REVIEW: Tarragon’s Queen Maeve packs one hell of an emotional wallop

In a quiet moment during Judith Thompson’s haunting Queen Maeve at Tarragon Theatre — a brief respite from the irascibly sharp tongue of Clare Coulter’s title character — personal support worker Siobhan (Caroline Gillis) gently washes the 88-year-old’s hair and begins to sing Leon Dubinsky’s “We Rise Again.” An ode to how we are reincarnated in the faces of our children and the things we create, the song serves as a fitting serenade to an elderly woman who fancies herself the reincarnation of a 2,000-year-old Irish queen.

All is not right with Queen Maeve — or, as she’s called in this reality, Mrs. Nurmi. Largely confined to a Cornwall, Ontario nursing home where the meals resemble dog excrement and the sounds of screams from dementia patients reverberate behind closed doors, she escapes from depression over her humdrum life by fantasizing about being the Queen of Connaught: a ruthless warrior from the Ulster Cycle of Celtic mythology who was buried standing up, facing her enemies, lest she be called upon to fight once more in death. 

The frail but stubborn Mrs. Nurmi’s battles may initially seem pedestrian in comparison, but bitter family drama, the refusal to accept a loss of power, and the twisting effect of soul-rending grief have been the stuff of legends for thousands of years.

If you’re looking for a full depiction of the warrior queen’s story or a link to her life that’s more than conceptual, you may find the show’s central metaphor a little fuzzy. But Thompson’s lived-in meditation on aging and the cycles that play out within families, filled with flashes of mysticism from director Mike Payette and anchored by Coulter’s blazing performance, packs one hell of an emotional wallop.

Maeve’s attempts to escape her current reality are all over Ken MacDonald’s set, her room covered with drawings of birds made in the nursing home’s art classes. A few non-avian images are of faces and trees, the latter representing Maeve’s deep resonance with the earth that connects her to an Irish burial ground blanketed with stones.

Thompson’s plays about broken systems and people on the margins have been studied for decades. Here, she takes on the fraught subject of eldercare and the increasing lack of agency we’re allowed as we age, particularly when we only have institutions to care for us. Maeve bitterly reflects on support workers who mock her and handle her roughly, breaking her fragile skin because they can. 

Siobhan is a beacon of light, in Gillis’ hands a stalwart, perky realist who Maeve calls her only friend and who looks at Maeve with kind eyes, while simultaneously being unafraid to tell her when she’s full of it. Yet from the beginning, Siobhan dictates the routine, an excruciatingly early wakeup through to dinner at 4 p.m., at which Maeve scoffs. Not wanting to wake from her dreams, she asks what remains to keep living for, maliciously (and hilariously) complying to the bare minimum.

Maeve claims to have been abandoned, but in flashbacks, we see the truth; she’s alienated both her beloved grandson Jake (Ryan Bommarito), a starry-eyed poet with a drug addiction, and her daughter Georgia (Sarah Orenstein), who had similar vices and artistic fantasies. One can see how the characters clash in how closely they mirror each other’s flaws, and both Bommarito and Orenstein handle the complexities well in Payette’s tensely staged confrontations, each presenting a bravely composed face before crumbling in need or grief.

The astonishing Coulter manages to appear one moment as if she’d blow away in a faint breeze, another as though she’d easily cleave you in twain with a broadsword. Drawing on how legends portray Queen Maeve, she’s intoxicating in her defiant presence and dry humour; as the legends also show, she’s often capricious, cold, and suddenly cruel. Thompson creates a captivatingly unreliable narrator, a portrait of a woman completely unable to admit fault, in her cruelty afraid to create an opening for others to be cruel to her in return. The audience serves as her confessor, hearing the apologies she’ll never issue to her family.

If there’s any issue with Queen Maeve, it’s that its references to the mythical queen actually feel like an interruption of the smaller but more interesting lives on stage. While the legend gives us lovely bits of stage magic, with John Gzowski’s sound design full of portent and Jason Hand’s hazy lighting dappling rising clouds of fog, the metaphor exists in a liminal space. It’s not detailed enough of a comparison to feel justified as the play’s driving force, but too detailed to feel as general as it does.

What is perfectly detailed is the powerful humanity of the characters, and the way Coulter breathes fierce, aching life into Maeve as she nears her final breath.

May she rise again.

Queen Maeve runs at Tarragon Theatre until March 29. More information is available here.

Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Ilana Lucas

Ilana Lucas is a professor of English in Centennial College’s School of Advancement. She is the President of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. She holds a BA in English and Theatre from Princeton University, an MFA in Dramaturgy and Script Development from Columbia University, and serves as Princeton’s Alumni Schools Committee Chair for Western Ontario. She has written for Brit+Co, Mooney on Theatre, and BroadwayWorld Toronto. Her most recent play, Let’s Talk, won the 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival’s 24-Hour Playwriting Contest. She has a deep and abiding love of musical theatre, and considers her year working for the estate of Tony winners Phyllis Newman and Adolph Green one of her most treasured memories.

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