Stone and Ashes

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan, and président de la Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

This remarkable play recalls the classic Japanese story and play
Rashomon, in which a violent encounter is recounted from three different
perspectives. In Stone and Ashes, however, mere fragments of the story
are unveiled bit by bit through a kind of character confessional, with
the viewpoints alternating almost as a dialogue. Danis’s cinematic
play on perspectives is reminiscent of the technique on display in Brad
Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. With
no scenic direction and ambiguous, poetic punctuation, Stone and Ashes
belongs to a group of recent Québécois plays that Jane Moss has
characterized as “self-consciously literary in their hallucinatory
exploration of tragic consequences” and in which “dialogue and
action are replaced by monologue and narration.” Daniel Danis won the
1993 Governor General’s Award for French-language Drama with his first
play, Celle–1.