Maud Allan as Salomé, The Cult of the Clitoris, Empress of Blandings Productions. Poster art by Laurel Dundee.
Cadaver Synod by Sebastian Ley, Vault Theatre. Poster image by Sebastian Ley and Sarah Fett.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Both, in their way, were celebrity trials. And both trials, in separately sensational ways, 1,128 years apart, have inspired two new plays premiering at the Fringe. Like theatre, history can be weirdly generous that way. Witness The Cult of the Clitoris and Cadaver Synod, both premiering at the Fringe this week.
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The Cult of the Clitoris, the latest from Empress of Blandings Productions, sent playwright Celia Taylor into the fascinating transcripts of Rex v Pemberton Billing, the trial that, as she says, “captivated the British public in 1918.” The legal proceedings that created a frenzy of publicity involved Canadian actor/dancer Maud Allan, whose hit showbiz specialty in the West End was Dance of the Seven Veils. When British MP Noel Pemberton-Billing accused Allan of “treason, lesbianism, and treasonous lesbianism,” topped up with a strong implication of espionage, she took him to court.
Rochelle Laplante as Maud Allan in The Cult of the Clitoris, Empress of Blandings Productions. Tech rehearsal photo supplied.
The scene was wild, describes Taylor, a theatre artist for whom legal research in law school archives is meat and drink since she’s also a practising lawyer (in a busy Vancouver family law firm). “Members of the gallery leapt out of their seats to shout insults at the judge. Personal enmities bubbled up during cross-examination. And, of course, everyone had to discuss — while clinging to their Edwardian dignity with varying levels of success — just exactly what lesbians do, what exactly a clitoris is, and how exactly it can work.”
“I think law and theatre are natural friends,” says Taylor, who originally wrote The Cult of the Clitoris during law school (“as a final project for a class called Queering the Law”). “I wasn’t the only person in my law school who came from a theatre background, and I wasn’t the only person in my theatre program who went on to law school.”
“Adapting transcripts into a play also feels natural. They’re already written as a script, after all.” And “verbatim theatre,” culled from documentary sources, is one of Taylor’s special interests. In this she was particularly inspired by Darrin Hagen’s play Witch Hunt At The Strand, drawn as it is from a sorry chapter in our civic history. And she’s appreciated Hagen’s help in workshopping her script.
Still, courts do tend to “the dry, quiet, meandering, and dull,” as Taylor puts it, in defiance of their livelier, more lurid depictions on American TV. And she admits to “worrying that even transcripts of a trial about a celebrity accused of lesbianism and treason, featuring witnesses who included a known spy and seductress, a mad conspiracy theorist, and Oscar Wilde’s most notorious ex-lover, might not end up lending themselves as well to the stage as I hoped.”
But the transcripts do “crackle with outrageous, absurd energy” — a rich vein of comedic possibility for Empress of Bandings Productions. And comedy classics, adapted for contemporary audiences, have been something of a specialty of the company started by Taylor, and named for a rotund pig in P.G. Wodehouse stories. They celebrated their 10th anniversary at last year’s Fringe with a return to Taylor’s original translation of the Molière comedy The Flying Doctor.
Maud Allan as Salomé in the Edwardian era. The Cult of the Clitoris. Photo supplied by Empress of Blandings Productions.
This new play, says Taylor, is “more serious than the usual Empress fare, because I think the story is grimly relevant to today’s political climate…. Politicians who seize on a marginalized or misunderstood community as a scapegoat for the anxieties of a society in turmoil feel all too contemporary. An awful lot of things threaten the livelihood and well-being of the working classes in 1918 — but gay sex really wasn’t one of them. In 2025, politicians, pundits, podcaster, and formerly beloved children’s authors are similarly putting energy that could be better spent, well, literally anywhere else, into the persecution of trans people. …”
”It’s hard not to hear the ghost of Noel Pemberton-Billing echoing in the voices of government and public opinion right here in Alberta, a hundred years later.”
The Cult of the Clitoris runs Friday through Aug. 24 at Fringe Stage 21, The Sanctuary Stage at Holy Trinity Anglican Church. Tickets and full schedule: fringetheatre.ca.
Cadaver Synod, Vault Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Poster by Sebastian Ley and Sarah Fett.
What captivated actor/playwright Sebastian Ley about the real-life trial that ignited controversy and mob violence in 897 CE was the bizarre extremes of obsession in the participants. Obsession, says the Edmonton-based author of Cadaver Synod (opening Friday at the Fringe) “is a common thread in the stuff I write.” In 638 Ways To Kill Castro, Ley’s first full-length fully produced play, a hit at last summer’s Fringe, obsession was a rich vein of dark satirical comedy. As history verifies, try as they might (hilariously, the title wasn’t even a joke by the 1970s), the CIA backed by the mighty American military-industrial complex, couldn’t manage to assassinate Castro. “Ohmygod,” thought Ley, “what kind of people rise to that level of tenacity but also that level of incompetence?”
He had a similar experience with the “historical tidbit” about the so-called Cadaver Synod that popped into his view. “Who are these people? What kind of person does it take to hold a grudge against someone so single-mindedly they insist on digging up their corpse seven months after they’ve died, and putting them on trial?” No matter how fierce the thirst for vengeance, death, as he points out, usually means “the end of that relationship, and you move on.”
Not the obsessive Pope Stephen VI, apparently. The three-week trial of the decomposing Pope Formosus (a deacon pretended to speak for the body) conducted by his successor, and backed by the Holy Roman Emperor, actually ended with conviction. Formosus’s three benediction fingers were cut off, and the corpse was tossed into the Tiber. No shortage of Roman drama, to put it mildly, as Ley, bemused and awestruck in equal measure, describes the conspiracies, the power struggles, the trial, the aftermath. “It was so controversial that the pope who was running it ended up being killed. And violent mobs then burned down the cathedral where the trial was being held.” Then the sightings of the corpse, walking around performing miracles, started.
As in the case of his Castro play, underpinned by a father-son story, Ley’s new play uses a “deeply bizarre story from the real world as a framework for telling a more personal story about real people and real feelings,” as the playwright explains. “I love that dichotomy.”
It concerns the “awkward relationship of two young men in Catholic school together….” The one (Michael Watt) left to go become a bishop, and then the obsessive pope. The other (Samuel Bronson) was sent away, and returns. And there’s unfinished business between them.
Ley describes creative inspirations like the darkly comic film Death of Stalin. Or the TV series Succession, “characters who think that everything they’re doing is the most important thing in the world.” He points to the plays of Pinter, like The Birthday Party, as an influence, too, “witty and very serious and entertaining at the same time.”
Kathleen Weiss’s Vault Theatre cast also includes Ley’s father David Ley, a U of A drama prof who’s also appearing in a solo Samuel Beckett play, First Love, at the Fringe. “I’ve grown up watching him do theatre,” says the younger Ley. “So this is very special.”
Cadaver Synod runs Friday through Aug. 23 at Fringe Stage 31, Nancy Power mainstage at Theatre Network’s Roxy. Tickets and full schedule: fringtheatre.ca.
