Spinning You Home
At Carousel Theatre
September 15 and 16
Tickets at vancouverfringe.com or at the door
Posted September 14, 2018
There’s something strange in us that relishes tales of coffins breaking free, tumbling off sleds, toboggans or carts as if the deceased is making a last desperate run for it. In Canada, Claude Jutra’s 1971 film Mon oncle Antoine is a famous example with horses struggling through snowdrifts to deliver a coffin to the undertaker. In American literature, there’s William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in which farmer’s wife Addie extracts a promise from her family to take her body across Mississippi to her birthplace in Jefferson – in the heat of the summer.
But neither of these journeys equals in sheer mileage the epic passage of Sophia Cameron’s body from British Columbia around the Horn back to Glengarry, Ontario during the Gold Rush. Sophia, dubbed The Beauty of Barkerville, was the first woman licensed as a prospector and she was, by all accounts, one helluva a gal. She died during a star-less, fifty degrees below zero snowstorm but before she breathed her last, Sophia made her miner husband ‘Cariboo’ Cameron promise to get her body back to Ontario.
Playwright Sally Stubbs tells the tale in the form of a radio drama with guitarist Evan Rein providing incidental music and sound effects. Seated performers Sarah Roa and Simon Webb read from scripts but so animated is Roa (playing both Sophia and young Sarah Holdon) that Spinning You Home never feels static.
The setup is that it’s 1951 and Sarah is visiting her grandpa’s grave; she has his old flask and his notebook. Sprinkling rum – his preferred drink – on his grave, Sarah conjures him and, promised more booze, he tells the epic tale of Sophia Cameron, Sarah’s legendary ancestor.
The fact that this story is true and part of Stubbs’ and her partner’s history makes it all the more interesting. It’s a lively performance by Roa and no one does grumpy old curmudgeon better than Webb.