Material where point of view is all requires an expressionist adaptation or failing that an expressionist staging.
"I see myself mirrored in your eyes, small and oval", he has Marian tell Todd. Marian's narration is adapted directly from Atwood's prose, but the dialogue veers in quality from the workmanlike in setting scenes and moving the plot from A to B to the awkward where better-known lines of the book are crammed into people's mouths regardless of how unnatural they sound. Carley foregrounds the comic events of the book since they are the most dramatic but this simultaneously backgrounds Marian view of them. Yes, he has Marian act as a narrator of her own story, and yes, he preserved the shift from first to third person when Marian is at her most dissociated except that this doesn't work on stage where the actor/narrator is physically present. In his stage version author Dave Carley has totally reversed the focus and priorities of the novel. Atwood has called the novel "anti-comic" because although Marian's world is filled with events that are humorous, Marian's alienation from them is not. Not all novels make good plays, especially a novel like this one where the narrator's point of view is all-important. Unlike Nora who has her awakening while already trapped in a marriage with children, Marian has her awakening in time to fend off marriage.
Atwood's tale proposes Marian as a woman who senses her own oppression without the benefit of a feminist movement much as Ibsen had viewed Nora of "A Doll's House" 90 years earlier. Meanwhile, she strikes up an acquaintance with angst-ridden graduate student Duncan and cannot reconcile her attraction to this hapless loser with her impending marriage. She begins to drop items from her diets until she virtually stops eating.
Her normal life begins to crumble when her boyfriend Todd asks her to marry him. Every aspect of the show-the writing, direction, the acting-is geared to show Margaret Atwood's breakthrough novel as negligible bit of 1960s fluff.Ītwood's novel, written in 1965 but not published until 1969, tells of Marian McAlpin, a young woman with friends, a lawyer for a boyfriend and a job at a consumer survey company. "The Edible Woman", a co-production between CanStage and the Vancouver Playhouse, is like a two-and-a-half hour pilot for a sitcom that never made it. Canadian Stage Company, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
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