So there was this Shakespeare guy who lived a bunch of years ago. He wrote about kings and shit.
Where to begin? "Two houses, both alike in dignity...." No, that's not right. "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer...." No, that's not it either. "The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife, shall no more cut it's master." Yes, that's more like it. Greystone Theatre returns to the Bard (the last visitation being The Winter's Tale in spring 2009) with the first part of Henry IV, one of Will's most popular history plays.
Once upon a time, during an extended halftime break in the 100 Years War, a man named Henry Bolingbroke stole the throne from Richard II and became King Henry IV of England. But many were unhappy with this coup and rebellion stirred in the corners of Britain. Meanwhile, the king had a son of a most prodigal nature; he was called Hal and he spent his nights in all manner of cavorting and debauchery, while shirking his princely responsibilities. But once the gallant Hotspur, once a favoured subject of the king, turns his passions toward revolution, Hal must step up to his birthright.
1 Henry IV is the second play in Shakespeare's second "Henriad", which eventually culminates in everyone's favourite Elizabethan action flick Henry V. It is a play of tremendous personality (if not historical accuracy), with memorable characters and an action-packed final act.
The production takes place on a thrust stage, brushing very close to the audience (so close one can almost reach out and touch the ringmail). Nicole Zalesak's set design works in contrasts. The backdrop is an old medieval castle, grey and weather beaten; extending out into the thrust is a very convincing woodgrain pattern floor, looking less like part of the castle and more like the stage. The edges of the woodgrain are rough, blurred, and abstract, giving the sense that this theatrical floor is rising up out of the historical milieu. The royal throne which is betimes the lone furnishing on the stage is simple and not particularly imposing, much like the king who occupies it, but stands in defiant hyperrealism to the weathered backdrop.
I regret that I will not be able to make specific mention of all performers, but with a cast of this size I am forced to take a selection. I will start, logically, with the king. Devin Wesnoski adopts a more classical diction for his pensive ruler, enunciating and lingering over syllables (with a few exceptions). He has a definite stage presence which is at its most powerful when he is doing little. Michael Prebble is a natural fit for Prince Hal. He exudes easy charisma and a thousand watt smile, capturing the vitality of the lad's carefree youth. A lot of his speech and manner is quite — if you'll forgive the momentary break from academic terminology — dickish, but with his comedic timing and darling eyes, he always keeps the audience in the palm of his hand. In later scenes he becomes more contemplative, and shows much greater depth in those moments of pain when he is torn between his calling as prince and his old friends. Rohan Keenan does a strong turn as Worcester (pronounced "Wooster", because British people, man), embodying an intense antipathy toward the king, but always doing so in a reserved way. He never has explosions of temper, but maintains a constant roiling just beneath the surface. Anna Seibel is a scene-stealer in her lamentably terse appearance as the Welsh sorceress Glendower (in a bit of gender-bending from the original text). With a jaw-dropping Welsh dialect, gilded armour, and wild-eyed witchery, she holds firm control of the stage, even against Donlevy's Hotspur. I can't speak much more to the acting, but I will point out a couple other short, but memorable, performances in Ciara Richardson's impeccably Cockney Mistress Quickly and Vernon Boldick's curiously piratey Bardolphe.
But the fact is, no matter how you try to dress up the performance, the main thrust of this play lies 'twixt two things: the loveable rotund Sir John Falstaff, and the fiery Hotspur. Donovan Scheirer hops into Shakespeare's plumpest role, sporting a large beard, an enhanced girth, and a hearty laugh. Falstaff was a very popular figure in Shakespeare's day, and it is easy to see why; he captures the bawdy Elizabethan spirit along with glimmers of the Bard's wisdom. Scheirer is larger than life onstage, taking delight in every dirty joke and having fun with Falstaff's boastful swagger. But he strikes a balance as well; it would be easy to steamroll over Jack's more sombre moments on the way to more laughs, but Scheirer takes time to digest them all. And as the only character in the play who has an actual soliloquy, he has the opportunity to strike real insight, such as in his "What is honour?" passage. He never loses his good humour, he never loses the audience, and he avoids the easy trap of getting lost in himself.
Chris Donlevy in the skin of Hotspur calls to mind Hamlet's famous piece of advice, "Speak the speech, I pray you ... trippingly on the tongue". Rather than being pressed under the weight of the language in the text, he cuts right through it. Every thought and emotion is communicated as clearly as if in an everyday conversation, and the dialogue flows like he has been speaking it his whole life. He does not trip over the elaborate phrasings, perhaps because he doesn't give it undue reverence; he isn't afraid to spit a word out in a furious rage. But the meter of the verse is not lost; it is adapted. As I listened more closely, I found a speech pattern reminiscent of slam poetry, stripping the elegance out of the meter and turning it into something more primal and intimate. Donlevy's characterisation does not hide Hotspur's stubbornness, arrogance, and impetuosity, but he lingers on the pain and frustration, turning him into the play's most sympathetic character. It doesn't hurt that he almost always commands the stage, with his charisma when calm and his atomic temper when not.
