All For One!

I went to see The Three Musketeers at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver, and was a bit surprised that a lot of the production was played for laughs. I mean, they had a lot of comedy worked into it… we’re talking on the verge of English Pantomime levels of silliness.

I think that was, in part, a way to make the stage combat work better. If they tried to play this as serious as a car accident, I think more scrutiny would be paid to the stage combat, and the flaws would show through (more on that later). When it’s a bit more lighthearted, these things are easier to forgive.

That said, for something played so light, it gets pretty dang dark. I was expecting a reimagined story, something more like the Disney movie with Keifer Sutherland back in the 90s, heavily altered so there’s a happy ending for all.

It was certainly quite an interesting choice, given that people die in sword fights rather regularly. But it worked.

I read The Three Musketeers back in high school, and, while I really enjoyed it, it was pretty clear it was a story that began life not just serialized, but paid for by the word. For Alexander Dumas, I personally think The Count of Monte Christo is a better story, but with a decent edit, The Three Musketeers would have been just as good.

Funny thing, I’ve actually never seen a version of The Three Musketeers that chose to be book-accurate in terms of hitting all the major plot points. That includes things like the tragic death of Constance, the relationship between Athos and Milady de Winter, the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham, and so on. 

The fact that they hit all the major plot points in under 3 hours also shows how the book (at nearly a quarter of a million words) could have used a bit of a trim.

This was the first Arts Club show I’d been to that had a significant amount of stage combat in it, and it was about as good as you could expect it to be. The motions seemed a bit slow at first, like they were holding back, but that’s only because that in a live production you do five times a week, you need to be a touch more careful.

It doesn’t help that we’ve all been spoiled by movie choreography for decades. 

However, by the second fight, you got used to the pace and everything flowed the way it should in your mind’s eye. The scale of the fights they put on was impressive, especially seeing so many fights happening on stage at once, sometimes a rotating stage at that). And it wasn’t just parry-thrust-parry-thrust stuff, either.

My brother and I often talk about fights in films and agree that there is nothing more boring than bad fight scenes. And what makes a fight scene boring is, ninety percent of the time, when they forget a simple rule: a fight isn’t just a beat in a story: a fight tells a story.

So when you see the Musketeers fight, you need their personalities to shine through in how they fight. And if two major characters are fighting, what they’re fighting over needs to come through in the fight itself. Desperation, revenge, pride. Just like any character conflict, it’s all about what the protagonist and antagonist want, and that needs to be conveyed in the way they fight and the choices they make.

This rule isn’t limited to melee combat. Even dogfights in space or massive dreadnoughts slugging it out have to follow the same rules. It’s something I keep in mind when writing my fight scenes.

There’s a stage combat performer on Youtube (Jill Bearup) who does movie combat and armour reviews (and books and movies). It would have been fascinating to someone like her explain the motions they were going through, the choices they made, and how it all came together.

That’s often one of the things I like most about going to live performances, seeing what creative things the team comes up with, either for sets, props, or stage manipulation. Unless you’re a big Broadway show, you have to learn to do a lot with a little. And to me, that’s half the fun.