Playwright: Moira Buffini
At: Rivendell Theatre Ensemble at The Storefront, 66 E. Randolph St.
Phone: (312) 742-8497; $15
Runs through: Sept. 27
If he weren't such a twit, you might almost pity King Ethelred. It's the year 999—the eve of the FIRST millennium—and his kingdom is beset by marauding Norse vikings. The Laird from the remote northern province of Cumbria whose advice he seeks turns out to be the 14-year-old son of the clan chieftain, born only days after his death and named 'Silence' by the distraught widow. The Frenchwoman imported to marry this dubious general is an ill-tempered shrew nearly twice the age of her prospective spouse. But what the king doesn't know—indeed, what nobody knows but the sour Lady Ymma and her adolescent husband—is that the latter is actually a girl, unwittingly endowed with the privileges meted out to men exclusively.
British author Moira Buffini's speculative historical fantasy should delight fans of The Princess Bride, its contemporary humor whimsical but never crude. (Arriving on the eastern shores of England, a seasick Ymma surveys her new home and promptly announces 'What a dump!') For Buffini's goal is not simply another Fractured Fairy Tale, but an inquiry into the actual Ymma of Normandy—who, in fact, wed King Ethelred of England, reigning by his side and afterward at the side of his successor—and her role in encouraging the Norman invasion of 1066 that made the England we know today.
It's also a—surprise!—Road-Trip Adventure, its personnel those we have come to associate with that literary genre: in addition to the naive Silence and the grumpy Ymma, we have a patient handmaiden, a prissy young priest, a soldier of ambivalent allegiances, and, of course, an obsessed villain in hot pursuit. Jason Loewith's deft direction keeps the pace brisk but never hurried, so that even when the myth and the mystical get thick, we have no doubt that all will end happily.
Engaging performances are forthcoming from Jane Baxter Miller as Ymma and Nicole Burgund as the courageous Silence, flanked by David Mendes' ingenuous Father Roger, Tara Mallen's earthy Agnes and Eric Slater's laconic Captain Eadric. Chewing the scenery with gusto, however, is Mark Ulrich, whose Ethelred moves from tenth-century Fawlty Towers to the nastiest villain that ever got what was coming to him.