The Hanging of Francoise Laurent
Directed by Kate Cayley
Presented by Stranger Theatre
All design & musical arrangements created by the company
Featuring Sarah Cormier, Zach Fraser, Kiersten Tough
Runs until August 15 @ Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace
By Jen Handley
The Hanging of Francoise Laurent tells the story of a seventeenth-century maid’s struggle to elude death after she steals a pair of her mistress’s gloves and is sentenced to hang for the crime. It begins with a woman holding a flashlight under her face, reciting a ghost story. It’s no surprise that the play explores the function of storytelling, and perhaps to drive this home it follows the first speech with a prologue that cast the show’s three performers, each of whom play multiple characters, as travelling players of yore. The prologue is full of phrases like “welcome ladies and gentleman” and “one night only” shouted over accordion music, and is much less interesting than the rest of the show.
Using just a couple of set pieces, the cast members create new settings for each link in the chain of events that leads to Francoise’s fate. Francoise herself, played with exuberance by Kiersten Tough, darts in and out of the scenes, pausing to address the audience once in a while. Director Kate Cayley finds ingenious ways to create surprises with the limited set, including Francoise jauntily reassuring the audience from the inside of a coffin, and later, holding a conversation with someone in the next cell, invisible to both us and her.
The play also makes good use of music to maintain a brisk pace and smooth over its abrupt emotional shifts. The blaring accordion, jarring in the prologue, provides a welcome relief from the solemnity of the play’s last section during a reenactment of a comically harmless duel. A mournful a-cappella piece ushers in the downfall of Francoise’s fortunes. A husband’s insistent knocking becomes background music during a tense scene between Francoise and her mistress.
The first half of the play is essentially a build-up to the stealing and discovery of the afore-mentioned gloves, and, despite the actresses’ best efforts and some interesting lines, it’s hard to keep the suspense going, because we already know what’s in the cards for Francoise.
However in the second half, Francoise finds herself in an interesting situation. If she can persuade Jean, the man in the next cell, who can’s see her and whom she can’t see, to a) become a hangman, and b) marry her, she will live. She has to create stories persuasive enough to win Jean over, or die. Although the play’s creators make plenty of feminist hay from Francoise and her mistress’s discussions of what a woman’s role is, Francoise’s later predicament, literally marry-or-die, is an inventive metaphor for the subject.
The best scene is one in which Francoise and Jean lie on either side of a cell wall in a posture that almost looks post-coital. Then Jean works up the courage to ask, “what do you look like?” and Francoise, with Scheherazadian poise, gives him three small details, and then tells him, “that’s all for now.” She makes her own identity, not just the stories she tells, the subject of curiosity and interpretation, for both Jean, and the audience watching the play named after her.
