To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
racy as means with the abstract goals that
the postmodernists vainly pursue:
[BIy holding society accountable to
abstract, disembodied norms (which they
despair of ever seeing embodied), the
postmodern theorists both misunderstand
the nature of legitimacy and
discount the accrued legitimacy of contemporary
Western society. Paradoxically,
this attitude leads them to both underestimate
and overestimate the possibility of
change. In their manic, euphoric
moments, they believe in absolute revolutionary
transformation, writing as if
pure thought can foster such change and
its historical moment is upon us.
That criticism applies directly to
Pedagogy Is Politics, and I highly recommend
McGowan's book as an antidote to
the wild and sometimes dangerous fantasies
that postmodern radicals entertain
and promulgate.
Three Keepers
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).
Coach House n.p.
Morris Panych
7 Stories. Talonboks n.p.
Maryse Pelletier
Duo for Obstinate Voices Guernica n.p.
Reviewed by Barbara Kerslake
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a graduate of the
National Theatre School, an actor and
clearly an alchemist. This is her first solo
play, for which she won a Chalmers
Canadian Play Award. Recycling literature,
a tradition that goes back beyond
Shakespeare, is once again acceptable. Tom
Stoppard, Pavel Kohout and many others
have achieved success with this method,
which frees the author from the tyranny of
the blank page and thus allows her imagination
greater leeway.
Playing with two plays, MacDonald produces
a third. She has chosen to work with
the heroines, and this is a feminist look at
comedy, but ten of the sixteen characters
are male, and there is plenty of room for
cross-casting. In the 1990 Toronto production,
Juliet's nurse was played by a man and
Mercutio by a woman. In keeping with the
need to minimize costs, all these parts can
be played by 5 actors.
Act One begins in the present, with
Constance Ledbelly, a repressed and
oppressed academic at Queen's University.
She is enthralled by and in thrall to a devious
professor named Claude Night. Her
other obsession is her thesis, positing a lost
source for Shakespeare's Othello and Romeo
and Juliet. She believes the key to this
source lies in an ancient alchemical manuscript,
which she hopes to decipher, in
order to prove that these two tragedies were
originally comedies. When her life is at its
lowest point, the alchemy begins to work,
and she is abruptly catapulted into the crucial
scenes of the two plays.
Actual scenes from Shakespeare are used,
first in their original form and then subverted,
so that they are spoken by different
characters in reverse situations. My one
reservation was the excessive repetition of
the handkerchief scene from Othello.
The result of all this genre-bending is neither
tragedy nor comedy, neither death nor
marriage, but an ending that opens up to
countless questions and limitless possibilities.
The characters are flawed with a
vengeance—Desdemona is addicted to violence
and Romeo and Juliet are spoiled,
petulant teenagers, but a genuine comic
heroine is created in the person of
Constance Ledbelly. Once she enters the
world of Desdemona and Juliet, she begins
to speak in iambic pentameter, adding to
the hilarity of communication at cross-purposes
across the centuries.
This play provides great scope for actors,
directors and designers. It is wonderfully
witty, full of action, suspense and con-
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