‘The Diviners’ at Stratford is an ambitious play that never quite matches the emotional impact of the novel

STRATFORD, ONT.—There’s no one way to adapt a book into a play. Just look at the various stage adaptations of popular novels that have been mounted this year.
Productions like “The Secret Garden” at the Shaw Festival, for example, hew close to their source material in both tone and narrative. Others, like the epic two-part drama “The Inheritance,” inspired by the E.M. Forster novel “Howards End,” retain the essence of the original but largely use it as a launch pad to create something refreshingly new. 
The Stratford Festival’s world premiere adaptation of “The Diviners,” which opened Saturday at the Tom Patterson Theatre, fits somewhere in between. Much of Vern Thiessen and Yvette Nolan’s sprawling work feels directly transposed from Margaret Laurence’s book. But then there are moments that feel so inspired and new, as if the pair are trying to move beyond the literary framework of the novel.
The result, as brought to life by directors Krista Jackson and Geneviève Pelletier, is an ambitious though uneven production that never quite matches the emotional impact of the original material. 
Laurence’s classic novel, which won the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction in 1974, feels like a peculiar work to translate from page to stage. There’s a modernist esthetic to her writing: jagged, non-linear, jumping between the past and present. 
Much of the narrative is also set in the mind of its central character, the novelist Morag Gunn, who confronts a sea of old memories as she pens her latest book.
Irene Poole, onstage for almost the entire play, is wonderful in the role. She plays Morag’s younger self with a shy curiosity. And as the adult version of the character, Poole turns that curiosity into a wistful longing, as Morag scours through fragmented recollections from her past.
Thiessen and Nolan’s spry adaptation condenses most of the original story into their two-and-a-half-hour play, retaining the structure of Laurence’s novel as it moves between the present and Morag’s memories. 
They don’t shy away from the story’s grittier aspects. We see Morag’s traumatic upbringing, how she’s orphaned as a young child and raised in the small town of Manawaka by her adoptive father Christie (Jonathan Goad), a garbage collector who’s shunned by the rest of the community.
Thiessen and Nolan also gracefully illustrate Morag’s relationships with the people who have entered and exited her life: her childhood sweetheart Jules (Jesse Gervais); her condescending first husband Brooke (Dan Chameroy); her old friend Royland (Anthony Santiago); and her daughter Pique (Julie Lumsden), who runs away from home after a heated argument with Morag. 
However, the issue with Thiessen and Nolan’s play is that it moves too quickly. Scenes rarely have a moment to settle while the dialogue often feels stilted, as if they’re setting the audience up for the next plot point rather than helping to develop the characters in the story. 
The playwrights partially flesh out some of the secondary themes in Laurence’s novel. There’s a greater emphasis on Jules’ Métis heritage along with an added focus on his father and sister (played by Josue Laboucane and Caleigh Crow, respectively). But these ideas could be further developed and more seamlessly woven into the play. 
Instead, this production works best when it forgoes dialogue altogether. Choreographer Cameron Carver’s dance sequences, especially the Métis jigs featuring fiddler Darla Daniels, take on a haunting, dreamlike quality as the ensemble fills the elongated thrust stage. Another choreographed scene — featuring Morag frantically typing away as the chorus swirls around her holding papers of her manuscript — is one of the few moments in the play that successfully transports the audience into Morag’s mind. 
It all makes me wonder whether “The Diviners” would work better if it was, rather than a play, a completely movement-based work or even a musical, with song and dance acting as a means to explore Morag’s innermost thoughts and desires. 
At the same time, this production’s shortcomings made me all the more appreciative of the original story. That Morag remains so difficult to define and translate into any other medium points to the beautiful elusiveness of Laurence’s writing. And it’s a reminder, too, of the challenging, painstaking art that goes into adapting a story for the stage.