Oncle Vania (1982-1983)

In the 1982-1983 season, the National Arts Centre produced Oncle Vania, a French reproduction of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's 1987 play. Co-produced with the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, this NAC produced was praised as French Theatre Director André Brassard's "best production of the year" by Radio-Canada.

The play's set design was created by Peter Barleben, whose team created quite a large maquette at 66.5 cm (length) by 42 cm (height) by 53 cm (depth). Using various items such as cardboard, paints and hot glue, the maquette captures a parlour room of the rural estate in which the play unfolds, a complex-looking set, with illusions of depth, different rooms and settings, such as staircases, hallways and outdoor decks. The colours are darker and cooler, primarily black, brown, blue and teal, with some hints of red found in the curtains and on parts of the floors. The main room includes a table, a piano and curtains. 

The maquette was very dusty, but this wasn’t the main challenge. The maquetted had suffered deterioration: dust was fully caked on every inch, but to make matters worse, poor lighting and not being able to remove the maquette from its black storage box made it an even bigger challenge. To tackle this challenge, the team divided their work space in half, with one student dusting the left half of the maquette, the other on the right.

The students felt discouraged every week, when unboxing the maquette to see that dust had once again accumulated. Dusting over and over, they noticed that the state of the maquette was dire, as pieces were extremely loose, and some colours were lifting.

To be as gentle with the maquette as possible, they used brushes on larger surfaces, using it like a broom, and used cotton swabs in smaller areas. At first this worked well, but they realized that the years of degradation made it so that more dust would appear. The darker colour palettes also made it harder to see the progress that we were making. In the end, there was only so much of the maquette that they could clean and decided to focus their efforts on using cotton swabs to lift years of dust and grime.