Hannah Boutillier and Clayton Jevne in A Short History of Night

Credit: Thiago Silva

Wicked and Weird

Theatre Inconnu’s A Short History of Night is an engaging puzzler

Acclaimed playwright John Mighton’s works are never exactly straightforward. Consider last season’s production of Half Life at the Belfry, where what you saw wasn’t what you got, and Theatre Inconnu’s current production of A Short History of Night, where scenes and speeches seem dappled with riddles and clues that hint at a greater meaning below the script’s surface. But despite an opening-night heatwave that added a vivid sense of realism to the show’s subtext of witch burnings, Night remains an engaging, if rather unusual, show examining the shifting relationship between science and society, as seen through a 16th century lens of superstition and surrealism.

As religious wars and witch hunts tear Renaissance Europe apart, astrologer and astronomer Johannes Kepler (Clayton Jevne) and his wife Barbara (Hannah Boutilier) take refuge in the castle of famed, but highly eccentric (and nose-less), Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (Tim Gosley). Brahe has gathered an eclectic collection of scientists together to try and fathom the mysteries of life, the universe and everything. Despite his reluctance to become yet another in Brahe’s court of sycophants, Kepler manages to carve out a place for himself as he attempts to puzzle out the orbit of Mars, while exploring his own theories mixing geometry and astronomy with the nature of God—an ideal character for Mighton, given his own background as a mathematician-cum-playwright. Meanwhile, Kepler’s wife searches for her own answers to more natural concerns, including multiple miscarriages, which bring her dangerously near to the realm of the witches, be they real or imagined.

Despite some good performances—notably the always-reliable Jevne as the starry-eyed Kepler, Boutilier’s subtly seductive turn as his wife and Gosley’s charming lunatic aristocrat—and some highly stylistic flourishes (expressionist makeup, imaginative astral projections, a spooky soundscape), opening night had a few clunky spots, not all of which were due to Little Fernwood’s tight space. The episodic nature of the script makes it difficult to keep up on the temporal jumps, the occasional use of shadow puppets is at times more distracting than successful and some of the entrances seemed to be hampered by too little light.

Still, director Graham McDonald has taken a difficult script and crafted a compelling and highly theatrical production—albeit one that echoes the Hammer Horror era of the ’60s as much as it does a court of the 1500s. Jevne’s “Castle Greyskull” set and the stylized makeup, as well as Susan Ferguson’s effective costume design, gives the whole production a look reminiscent of a Dutch masterwork. Better still, the show runs only 90 minutes, which means if it’s a hot evening outside (which translates to sweltering inside), you won’t be there all night.

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A Short History of Night
8pm Wed.-Sat. to June 20
2pm Saturday, June 13
Little Fernwood, 1923 Fernwood
Tickets $10-$12 • 250-360-0234
theatreinconnu.com