Judith Thompson’s latest play Queen Maeve follows Mrs. Nurmi, an elderly grandmother living out her days in a decrepit nursing home.Supplied
- Title: Queen Maeve
- Written by: Judith Thompson
- Director: Mike Payette
- Actors: Clare Coulter, Caroline Gillis, Ryan Bommarito, Sarah Orenstein
- Company: Tarragon Theatre
- Venue: Tarragon Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to March 29
Queen Maeve is a homecoming about a homecoming.
Plot-wise, Judith Thompson’s latest play follows Mrs. Nurmi, an elderly grandmother living out her days in a decrepit nursing home. Her tan hospital bed evokes a bygone, more analogue era; her paintings, cheerful and vivid, suggest a mind spinning its wheels out of boredom. In its earliest beats, we get the sense Queen Maeve might not be about royalty at all, and instead about the fate that comes for us all, regal or not. Mrs. Nurmi will die in this room, we come to understand – she’ll soon go home to the people she lost along the way.
But outside the walls of Queen Maeve’s fictional old-folks home, the play itself marks a return for Thompson, who spent many of her formative years as a writer within the walls of Tarragon Theatre. It’s at Tarragon where such hits as Lion in the Streets, White Biting Dog and Perfect Pie were born, and where Thompson, now 71, became one of Canadian playwriting’s most enduring monarchs.
Queen Maeve traces familiar themes for Thompson – the death, drugs and abuse that feature so prominently in her early work are here, too, and no easier to digest now than they were in those older, seminal plays.
But this time, motifs of substance dependency and familial betrayal are filtered through the unforgiving sieve of time. They’re curdled by Mrs. Nurmi’s memory, which isn’t what it used to be, and by the inevitability of her imminent freedom from the smells and screams of her assisted living facility.
The resulting play is inconsistent – but, despite itself, irresistible. Some of Thompson’s scenes snarl with the same relentless bite that first made her stand out as a playwright in the 1980s and ‘90s; others are droopy, indulgent and overlong.
Clare Coulter as Mrs. Nurmi and Caroline Gillis as Siobhan in Queen Maeve.Supplied
It’s Clare Coulter as Mrs. Nurmi who elevates the work to a more uniform level, and whose absence from the play’s more rickety sequences occasionally makes Mike Payette’s production sag. While Thompson has written an engaging parable of old age – which, on its own, might feel more cohesive and tidy – the playwright punctuates Queen Maeve with sequences that see the titular matriarch reconnect with her ancient Irish heritage in the form of a ruthless warrior. Sometimes, she even wields a sword, ready to battle any who might dare challenge her.
Nothing and no one is safe from her Celtic fury: not her grandson, who’s addicted to intravenous drugs, and certainly not her daughter.
The only mortal who might survive Mrs. Nurmi’s unwavering reign is Siobhan (a formidable Caroline Gillis), the PSW whose Irish name and kind hands endear her to the nursing home’s most stubborn resident. She moisturizes Mrs. Nurmi’s feet with citrus-scented cream, and reminds her to drink water at regular intervals, tending to our heroine with empathy and love.
Queen Maeve falters when we get to know the old woman’s family: First, Jake, the prodigal grandson (Ryan Bommarito), then Georgia, Mrs. Nurmi’s daughter (Sarah Orenstein), who carries huge swathes of her own baggage alongside her son’s. Bommarito and Orenstein do what they can with their material, but it’s in these scenes where Queen Maeve veers off its rails with vaguely impressionistic ghost sequences and flashbacks. It’s no help, either, that Jake and Georgia are most often vessels for the play’s exposition – much of their dialogue sees them spoon-feed the audience with context, leaving little by way of objectives for the actors to accomplish.
Payette’s production goes heavy on the fake smoke in these moments – if you plan to sit in the front row, you’ve been warned – making the play feel at times overwrought and dreamy despite the very real human drama at Queen Maeve’s core.
Even so, Coulter is intoxicating onstage. She’s playful yet grounded as the hard-edged grandma who may or may not be experiencing signs of psychosis, supplying some of the play’s fleeting laughs in the form of disgruntled one-liners: “I might have been muttering in Gaelic, they thought it was dementia,” she quips, a whip-smart line that illustrates Thompson‘s premise at its most subtle.
Sometimes, Mrs. Nurmi even wields a sword.Supplied
Indeed, much of Queen Maeve is understated and cerebral, a bruising critique of how we as a society treat our most vulnerable elders. But when the play gets ham-fisted, it does so loudly and without mercy – after two or three of those ghost-sword-trauma interjections, it becomes harder to recalibrate to the play’s land of the living, where apple Danishes are a once-in-a-while treat and where a seniors’ art class is the highlight of any given week.
In plenty of ways, Queen Maeve is peak Thompson – thematically, stylistically, aesthetically. It’s hard not to hear echoes of White Biting Dog and The Crackwalker, to feel ghosts of Thompson’s other plays (many of which featured Coulter) in the air of the Tarragon Mainspace. As with most homecomings, this one straddles duelling feelings of joy and awkwardness; nostalgia and restlessness; triumph and defeat.
Then again, Thompson has never shied away from embodying the ugly, discordant contradictions of real life in her work – why start now?