Seven Oaks Magazine.

I was struck recently while watching director Charles Binamé’s brilliant biopic on Maurice “Rocket” Richard how much more I’ve been exposed, over the course of my life, to cultural representations of my Québecois heritage rather than my Scottish heredity. I’m often reminded of my childhood, growing up with my best friend Shaun Zavarise, who like Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas was both Italian and Irish, but with almost no sense of the latter. In the current political climate, where formerly marginalized ethnic identities carry less stigma, we often tend to identify with our least ‘white,’ most ‘interesting’ ethnic identities as a means of feeling rooted. One of my Scotch-Canadian aunts, in fact, once admitted to me that she had often felt envious of French-Canadians because of her sense that they ‘knew who they were.’

Director Dean Paul Gibson’s production of No Great Mischief, running until May 6 at the Vancouver Playhouse, is one of those few glimpses I’ve had into fictive meditations on the other part of my background: an extended Scottish family of aunts, uncles and cousins, beset by various tragedies and transfixed (and comforted) by a compulsive telling and re-telling of family myths and stories.

In many ways, the similarities with my family end there; after all, mine weren’t rustic, coal-mining residents of Cape Breton. The story of the MacDonalds (rather than we Birnies) revolves around two brothers, Alexander (Allan Morgan) and Callum (Duncan Fraser). Though Alexander is the narrator and main protagonist of No Great Mischief, it’s the rough and hypnotic Callum who truly captures our attention, a fact due in no small part to the sheer enormity and raw power of Fraser’s awe-making performance. Callum’s proletarian cadence is infused with a great pride in family and clan, then laced with pants-pissing alcoholism. It is the most staggering performance at the Playhouse this year – no small feat, especially considering Pamela Gien in the Syringa Tree.

Pamela Johnson’s set design, too, is an incredible allusion to the force and wonder of the Atlantic ocean. Johnson’s Playhouse credits include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, whose set was so lush, fulsome and beautiful that I still remember it in detail today, despite having seen it years ago on a junior high school field trip.

Despite all this, No Great Mischief stands along with A Little Night Music as a weaker spot in an otherwise flawless season at the Playhouse. Some fairly weak performances by supporting cast, as well as a too-generous helping of CanLit clichés of the hard-working, hard-drinking coal miners of the Canadian East Coast tend to overwhelm the beauty of the production and the poignancy of Fraser’s performance. Still, I enjoyed No Great Mischief – but like they say of The Sopranos, it’s a family thing.