She sat quietly on a raised chair, dressed in white, to tell her three-hour tale, just as story tellers and wandering minstrels had done before eager listeners in centuries past. Olivia Olsen is an actor living in London who brought her one-woman play, the story of Parzival, a knight of King Arthur, to the Botanical Gardens pavilion on March 18.
“Stories continue through centuries,” Olsen said. And audiences continue to love them as evidenced by the Sunshine Coast audience who sat enthralled for three hours.
“This audience knew how to listen,” Olsen told Coast Reporter. “I knew that in the first few minutes, and it changed how I tell the story.”
Parzival began as an oral tale in Wales then moved to Cornwall and France before coming back to England. A German knight poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, in 1220 wrote a medieval romantic novel based on the story and that became Olsen’s source. She put her own interpretation on the story and invited the audience to do the same. “It’s myth; it lends itself to spaciousness in how people experience it.”
Parzival’s father, a brave and glamorous knight, meets his regal mother and Parzival is born. But when the father loses his life, his mother vows that the boy will not become a knight and she hides him in the forest. Despite her efforts Parzival rides off on a lame horse at an early age, forsaking his mother, and making many mistakes in his chivalrous practice for which he must atone later. After he is trained by a wise master, he pursues many adventures, including visiting a ghostly castle where he learns about the incorruptible stone (a symbol for the grail) that angels have given to the people who must care for it.
Olsen works without notes, retelling the story by memory. She practises it all the time. “It’s like being a pianist,” she said. “You know the piece but you must always be moving your fingers.”
It took her 11 months to develop the story from the original novel and it requires a good month in advance of performances to rehearse it every day. She first heard it told aloud as a teenager over several nights at a campfire by a camp leader. It stuck in her memory and although she has performed in other plays based on myths (she played Guinevere in England’s mystical Glastonbury) this is the story she decided to develop.
Olsen teaches at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, England, at the International School of Storytelling in Sussex, England and at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. She is giving several sold out performances in Vancouver before returning to England where she will take up a role in Alan Bennett’s Bed Among the Lentils. She hopes to return to Sechelt where her mother lives, possibly in June or if not then, in the autumn. She will present another one-woman play she has developed based on the story of Penelope from The Odyssey. The trio who organized this production – Elizabeth McNeill, June Meyer and Dorothy Olsen – hope to spring into action again to round up an audience for another day of tale-telling.
