Even now, over three months after the event, it’s a challenge to fully articulate my emotions upon seeing Gabriola Island resident Melanie Teichroeb’s extraordinary one-woman show, Shield Maiden. When my wife Susan and I and our Gabriolan friend Lynn took our places among the sold out crowd for the performance at the inaugural Cultivate Festival on August 18th, the crackling, anticipatory atmosphere verged on unbearable. There was a tangible, physical sense in the marquee that something truly remarkable would be unfolding before us that afternoon, but the fever of excitement gripping us all was undoubtedly partly fuelled in some, including me, by a collective anxiety as to whether ‘our Mel’ could pull this off. You see, like many present that day I had already known Melanie socially for over a decade, so to witness her first ever foray into such a bold theatrical venture as this – all alone on that stage, in her writing and acting debut no less – wrecked my nerves to the extent that – sitting there waiting, each minute towards curtain-up feeling like an hour – I felt like I might well puke.
From our first meeting I unfailingly found Melanie to be unfeasibly sweet, kind, accommodating and – this is key – with her Texan twang tempered by years living in Ontario and BC, softly spoken with a soothing timbre. So when, to the ominous introduction of AC/DC’S Hell’s Bellsas a soundtrack a mud-smeared Melanie came blasting on stage as the shield maiden Ingrid Larsdottir, storming around the stage she was soon to effortlessly claim, flashing the sign of the horns and poking her tongue out at the audience, my jaw dropped. And, swept up in personal pride and the spine-tingling, rapturous welcome from her people, tears rolled down my cheeks. Susan clapped uncontrollably, staring at this astounding vision of our old friend in disbelief and awe. It was and always will be an understandable reaction.
Melanie looked INCREDIBLE. She is a tall woman, but wearing a flame-red, partly braided wig and adorned in full-on, weathered leather Viking garb – complete with a huge, Viking Age replica sword and ‘blood’-splashed shield decorated with runic symbols – she somehow looked twice her normal self. It was an awesome entrance, so before a single word of her ‘RED’ Talk on how to be a shield maiden had left her mouth, Melanie had already won the audience, who were to hang on her every word for the next 50 minutes.
As a piece of theatrical writing, Shield Maiden is by turns side-splittingly funny, utterly heartbreaking, thought provoking, poignant, hilariously bawdy and profane – hey, we’re all adults here – but it is also as socio-politically timely as can be imagined. Inspired and incensed by the presumption of the sex of the remains of a Viking warrior discovered buried in Birka, Sweden, as male – later reported by the American Journal of Physical Anthropology as confirmed by DNA testing to be female – Melanie set out to write and consequently perform her vision of a Viking shield maiden. Her powerful and brilliant work examines not only the role of women in the overwhelmingly male-dominated Norse culture, but also perfectly reflects the overarching philosophies and aims of the burgeoning #MeToo movement today when, over 1,000 years later, in so many ways so little has changed for women in our so-called modern society.
Shield Maiden is accurately marketed as ‘Fierce. Funny. Sexy. Unapologetic.’ It is all of these things in abundance, yet so much more. For reasons enough to comfortably fill a notebook it deserves to become an inspirational cultural phenomenon, and on the evidence of Melanie’s breathtaking debut performance in August 2018, if she can maintain the stamina it demands I can think of no reason for that not to occur. So, please, at your earliest opportunity, go see Shield Maiden at all costs.
– David Morrison, Freelance Writer