title, it promises a timely take on the theme of transformation that lies at the heart of so many of the myths in the Roman poet’s magnum opus.

Metamorphoses, Ovid’s original, dates to around 8 CE and covers about 250 myths in its almost 12,000 lines; this adaptation features a cast of five making their way through about 10 of these in a bare-bones 70-minute production.

Its dialogue is in English rather than Latin – but the primary language, as in all Theatre Smith-Gilmour shows, is that of the body.

Tiresias (played by Gilmour), a character who classically inclined theatregoers know well from the Ancient Greek plays of Sophocles and Euripides, is the storyteller for the evening.

This blind prophet of many pronouns first tells how she came to change genders, and then change genders again; how he lost his vision settling a bet for Hera and Zeus; and how they ended up sightless but all-seeing through the intervention of Athena.

Tiresias accepts all of this as inevitable, as a seer must. Gilmour paints the character as a long-suffering, surviving Beckettian clown and channels Ovid’s mantra: “Everything changes. Nothing dies. What you are or were is not what you will be tomorrow.”

Metamorphoses 2023 very much follows in the footsteps of Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s previous productions that adapted short stories by the likes of Anton Chekhov, Lu Xun and Katherine Mansfield.

With Ovid as the source, however, Smith, Gilmour and their collaborators are putting their movement-focused miniatures up against some serious competition.

Many of the myths found in Metamorphoses were already adapted into plays before Ovid came along – and the Roman poet’s own particular take on others has influenced more than a few big-name playwrights, including none other than William Shakespeare.

Indeed, you might not even be able to place where you first heard some of these familiar stories, such as that of a certain fellow who falls in love with his reflection.

Narcissus is played here by Rob Feetham, a physically gifted performer whose characters often carry themselves like oversized toddlers. His scene partner is simply a watery projection on the floor – and with nothing more, he takes the audience through an unrequited romance that begins humorously and ends in heartbreak. (Tiana Kralj is credited as the set designer, but all I saw was a bare, black stage.)

Then there’s the more gruesome story of Tereus (Daniel R. Henkel), who marries Procne (Sukruti Tirupattur) and then captures, rapes and cuts out the tongue of her sister, Philomela (Neena Jayarajan).

This tale is the source of, among other plays, Erin Shields’s Governor-General’s Award-winning play If We Were Birds (ripe for a revival) and inspired the more gruesome bits in Titus Andronicus. But it is retold in its own unique, concise, darkly comic way here.

Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s long-established physical language, rooted in mime and clown, is given fresh life with the addition of Tirupattur and Jayarajan’s skills in Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance. With powerful stomps that shake the heavens, their Procne and Philomena take their revenge on Tereus as a dish served piping hot.

Less successful in Metamorphoses 2023 is the too-short take on King Pentheus (Henkel, who plays a wide variety of preening oppressors to perfection), whose body ends up torn apart by his mother and aunt, followers of the god Bacchus.

There are elements of Ovid’s version of this story that differ from Euripides’s The Bacchae (the source of, among other contemporary plays, the Hawksley Workman musical The God That Comes), but Theatre Smith-Gilmour leaves them out, making this part feel like the Coles Notes of a classic.

It was also in this section that the year in the title fully starts to feel out of place, as the reactionary ruler Pentheus complains about “radical feminists” – a term you usually find in the mouths of people of other political persuasions in 2023. Indeed, this take on Metamorphoses doesn’t turn out to be in conversation with contemporary discourse about transformations, especially regarding gender, but instead stays cautiously at a distance from it.

For better or for worse, this show feels like it could have any year from Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s history affixed to the end of its title; they found a style, and they’ve stuck to it.