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Eve of destruction
The Book of Hours is over-ambitious
BY IRIS FANGER
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Laura Harrington has taken on an enormous challenge in her play about the beginnings of World War I, The Book of Hours, which is getting its world premiere at Wellesley Summer Theatre. The work is set in the Belgian town of Louvain just as the German army invades, violating the country’s neutrality. Home to a famous university and a renowned library, the city had its center torched by the Germans, with the cathedral of St. Pierre, the library, and more than 1000 buildings being destroyed and many civilians killed. The library was rebuilt between 1921 and 1928, whereupon the country that gave us Beethoven and Goethe burned it again in 1940. The problem for a playwright is to find a way to encompass the horrors of the First World War in a mere two hours. Harrington’s solution is to dramatize the fate of six persons marooned in the library during the summer of 1914: Septimus and Albert, two priests charged with caring for the ancient and modern volumes; the young novice Lucie, who assists them; Lucie’s mother, Isabelle, and her sister, Sophie; and a wayfaring English stranger, Vera, who may or may not be a spy. With the 15-year-old Sophie as narrator, the group’s plight is depicted as the Germans enter Louvain. But Harrington presents her characters as if they were roles in a morality play, and her dialogue sounds more like philosophical questions than responses to a real-life situation. Some of her lines are eloquent; others sound like sermons. She’s created some unbelievable scenarios as well, the most incredible being when Septimus, the younger of the priests, suddenly falls in love with Vera. The young woman who has come to him for help in smuggling out photographs of the German atrocities is in emotional turmoil herself, and it’s not clear why she’s in the war zone. Neither is it plausible that Septimus, given his vows to the Church, should long for "one more day" with her. Or that Lucie, who’s been surreptitiously supporting the underground effort, should cast off her novice’s attire for peasant dress out of the fear that Germans will persecute her as a member of a religious order. And the conflict between Lucie and Sophie just seems extraneous. Although The Book of Hours builds to a moving climax as the lives of these innocent people are forever changed by their decisions in the face of the ungodly war machine, I suspect that the poignant conclusion would be more devastating if the characters’ motivations were better explained. The play seems condensed, as if Harrington had drawn up a blueprint without filling in the third dimension. An uneven cast of actors, mostly regulars at Wellesley Summer Theatre, struggle to turn the disparate characters into a cohesive ensemble. Alicia Kahn gives a layered performance as the conflicted Vera, but Melina McGrew’s Lucie and Charlotte Peed’s Isabelle are too subdued, and Derek Stone Nelson’s Septimus could use a more forceful attack. Ed Peed, as the elderly Father Albert, who’s more in love with his books — and his wine bottle — than with his flock, is affecting in his overwhelming encounter with his emotions at the end. As Sophie, Wellesley College undergraduate Kelly Galvin makes a lively adolescent confronted by unspeakable anguish. Under Nora Hussey’s direction, the play moves right along, but perhaps that’s not a good response to the material. The Book of Hours needs to take its time in order to impress upon us what war does to the civilians it engulfs, whether that’s in 1914 Europe or present-day Iraq.
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