Classical victory

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This article was published 21/03/2025 (253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Whether in Winnipeg, in Sparta, or in Troy, a well-set table is often a mask worn by a household to maintain a polished appearance of bliss.

In Prophecy, Jessy Ardern’s brilliant retelling of Homeric mythology brought to light by a quartet of long-suffering women, the dining room table is the literal homefront of the Trojan War, a domestic theatre where biscuits and reason are proffered while war is mongered elsewhere by men who never listen and rarely apologize.

Despite repeated warnings, those behavioural patterns send society spiralling downward and into bloody conflicts that could have been avoided were it not for brutish, masculine hubris.

It’s not a new story, of course, but by reframing the ancient narrative in contemporary voicings, the playwright-performer injects The Iliad with a potent electricity, a current that provokes no shortage of shock and plenty of deserved awe.

Produced by Theatre Projects Manitoba and directed with a flawless sense of gravity by Suzie Martin, Prophecy begins before it starts with the haunting pluck of sound designer Natanielle Felicitas’s cello, an instrument whose silhouette mirrors the three headless, armless, faceless mannequins pinned behind set designer Kate George’s table spread.

With five ionic columns made of linen, and two swooshing canopies draped over the three-seated table, George’s set is well-composed and calculated — a promise, in the context of tragedy, for collapse and reconfiguration.

When Ardern, who wrote and performs each role, enters the fray, she is barefoot. And before grabbing the microphone as the seer Cassandra, the actor wraps one of the dress forms in a teal shroud. From this moment onward, each perceived “object” on stage is cast as a potential stand-in for humankind — a jug becomes the body and the wine inside the soul.

As a performer, Ardern infuses each of her characters with magnetic idiosyncrasies, shifting with the score and Annika Binding’s lighting to showcase every mechanism — laughing, denying, disappearing, gossiping, shrinking, shouting and repeating — that these women have in their arsenal of coping with the vanity of war.

Cassandra saw it all coming. In a deal that she’d prefer to take back, she was convinced as a young woman by Apollo to trade her virginity for the ability to foretell. But later, rather than rescind the gift, the vindictive god turned it into a curse: no matter whom she told, no one would believe her.

“Ignorance can be blissful, but knowledge is not power,” says Cassandra.

The script, which Ardern began working on in 2016, is masterfully layered and textured, flecked with as much sorrow as it is wisdom, humour and wit.

While each character is worth a book of her own, Ardern drew repeated bravos for her fierce, acidic mother-in-law Hecuba, a cross between a real housewife and the fictional Lucille Bluth, played on Arrested Development by Jessica Walter.

“Darling, what you’re doing is called warmongering — and it makes people nervous,” she warns, delivering harsh but necessary critiques of each of the men in her orbit.

In focusing on Cassandra, the teen war bride Briseis, Hecuba and the solo-parenting Andromache, Ardern manages to portray a vast array of female roles with startling sensitivity, using a dazzling variety of theatrical techniques to engage with the world around her.

The most gorgeously rendered bit of object theatre in a production teeming with invention lies with Andromache, who treats a ripened pear with the preciousness of a newborn child. The contents of every jar and bottle on set are shrouded in unknowability until they’re turned upside down.

One of the most astute, dynamic and affecting productions on a Winnipeg stage in recent memory, Prophecy is, for the locally raised Ardern, a remarkable accomplishment in classical and political communication that can be heard loud and clear in the Rachel Browne Theatre.

You have to see it and believe it.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com