by AMY BARRATT

In La Cloche de verre, an adaptation of Sylvia Plath's only completed novel, The Bell Jar, the heroine is not so much trapped under a sterile glass jar as sealed up in Tupperware. The set, by Anick La Bissonière, features "walls" of translucent plastic that diminish rapidly and irregularly towards the back so that when the actress stands upstage, her head touches the tautly pulled ceiling. It's a lovely illustration of the play's thesis that Plath was "a pure product of the 1950s, a woman torn between conservative values and her desire to write and live according to new forms." There's also that ominous oven door in the back wall, representing both domesticity and Plath's chosen mode of suicide.

The look of the show, along with the solo performance by Céline Bonnier and Brigitte Haentjens' direction, form a hat-trick that make the Sibyllines co-production at Théâtre de Quat'Sous one of the plays to see this season.

On stage by herself for nearly two hours, this is surely one of the most demanding roles of Bonnier's career - and she is up to the challenge. Dressed in a floral skirt with bountiful crinolines, her blonde pageboy hairdo petrified with product, she looks like someone desperately trying to pass as a perfect '50s housewife. Her smiles are wide, toothy and utterly fake.

An autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar recounts the experiences of 19-year-old Esther Greenwood, who has been sent to New York City with a group of other young women by Seventeen magazine. The winners of a writing competition, they are wined and dined, sent to the finest salons and placed with publishing companies for a month. When Esther returns to her mother's home following this surreal experience, she doesn't know what to do with herself. She tries to write a novel but concludes that she hasn't had enough experience of life. She spirals rapidly into a depression which culminates in institutionalization and a series of shock treatments. All of this also happened to Plath. Bonnier narrates the tale as the 30-year-old Esther/Sylvia.

If I have one criticism of the production it's that it's not clear whether this is indeed The Bell Jar or rather Sylvia Plath: the play. It feels as if Haentjens has things to say about Plath that don't figure in this novel. And that oven door makes it clear that Esther is going to share Sylvia's fate. From her notes in the program, it almost seems as if the director is more interested in the older Plath: the wife, mother, established writer and suicide. Over the soundtrack, we occasionally catch snippets of some of Plath's most famous poems being read in English.

I wouldn't be surprised if Haentjens decided to follow this project with another piece about Plath. If she does, she won't have to search for her Sylvia: it's got to be Bonnier.

Also playing: Don't forget Renegade Productions' Jennydog, by Harry Standjofski, through Sunday, Feb. 22 at Geordie Space. And opening tonight at the Saidye, Edward Albee's masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Brenda Robins and Ric Reid (to Feb. 29).

La cloche de verre, 8pm nightly until March 6 at Théâtre de Quat'Sous (100 Pins E.) $18-$25, 845-7277

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