After more than a year of cancelled live performances, Victoria’s theatre scene is coming back to the stage, at least in part. This year’s Fringe Festival features a mix of live and virtual performances that include political deportation, sharks, rockstars, lawyers, and more; this year’s Fringe has it all.
Bema Productions founder Zelda Dean is directing and producing a play called Mazel Tov, John Lennon, written by David Wells, that will be shown online as part of Fringe. Dean had hoped to do the production live, but COVID interfered with that. The play is based on real events that took place in the United States during the 1970s.
“The play is actually about the misuse of the law for political purposes. And [John] Lennon and Yoko Ono became targets of Nixon and his dishonest group of… whatevers. Nixon saw Lennon and his activism as a threat to his re-election because Lennon appealed to the young voters. And remember that the election coming up, then, was the first time that 18-year-olds got to vote in the States,” says Dean. “We see all the stages that Lennon went through, which were really, really awful. It was a time of his life when The Beatles were not together, so he had outgrown his superstardom and he was really anxious to promote his high ideals. So, the playwright caught all these moods as they changed and in some scenes it’s really clear that probably Lennon was on cocaine at that time, and in another scene he’s drowning his sorrows in rum.”
Actor Nicholas Guerreiro strikes a remarkable resemblance to Lennon, but you might not have been able to tell at their rehearsals—Dean says that masks made it difficult to judge the actors’ expressions during rehearsal. They endured despite the challenges, however, and after two months of rehearsing on nights and weekends they did one performance, which went perfectly.
“I didn’t let them take their masks off until they had all had their second vaccinations,” says Dean. “And then we filmed the show, we videotaped it at Langham Court, who very kindly let us go on their stage. And Jason King [who also works in Camosun’s audio/visual department] did the video. We only did a one-camera shoot because on Fringe you don’t really make a lot of money and a three-camera shoot is like $2,500. So, he did a one-camera shoot, and I was so thrilled at how it came out. One take.”
Like Dean, David Elendune also had to adapt his play for the pandemic. Elendune said that The Shadow in the Water has been the most feedback-intensive piece he has ever written, first going to Langham Court, then The Belfry, and then through multiple workshops. And almost all of this was done over Zoom during the pandemic. The play also had to be shortened to comply with a 60-minute maximum length. And while The Shadow in the Water is technically being performed live, it won’t be the usual theatre-going experience.
“The play is designed to be done with a minimum of five actors if it was done as a normal play—two people in the middle and then three people playing multiple roles,” says Elendune. “But because of COVID we were like, okay, how many actors can we have? We don’t know what it’s going to be six months down the line, so the decision was made to basically have the two people in ‘the now,’ which is 1969. The old lady, the person who’s come to pick her up, and any of the flashbacks were filmed by Mike Byrne of Clock Tower Images. So that’s all being edited as we speak. So, there’ll be some scenes where it’ll just be purely film, and there are some scenes where the live actors interact with pre-filmed stuff, flipping words back and forth.”
Elendune has been working on this play for close to 18 months. And not long into the writing process his wife, Jane, got sick. She was eventually diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. From that point on, the play started in a new direction. He called it a “memory play” similar in structure to the movie Titanic. In the play, an elderly woman, who is being interviewed, looks back at her life and recalls her loss.
“So, obviously that’s Jane in all but name. And this person throughout her life has lost three loves, so then you’ve got this… How do you deal with grief? How do you deal with the loss of somebody? And in that way, I was writing about myself. Almost pre-grief, if you know what I mean, because I knew she was dying. So, I was writing about me at that time through this character but also me in the future. After somebody is gone, how do you rebuild but also honour their life?”
Elendune says that writing this play helped him to escape. It gave him somewhere to channel his emotions. He says that until now he has written mostly with his head, but this one came from his heart.
“You’re gonna get what you think you’ve come in for, but not in the way you think you were gonna get it,” says Elendune. “There’s always a twist in the tale with me. This is a play that’s been sold on sharks. And there’s sharks in it but, actually, to be honest, it’s a play about grief.”
Victoria Fringe Festival
Various times, Until Friday, September 24
Various prices and venues
intrepidtheatre.com/festivals/fringe-festival/