The Queens

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

Normand Chaurette is the author of the infamous and horrifically
fascinating Provincetown Playhouse, July 1919. He deals with truth and
illusion, power and relationship. In Provincetown Playhouse he held the
theatre captive with the trial of three youthful actors accused of
murdering a child in a sack on stage. The primordial question was one of
motivation and whether any of the three knew that a living child was in
the sack prior to the stage action. It would seem that Chaurette is
sticking close to a familiar theme in his new play (in which a
constellation of queens surrounds the infamous Richard III, alleged
murderer of the two princes in the tower). Again, he presents a mystery.

If the theme of these two works seems natural to this author, one must
nevertheless contemplate in wonder the Québécois playwright’s choice
of historical location and dynasty: London, 1493. But, as in his earlier
work, he transfuses his new play with the amplified voice of myth. In
the first play, the characters spoke in the long, convoluted phrases of
a sentencing judge or an examining psychiatrist. In The Queens Chaurette
uses short lines, descending in poetic profusion down the page, to form
speeches of Shakespearean amplitude and breath. Robert Hinton, director
of the first English-language production by the Canadian Stage Company
in 1992 (following the 1991 Banff Playwrights’ Colony workshop under
the direction of Kim McCaw), cannot restrain himself in his introduction
from repeating, “I love this play.” Doubtless others will too; it
certainly is a gift for actresses. The plot is as timeless as the
Shakespearean Richard’s, and much more intriguing than those tired
wives of Henry VIII so frequently trotted out on the boards. Perhaps the
secret is that the very essence of the plot, with Richard III at its
centre, remain a mystery.