This sonorous mouthful of a title serves warning that French-Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay has grave dramatic business to transact. So it proves, as Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer launches the Barbican's international drama season with this full-throated dirge. Tremblay's play, translated into Scottish dialects by Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay, luxuriates in grief, though there are recollected ecstasies too.
Eleven people devastated by love reveal their bleeding hearts in rhapsodic soliloquy. Almost all human life is here, from a desolate widow remembering her adored mate, to a gay couple, one of them dying from Aids. The play's 14 sections may be billed as if parts of a traditional mass, and there are occasional appeals for mercy and peace, but there's no guiding religious theme. Quite the reverse. An epigraph in the printed text (NHB, £7.99) hints that Tremblay's intention is to give the experience of love the mystic, life-transcending status of a religion.
Neil Warmington's moonlit set, three tiers of interconnecting balconies where people stand and sit, is realistic but the play's almost musical form, with short speeches spoken in choral unison, key sentences and phrases repeated by several voices, single words intoned or chanted in counterpoint to soliloquies, removes the play from real-ism's confines. Tremblay's attempt to write his soliloquies in poetic, heightened diction is spoiled by lurid, histrionic extremities and repetitive tendencies.
"I curse the words that don't do justice to the horror I feel. The nameless horror inside me that I can't stifle," says the fifty something lesbian Jeannine trying to explain that she and her lover are at odds, though for no clear reason. Perhaps it would have been better to translate the play for Irish speakers, who are more at home with high-flying lyricism.
Yet directors Philip Howard and Ros Steen and their talented cast work creative wonders in welding Tremblay's mosaic of murmuring and lamenting voices into a smoothly integrated whole. David Gallacher's Gaston, tending his Aids-ridden lover, transcends clich?s. Colette O'Neil's mother lamenting her son's life and marriage being ruined by his gayness strikes real anguish, before the dancing finale provides respite from despair.
Solemn Mass For A Full Moon In Summer
