Fringe Show Reviews

Winnipeg Free Press - ONLINE EDITION

Under the Glacier

Written by: Adapted by George Toles, from a novel by Halldor Laxness

Presented by: Snakeskin Jacket Productions / Winnipeg, MB

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07/16/2009 1:01 PM | Comments: 0

Iceland’s Nobel literary laureate Halldor Laxness provides the source material for this comically surreal drama about God, women and fish.

His 1968 novel has been adapted by Winnipeg film and theatre guru George Toles, best known as Guy Maddin’s script writer. So it’s not surprising that the 75-minute piece has a dark and mockingly sombre tone, like Ingmar Bergman crossed with Saturday Night Live.

Local pro Darcy Fehr leads the seven-member cast as a bishop’s emissary sent to investigate the strange goings-on in a remote village. Another local veteran, Ross McMillan, plays a bizarre stranger who has stolen the pastor’s wife and possibly turned her into a salmon.

After 35 years, she reappears and is played by three actresses. Exactly why is hard to follow, and the confusion isn’t helped by the production looking a tad under-rehearsed.

The highlight is McMillan literally laid bare as a corpse and sponged down by the three blond lovelies. Talk about mind over matter.

— Morley Walker

From the official Fringe program:

George Toles (What Happened Was…, Shock Corridor, Notes from Underground, Shack Out on 101) adapts Nobel Prize-winning Halldor Laxness’s delightfully comic novel Under the Glacier for the stage.

Learn why the dead at Snaefells Glacier remain unburied, join the banquet of undried halibut, meet Ua, the Pastor’s irresistible dead wife, who runs a brothel and is resurrected as a fish.

Warnings: Subject Matter, Language,
RECOMMENDED: Mature Audience

75 min.

Venue#1 MTC Backstage at the Mainstage 174 Market Ave (Entrance on John Hirsch Pl)

Tickets: $9
Discount Tickets: $8 for Matinees, Students
Under 12 not admitted.

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