Everyone is aware, post-Amadeus, of the potential of great music as a subject for the stage. Black Theatre Workshop taps a little of this good karma in Le Code Noir, a 70-minute play at the Segal Centre about Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. But the fitful script by George Boyd only touches on the achievement of this composer and cavalier while trying much too hard to make him a victim. Its brevity turns out to be both a vice and a virtue.

To be sure, black skin was no advantage in the dying decades of the ancien régime. It may be that Saint-Georges — as he is here made to say — needed to work twice as hard to achieve his stature. But achieve it he did, in spite of the Code Noir, a 17th-century decree having to do with the status of slaves and the offspring of liaisons. Boyd’s narrative never really makes clear how Saint-Georges (a free man) was affected by the code. Would that this were the only ambiguity.

The tale is told mostly in flashbacks by the composer, who is portrayed with considerable charisma by Tyrone Benskin. Knocking back the absinthe, Saint-Georges tells an eager young journalist (Ralph Prosper) about his triumphs and (more often) tribulations. Music intervenes from on high, in periodic hallucinations, but otherwise has little bearing on the action. More is made of this Frenchman’s swordsmanship but even this distinction is compromised by an odd scene in which his father eggs him on to accept a match he apparently does not want to accept. Who has ever heard of a feckless D’Artagnan?

The relation of white father and mulatto son is never clear, in part because Boyd has not decided whether dad was a forward-looking liberal or a scoundrel. No wonder Keir Cutler has no luck fleshing out the role. Brett Watson makes a memorable entrance as a cross-dressing courtier and Frank Fontaine does what he can as the Governor of Guadeloupe (another ill-focused character). Adrienna Mei Irving as Saint-Georges’s slave mother Nanon is the strong and silent type. Stefanie Buxton conveys anguish as the married woman who was his most notable lover.

The set is smartly built with an unmade bed in the middle and a patch of flowers evoking the West Indies. Costumes are of the period. Richard Donat’s direction is fluid. The means were there to make a great play. The piped-in music – a violin concerto – is of high calibre. But the script keeps the enterprise earthbound. Even the occasional interventions of primitive French – “excusez-moi” materializes at one point – betray a fatal lack of inspiration.

This is all too bad, for Saint-Georges is a figure worth portraying. There was a CBC television docudrama about him back in 2003, when the CBC still did that kind of thing. It is a fair bet that the story will eventually be told, in fuller dramatic form. What a movie it would make. Somebody, call Peter Shaffer.

Arthur Kaptainis is classical music critic for The Gazette.

Le Code Noir continues at the Segal Centre, 5170 Cote Ste. Catherine, through April 5. Box office: 514-932-1104 ext 226.