The Diviners: soaring ahead into the past and back to the future
15 Aug 2024 - Photos by David Hou

The Diviners turns Margaret Laurence's classic novel into a spectacularly explosive production without losing the nuances of the character studies and political ramifications. Morag Gunn is holed up in a cabin trying to write a novel that was due at the publisher yesterday. Inspiration is in short supply, further complicated by too much alcohol, visits by the water diviner Royland (Anthony Santiago) delivering fresh caught fish, and a battle with her daughter Pique who has stormed out to hitchhike "west." In a classic procrastination technique, she retreats into drink and memories. The memories come to life with a huge cast flooding the stage to recreate memorable moments from Morag's life as well of the stories she has been told about her heritage. Initially The Diviners feels like a series of Heritage Minutes strung together, but the exuberance with which they are presented carry the audience through to the first act finale which is stunning, shattering, and slams the characters into our broken hearts. A brilliant and simple theatrical device, linking the rhythm of dance, of feet pounding the boards, to the clacking of a typewriter creates a driving momentum that papers over any resistance.

Irene Poole (Cymbeline, Manon, Sandra and the Virgin Mary) is the epi-center of the maelstrom of memory and eventually feverish typing as she realizes that "all you can do is look ahead into the past and back into the future." Inspiration comes from her history. And by extension, the history of Canada, the Metis and feminism. It's a lot of weight on her shoulders, but directors Krista Jackson and Genevieve Pelletier with the assistance of choreographer Cameron Carver, keep the action speeding along and somehow make each individual in a cast of thousands distinct and complete. As The Diviners progresses, there is scene after scene where the ensemble flows onto the stage, still clad in individual costumes, while becoming a new whole. The thematic thrust of we are all in this together and individually, in spite of or because of our differences, could not be clearer without having to be stated. The various time periods, the line between memory and immediacy, are also clearly drawn with ghosts mingling with the living with no confusion. Morag even acknowledges this in a running gag where she insists on staying in an amorous clinch in memory despite pressure from the present.

The one confusion present is that it takes a bit of time for us to realize that the memories are being filtered through Morag. Only when she retells a story she has been told, do we realize that the awkwardness of the schoolyard scenes—adult actors playing children and teens is always iffy—is because that is how Morag remembers it. The same for the puppy dog quality of her long lost love Jules played by Jesse Gervais. Jules is that lovable lug who has your back but whose back is camped on your couch and who you can't quite bring yourself to quit him. I first read the novel The Diviners in grade school in a part of Ontario where it was banned. Part of my motivation was prurient (that is what happens when books are banned) and in that regard it was a letdown. It seemed to me, even in pre-pubescence, that three pages, I counted, of romantically explicit sex out of 560 pages depicting a lifetime, were not excessive. The stage Morag is much more proactive though most of the sexual activity is demure, and when Jules joins Morag in a lustful romp, it feels out of character: the puppy dog suddenly a wolf.

Jules also illuminates a crucial thread in The Diviners. He is Metis so is an outcast, as is Morag because she has been adopted by Christie (a gruff with a heart of gold and a gift for spinning yarns Jonathan Goad [Cymbeline]) who runs the town dump. That status brings them together and results in Pique (Julie Lumsden [Rockabye]) who Morag raises but whose heart belongs to daddy. Christie has told Morag mythical tales of her Scottish heritage (unleashing some Highland flings from the ensemble) and Lazarus (Josue Laboucane) Jule's uncle the town bootlegger, has traced his heritage back to Louis Riel. Two parallel sets of folklore. The Diviners weaves biological family into chosen family into that unique heritage that is Canadian. Morag, before the fateful tryst with Jules, had been married to Brooke, a very subtly subdued (to turn a villain into an empathetic misogynist classist monster) Dan Chameroy (Something Rotten!, multiple pantomimes) with whom she desperately wanted a child. And to write. He forbade the former and mocked the latter. So she took matters into her own hands, wrote a successful novel and fucked Jules. 

All this time travelling cures Morag's writer's block and she begins to frenziedly channel her collection of memories and myths, creative non-fiction, into her typewriter. Thus begins the most spectacular portion of The Diviners, as the typewriter pounds out a frantic beat and the ensemble swirl around clutching pages of copy. All of the little details—divining water as a metaphor for creative inspiration, the dwindling size of the successive fish, moonshine as currency and as downfall—swirl into a glorious celebration of the act, the art, of writing. A physical manifestation of Morag's ecstasy as the words start to flow. And a magnificent representation of just how euphoric that feeling is when the brain connects ideas to words to fingers to page. Of course typewriters have long been replaced by keyboards, and a teenage Indigenous woman hitchhiking has terrifying implications today, but if we can travel back into memory time with Morag—"look ahead into the past and back to the future"—we get to feel the soul, the spirit of Laurence's prose. And it is exhilarating.