Irene Poole as Morag Gunn and Jesse Gervais as Jules in The Diviners.David Hou/Stratford Festival
- Title: The Diviners
- Based on the novel by: Margaret Laurence
- Written by: Vern Thiessen with Yvette Nolan
- Directed by: Krista Jackson with Geneviève Pelletier
- Actors: Irene Poole, Jesse Gervais, Julie Lumsden
- Company: Stratford Festival
- Venue: Tom Patterson Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Oct. 2, 2024
Before the Stratford Festival gets to the world’s most popular fictional female orphans next season (Annie and Anne of Green Gables), consider a trip to the Ontario repertory theatre to see one who has been in danger of being forgotten: Morag Gunn.
Morag is the protagonist of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, published 50 years ago this year to an almost immediate school censorship row over its sex and swearing and, perhaps, a central romantic relationship between a white woman of Scottish descent and a Métis man.
These days, however, the 1974 novel is more likely to not appear on assigned reading lists owing to the increasingly sidelined place within the CanLit canon of Laurence, who died in 1987, never finishing another book after being shaken in her last’s controversy.
Playwrights Vern Thiessen and Yvette Nolan’s stage adaptation, a bit strange but ultimately savvy, could very well provide the spark for a revival of interest in the Manitoba-born writer – or, at least, this work of hers, which seems to wrestle openly with how a settler-descended writer should tell an epic multi-generational story set in Canada, even as it does so.
Morag (Irene Poole, smart and sexual) begins the show as a middle-aged novelist and single mother living in a rural area north of Toronto in the early 1970s. She starts to think back on (and write about) her past after her 18-year-old daughter Pique (Julie Lumsden) sets off on a westward journey to find her roots.
The shape of Morag’s life owes much to its traumatic start, with both her parents dying of polio. She ends up being taken in by Christie (a poignant Jonathan Goad), a fellow Scottish-Canadian army buddy of her late father, in the small Manitoba town of Manawaka, which was Laurence’s regular stand-in for her own hometown of Neepawa.
Christie is a local lower-class pariah – his job is to cart trash and other unwanted items to the garbage dump known locally as the Nuisance Grounds. (His wife, Prin, like so many characters and plot lines from the 500-page novel, is probably necessarily viewed as a nuisance by the dramatists themselves and tossed aside.)
Raised as an outsider, Morag stands up for her Métis classmate Jules Tonnerre (a wonderfully warm Jesse Gervais) one day after he refuses to sing God Save the King. It is the beginning of an off-and-on connection that will eventually, in another time and place, lead to the birth of Pique.
From the drunken storytelling of Christie, Morag learns of her ancestors who were chased out of Scotland during the Highland Clearances, and their death-ridden overseas journey to Canada.
Darla Daniels as the Métis Fiddler with members of the company in The Diviners.David Hou/Stratford Festival
Meanwhile, from Jules and his father Lazarus’s songs, the budding writer learns of their Métis ancestors – who fought for their lives and land alongside Louis Riel, against a prime minister who, though the cruel irony is not overunderlined, himself came to Canada from Scotland.
While these two prongs of the past intertwine fairly easily in the first half of The Diviners, the second half feels a little askew as it focuses more on Morag’s move to Toronto after marrying her much-older professor Brooke (Dan Chameroy, who is not well integrated into the ensemble). She begins a literary career while being suffocated by his condescension – and, in a contrast from most stories about artists, ultimately finds liberation in a small town rather than the big city.
Thiessen adapted, to much success, W. Somerset Maugham’s Bildungsroman Of Human Bondage for Soulpepper in 2014 – so he’s got the right experience to adapt Laurence’s Künstlerroman, a related genre that follows an artist’s alter-ego’s development to maturity. He’s partnered with Yvette Nolan, an Algonquin playwright and director who also has a flair for adaptation.
Clearly, care has been taken to include First Nations and Métis in this stage retelling – and expand on their presence in the story. The direction, too, is an intercultural collaboration between Krista Jackson and Geneviève Pelletier.
Still, the telling of the events of The Diviners from the point of view of Morag – once removed from the bigger drama of the narratives of the Métis characters, both in Manawaka and overseas (where Jules ends up fighting at Dieppe) – can feel idiosyncratic, especially on a stage where all characters take up equal physical space.
The balanced perspective from which to tell all these stories would be Pique’s, of course – and yet Morag’s struggle to do so adds a layer of in-the-moment drama often missing from memory plays. In the play and novel, the art of storytelling is compared to the divining for water – if it works, it works.
What doesn’t always work in Jackson and Pelletier’s production is the movement by Cameron Carver, that sometimes feels too much like a musical’s choreography; the Scottish and Métis dancing and drumming juxtapositioned with the click-clack of Morag’s swivelling typewriter, in particular, is less than divine.