Toronto Fringe Review: Dickens of the Mounted

A true story! A Dickens kid came to Canada and worked as an RCMP officer, and then Canadian humourist Eric Nicol wrote a fictionalized series of letters from him, published in best selling novel form as Dickens of the Mounted. And then these guys made it a play.

I feel weird and twitchy about things involving my own name and my maybe ancestry, and this book, which has lived in my bathroom ever since a friend bought it for me at a Lebanese cafe for a dollar, weirds me out more by sounding at times remarkably like my grampa. (A British Dickens who didn’t write to publish but did jot down his memories from the end of WW2 and wrote us fables that echoed with a sweet dark Dickensian tendency to twist sorrowful truth with self-deprecating wit.)

Dickens of the Mounted, the play, is a smooth and seamless compression of the novel. It tells the story of the lonely, boozy son, an embarrassment to the family, trying to make his own name under the shadow of familial fame, mostly tripping over important instances in Canadian history instead. It’s super funny and pleasingly alliterative (a genetic trait it seems) and a sad wit works its way throughout. A great one person play, it colours and creates a whole world on the Canadian frontier through this one man’s funny/useless gaze, and this is most painful and appropriate on the subject of the negotiations made and betrayed with Native leaders.

Dickens of the Mounted offers a really excellent theatre experience- it’s quite brilliantly directed, keeping the actor, Kristian Bruun, in a kind of unfolding perpetual motion that suits the story of years going by, using two boards and 3 trunks to constantly reshape the space. He pulls it off without giving the business too much focus. He smoothly balances the boards to make a wall, then a tree; the trunks are stacked to become a horse, or turned become a dog. I’m sure this show is really physically demanding, but Kristian Bruun keeps his pacing in the pocket like a pro, doesn’t rush or huff and so the humour and the dry sorrow that sometimes underlies it are uncluttered.

I met these guys - director Brad Lepp and Kristian - in Montreal and liked them immediately, so I’m awfully glad to also like their show. Both were sporting mountie regalia and bushy beards, and Brad told us he’d just grown his in sympathy and support for Kristian. Now that’s a good director.

Check out Dickens of the Mounted at the Toronto Fringe, or at one of their other stops on the road- their website is great, and has all the info on their tour dates and venues.