Rochelle Laplante as Maud Allan in The Cult of the Clitoris, Empress of Blandings Productions. Photo supplied.
The Cult of the Clitoris (Stage 21, The Sanctuary Stage at Holy Trinity Anglican Church)
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
In The Cult of the Clitoris, from Empress of Blandings Productions, playwright Celia Taylor steps up to the drama, the absurdities, and the dark comedy, of a preposterous miscarriage of justice — by mining the actual transcripts from the head-line grabber celebrity trial that rocked London in 1918.
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History has provided a splashy story, and it makes for lively exchanges. The audience is asked to provide “hubbub” and “cheering” where required.
The Canadian actor/dancer Maud Allan (Rochelle Laplante), a star in the West End (her Dance of the Seven Veils from Oscar Wilde’s Salomé was a particular attraction), was publicly accused by the Conservative MP Noel Pemberton Billing (Ryan Williams) of treason, lesbianism, and, for good measure, “treasonous lesbianism.” Homosexuality, he declared with one eye on publicity, made its practitioners susceptible to blackmail by foreign powers, like Germany. He pulled the ‘espionage’ card. So Allan was forced to sue him for libel.
The play is bookended by the past and future. First, the characters of Taylor’s new play — the lawyers, the judge, the litigant and the defendant — remember the trial. And all get to air their views on Oscar Wilde, the “extraordinarily perverted genius” who’d spent two years in Reading jail in the 1890s for “public indecency.” And as a finale, they speak from the post-trial future. And then there’s the trial itself, which includes the truly bizarre collection of witnesses Mr. Pemberton Billing calls, including a crazy conspiracist drummed out of the army for “delusional insanity” (Émanuel Dubbeldam), a weirdly flirtatious bigamist (Maggie Salopek), and Wilde’s ex-lover, the self-promoting opportunist Lord Alfred Douglas, (played with compelling sleaze by Rory Turner). Lord Charles Darling (Timothy Anderson) is the presiding judge, with adamantine views on proper morality.
The hothouse accusatory phrases Taylor has found in the transcripts — “lesbian ecstasy,” “notorious pervert,” and “descent into degeneracy” among the milder — are fascinating in themselves, along with the title itself. And the cast assembled by co-directors Taylor and Tegan Siganski dig into them with gusto.
At the centre of these proceedings but not part of the arguments, Maud Allan herself, as played by Laplante, has a certain unsmiling reserve about her, as a character. She permits herself glances of exasperation from time to time as she watches her own lawyer (André Prevost) back away when he should be advancing, hampered by the fact that he clearly doesn’t have a clue what an orgasm is.
The play is fascinating. And it lands with particular meaning, times being what they are in our part of the world, drifting toward populist manipulation of information and the justice system, suspicion of artists, and the enforcement, under an assortment of guises, of orthodoxy under the banner of “normalcy.” The Cult of the Clitoris is part of the resistance.
