The Stillborn Lover
, Timothy Findley's 1993 play, is receiving its American premiere this summer at the Berkshire Theatre Festival (Stockbridge, Massachusetts) where it runs until July 26. Set in a safe house in Ottawa, Canada (Findley, who died last year, is among Canada's literary elite), the story of Ambassador Henry Raymond and his wife, Marion, begins immediately after they have been secretly flown home from their posting in Russia. Two RCMP officers maintain a constant guard and subject them to rigorous questioning at the same time that Michael Riordan, their long-time friend and Raymond's political colleague, sets his sights on his country's highest political office. Intrigue, manipulation and vaulting ambition fuel Findley's discourse on morality and the ways in which we are tempted to serve ourselves by obliterating others.The play promises a great deal more than it ultimately delivers. Weighed down by plotting that fails to ignite either character or situation, (the much talked of murder of a young Russian is little more than a red herring) the dialogue is determinedly formal, more reminiscent of Terrence Rattigan of the late 1930's than it is of life as we might more accurately imagine it. And while it's wholly credible that senior politicos might favour the cautious British language where people rarely say what they think and feel, it's also more likely that when lives are on the line, some unclenching of body parts will give way to an emotional honesty that Findley appears to have resisted. The female characters are better written because the playwright believes that women can more easily see themselves for what they are without the bother of maintaining appearances or the wasted energy of pretense.
Confusing, too, are incomplete scenes with the Raymonds' daughter, a lawyer who, we are led to believe, is a history of failed relationships and self-deception. Another red herring. The RCMP officers say and do some predictably inept cop things meant to add humour to the mix, and the younger of the pair, a preening physique in a redneck's body, is an essentially thankless character with nothing to say and nowhere to go.
The production does not always help to serve the play or the players. Though there are references to Japan, including one brief flashback scene set in Nagasaki in 1946, set designer Michael Downs has made the literary far too literal by imagining that a house overlooking the Rideau Canal would be built in the Japanese style, complete with sliding rice paper doors.. The unit set, which must contain a variety of locations, so dominates the stage that Martin Rabbett, the director, is barely able to maintain traffic control without actors having to fight their way on and off stage, up and down stairs.
Perhaps the congestion contributed to a tentative opening night performance. Perhaps, too, the overwritten dialogue, instead of direct expression of emotional depth which might allow the actors to more easily connect, further removes us from the desperate circumstances on the stage.
Richard Chamberlain is an ideal embodiment of the ambassador who cannot face his family until he can face himself. His stiffness in voice and body will probably modulate as the run continues. Lois Nettleton, as his wife, endows the character with warmth and humanity that the dialogue barely hints at. Keir Dullea and Jessica Walter, as the couple's close friends, do what they can with stock characters that have to endure stock dialogue.
As a Canadian myself, and seeing The Stillborn Lover for the first time in this BTF production, I have to wonder at the audience response to a story of people whose lives are at the breaking point but who in true Canadian style, manage not to get too upset or too excited. In spite of everything, they allow us to leave the theatre, and their personal crises, far behind.