THEATRE REVIEW WAITING FOR THE PARADE
Excellent cast of five women holds up tradition
Reputation of Murrell play is preserved in gracefull production at Tarragon
By: Liam Lacey
Theatre Critic
January 3, 1992
Written by John Murrell
Directed by Marti Maraden
At The Tarragon Theatre
THIRTEEN years after it first played The Tarragon Theatre, John Murrell's
Waiting For The Parade is back. The play, about five women in Calgary
waiting out the Second World War, stands tall in contemporary Canadian
theatre: it toured nationally, was exported to England, received an
acclaimed production under the direction of Robin Phillips at London's
Grand Theatre, which was adapted for television.
The play's reputation is preserved in director Marti Maraden's graceful
production, currently at the Tarragon, which unravels the play like a
magic carpet, as the series of vignettes move chronologically through the
Second World War, from 1939 to 1945.
Many of our images of the era are overviews: shifting borders, aerial
shots of masses of troops and ruined cities, pictures of divisions moving
in pincers around dotted place names.
Murrell's vision is intensely microscopic, detailed, domestic: the
women putting make-up on their legs to simulate stockings; the anger a
woman feels when someone else grabs a five-pound bag of sugar before she
can reach it; the difference between a neatly rolled bandage and a sloppy
one.
Initially, the sequence of monologues, collective scenes and popular
music feels a shade contrived - a forced, sociological condensing of
disparate issues of women on the homefront. But Murrell's sheer
accumulation of pertinent detail wins you over, and you soon become
completely absorbed in the characters.
The play is road-tested as a great vehicle for the right five women
actors, and the excellent cast here holds up the tradition admirably.
Those characters are: Catherine (Catherine Disher), a factory worker, with
a husband overseas; Janet (Barbara Gordon), the rigid, repressed do-gooder
who leads the volunteer exercises; Margaret (Jennifer Phipps), a mother,
with one son in the army and another of army age; Eve (Patty Jamieson),
the schoolteacher married to an older man; and Marta (Susan Coyne), a
German Canadian storekeeper, whose father is interned for pro-Nazi
sympathies.
That no single performance can be easily singled out is a mark of the
production's overall success and director Maraden's skill. Each
performance is distinctly realized and each scene holds the sense of
dynamic equilibrium between the actors. There's space here - both for the
development of the characters and for the surprising injections of humour
that keep the play buoyant.
Against a set made up of simple risers and painted-over windows, the
women play out their parts. More memorable than any specific speech or
scene, though, are a dozen simple gestures: Susan Coyne dusting off her
father's grave before she begins her speech about his death; Jennifer
Phipps staring rigidly ahead and clutching her handbag in outrage, when
she sees Catherine getting drunk; Catherine indolently lying back on the
ground, skirt riding up her legs, as she talks about how she has started
thinking like a whore.
In the best sense, the production reflects the feminine touch, the
details that add to the overall, curiously affirmative, impression.
Parades and wars come and go; life goes on.
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