Playing Sarah Bernhardt

I use old ticket stubs as bookmarks. They are reminders of good times; Pal Joey at the Shaw, the Great Lakes Jam, movies I have liked. After starting Joan Givner's Playing Sarah Bernhardt (Simon & Pierre), I picked a ticket to Regina's Globe Theatre out of the pile to mark my place. We had seen The Secret Garden there in December and, to my surprise, it was the setting for this novel about an aging actress who is losing her memory. Givner, whose past work has included major biographies of Katherine Anne Porter and Mazo de la Roche, spent 25 years teaching English Literature at the University of Regina. This is her second novel. Harriet's long acting career is in shambles when she can no longer remember her lines in a play about Sarah Bernhardt. Wondering if she will end up poverty-stricken, sewing costumes backstage, she accepts the role of Mazo in a production written by a Saskatchewan playwright and performed at Regina's downtown theatre. Playing Sarah Bernhardt is a clever novel, incorporating the script for the play as part of the narrative. And while Harriet and her theatre colleagues are well-drawn characters, Regina also comes shining through. It's a haunting city with the prairie surrounding it on all sides, an old CPR hotel, a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, and the Globe Theatre housed in the old City Hall.

Owen-Sound Sun-Times