Archive » Arts and Entertainment

Review of Stage 3’s production of Disarming Venus at Theatre Orangeville

October 3, 2024   ·   2 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Warm and enthusiastic congratulations to Marni Walsh and the 25 women who were part of the stunning production of “Disarming Venus,” and the notion behind her concept of the Stage 3 Theatre – that the women involved are all over 55 years old.

This engaging and original two hours of theatre was performed as a once-only production on stage at the Opera House, last Saturday. (Sept. 28). Still worth reviewing for those of you who missed it, Disarming Venus revealed and reminded us all that aging is not the elimination of basic feelings and needs, nor the necessity for respect. 

An older woman is still a woman.

Founded by Ms. Walsh in 2020, for Act 3 Theatre, she invited a number of renowned professional theatre women, who had played a multitude of roles in theatre and television.

As an example of the who’s who of Canadian theatre and television, in part, “Rita Shelton Deverell has stood out for her innovation, creativity, and inclusion throughout her career in broadcasting, journalism and theatre. She co-founded VisionTV, where she produced “Skylight” and “It’s About Time” (Gemini, excellence in mainstream television reflecting Canada’s cultural diversity).”

In brief, the set was entirely simplistic, with a couple of benches and a kind of podium to one side for “Dr. Beryl Freud” and her hidden puppeteer Nina Keogh. “Dr. Freud” provided the commentary; she was the glue in the program and the cheek to keep us in our place.

Centre to the stage was the very famous Venus di Milo, a copy of the original statue and definitive vision of a woman carved by Alexandra of Antioch in about 130 BCE. It is one of the best preserved and certainly the most recognizable of Greek antiquity’s legacy.

Many of the twenty presentations addressed her with prayers and protests but others talked to the two other historical portraits of the goddess: Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1484) and a lesser-known Venus of Willendorf (Austria) – a 29,000-year-old goddess.

Disarming Venus stands alone in its particular passion and that was very endearing. The production consisted of 20 vignettes of varying lengths and number of actors involved. Everyone told a story, delivered a reflection or made us understand something we might have forgotten or never known. 

They made us laugh, wonder and weep; they involved us deeply with the brief tales they told or the songs they sang. Not a second was wasted and there was very little that could have distracted us.

Primarily honest it seemed, obviously introspective and, naturally, forgiving. Its greatest virtue is that seeing this production did everyone in the three audiences it played to, a lot of good. Certainly, the tremendous response indicated that was true here in Orangeville.

Very movingly, for this reviewer, were the two ‘episodes’ that informed us about the Black Venus, a young Black woman from South Africa, Saartjes Baartman, who went in the 1800s to Europe where, by the hand of her manager, she was displayed as an exotic curiosity and, still very young, she died. She was treated as a freak because of her very large buttocks, from which scientists speculated about her lineage as a link to earlier humans. Once she had died, she was dismembered and placed on display for 150 years, until Nelson Mandela, on a visit to Europe, took her back to South Africa to give her a proper funeral. A fine tribute they paid to this dismal but little-known story of racism at its most base, in this time of remembrance.

Bravo! Many times and here is the hope that Stage 3 Theatre will return sometime soon to the stage of the Orangeville Opera House.

Readers Comments (2)