I missed parts one and two of Peter Hinton's The Swanne and just now caught the finale of this ambitious new Canadian trilogy, The Swanne: Queen Victoria (The Seduction of Nemesis). The title may suggest some of its problems. The play is a too-elaborate historical fantasy in which the young Queen Victoria writes a work of fiction. Her story imagines more than one illegitimate heir to the throne and follows their adventures through prisons and madhouses and political riots, while her own mother and household and court are full of intrigue attempting to mold or control or eliminate her as future queen.
We get ham actresses, drunks and plenty of crooks and prostitutes, a black boy who may be an offspring of royalty and is the lover of a white boy who may even be an heir to the throne of England, or maybe a bastard son of a scoundrel, and singing and dancing and lightning-fast switches from ugly rabble in the streets to aristocratic drawing rooms. And when all this unravels, the ending is at least forty minutes of nothing but endings.
You'd think that a final dance would end it, but then we meet a whole new character who sits down and makes a ten-minute speech. Then we re-unite or kill off or explain a slew of characters. Then we get a romantic kiss when the black and white boys meet on a boat headed for the New World. And we hear a lot about what's going to be in Canada. That's what this Canadian play all aboat.
