THEATRE
The Nightingale and the Rose, After Oscar Wilde ★★★½
Little Ones Theatre, Theatre Works
Until June 10
Little Ones Theatre won a Green Room Award for its adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince at La Mama last year. That was a wonderfully poised production suffused with melancholy, and The Nightingale and the Rose stands as a worthy companion piece.
Yuchen Wang in Little Ones Theatre's The Nightingale and the Rose.
Photo: Sarah Walker
It's the bleakest of Wilde's fairy tales, The Nightingale and the Rose, because it takes the kind of mortal sacrifice transfigured (in the face of whatever desolation) in The Happy Prince and makes it meaningless, futile. This time, a bird dies in vain; the love just doesn't show.
The story can be shortly stated. A nightingale (Jennifer Vuletic) overhears a lovesick university student (Brigid Gallacher) pining over a professor's daughter: she has promised to dance with him if he brings her a red rose but there are none to be found.
Moved by the student's passion, the nightingale quests to find a red rose, each rose bush (Yuchen Wang) she encounters leading deeper into a garden where a fatal price must be paid. Then, Wilde brusquely subverts the expected happily ever after: the student is rejected by her beloved, despite the rose, and stops believing in true love.
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Director Stephen Nicolazzo hits upon a performance style that combines narration, heightened physical theatre and opera to deliver storytelling with no fat on it at all.
Vuletic brings a surreal and statuesque quality to the nightingale, and the fact she's a trained opera singer allows her to burst forth into famous arias.
As the student, Gallacher's physical theatre isn't as sharp or disciplined, but she does embrace the queer lens through which the romance has been filtered.
And Yuchen Wang complements them nicely. He has the physicality of a trained dancer, an unearthly presence as the rose bushes, a chiselled cruelty as the unattainable object of desire.
Distilling Wilde's dark parable into a seamless 45 minutes, The Nightingale and The Rose rides high on Eugyeene Teh's stylish design, and on magnetic, savagely beautiful performance that flows into moments of amusing camp. No doubt Oscar would have approved.
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