Some character dynamics, however, were lacking. Wesnoski's stronger moments were his quieter ones, displaying the reserved emotions of a strong but ultimately passive king. At other points that strength was lost in a flurry of hand gestures and spiking emotion, where it seemed that he and Donlevy were competing for the floor by way of passion — a battle the king was fated to lose. And as much as I enjoyed the intimacy that the thrust stage provided, the side effect was that characters had to move way too much. On one hand I can appreciate the irony that Falstaff, after professing how he can take not another step, is suddenly darting from one side to another in his conversation with Hal, but on the other hand, the movement itself strikes me as artificial, and the scene better served by staying in place. At various points a character will cross to the far side of the stage, utter a line, and then cross all the way back for one final moment, and it gets dizzying.
I attended the play on two nights. The first night was preview, after which, I was told, several cuts were made. I do not think I noticed all of them on second viewing, so I suppose they did their job. The play's opening scene, however, jarred me. A chunk of lines was sliced from the beginning of Henry's opening speech, which upsets me both because we lost some very powerful lines reflecting on England's experience with civil war and because the play now, quite bizarrely, starts with "Therefore". I am not sure what purpose these cuts were meant to serve, but the play did not feel any shorter the second time.
1 Henry IV is a play of language and character, and serves both up in generous portions. While there were a few detractors along the way, it is a tremendous production, with a tight cast, excellent chemistry, and an undertone of Dwayne Brenna's sense of humour. Zounds.
Thursday 29 November 2012
Tuesday 27 November 2012
The December Man
December is a bleak time of year. It is cold and white and dark, yet the entire month revolves around this sense of holiday cheer. It's kind of paradoxical, but perhaps it's no accident we choose to set our most profound celebration within our most dismal season.
The December Man is a bleak play. It is a gripping and soul-rending exploration into the nature of hopelessness. Yet, paradoxically, it is also about hope, about that persistent little flicker that soldiers on in the face of insurmountable odds.
Live Five's second show of the season tackles the nebulous distinction between life and living. The plot centres on the events of the "Montreal Massacre" — a shooting spree at the Ecole Polytechnique in December 1989, where Marc Lépine killed 14 women before shooting himself. Our principal characters are an elderly Franco-Irish couple consumed with grief after the suicide of their son, an engineering student racked with survivor's guilt in the years following the massacre. The play is told in reverse-chronological order; each scene takes place several months before the previous one. This technique adds tremendous strength to the narrative structure, because instead of simply seeing their family deteriorate, we see a more tragic picture that layers on dramatic irony while peeling back the layers of history in a constant search for meaning, just as we all do when confronted by tragedy.
There was an intimate house at the showing I attended, and the ushers encouraged us to sit as close to the front as we were comfortable. I ordinarily stay away from the front row, but in this case I decided to take the plunge. Anyone else going to see the show, I encourage them to do the same. This is a play best experienced at arm's length. It is built on tiny moments, and it is unwise to miss a single one of them. These moments start from the very beginning, when we see Kent Allen shamble onstage as the father, Benoit, his face stained in a look of anguish that tells us all we need to know. Their dress is formal, but it is clearly funereal rather than celebratory.
The cast takes on a tremendous amount of stress in order for the emotional reality of the play to land. Aaron Hursh plays Jean, the tragic son, whom we spend three scenes waiting for before he returns from the dead, as it were. At that point we begin to understand the legacy of the play: the sense of haunting torment his parents have been carrying around with them after his death now passes back to him. Hursh plays understated, almost muffled, with a few intense emotional spikes, such as when we see him having night terrors. When we first see him he is dazed and disjointed, not entirely registering the world around him; and as he moves back in time we see an increasing effort to piece his mind back together, while we know that it will never quite happen.
Kent Allen plays a very precarious game, teetering on the edge of emotional collapse without toppling over. He takes on the role of the father, exhausted and defeated, having come from nothing and desiring only to provide a life for his family. Seeing that he has failed to secure that very basic thing, he takes the responsibility for Jean's death on himself. Allen performs this role with grace gravity (not to mention a very natural Quebecois accent), but is not afraid to inject small moments of humour.
The heart of the play, however, is Sharon Bakker, as the mother Kathleen, who is onstage for all but about five minutes of the production. Incidentally, I've already seen Bakker play a grieving mother this season, as Mrs. Gottlieb in Dead Man's Cell Phone. But while the former played to stylistic conventions and overexaggerated emotions, The December Man is painfully down to Earth. I can only marvel at Bakker's emotional availability; she proceeds through the play like an open nerve ending, firing at the slightest stimulus. In the early scenes she hovers constantly in the grips of anguish; in later scenes she oscillates between doting mother desperate to maintain a happy home and those gnawing moments of insecurity about what is happening with Jean. She is a six-sided die being shaken this way and that, but every moment is raw and visceral.
Jenna Maren's set is unusually intricate for the Refinery. It is a very complete feeling living room box set, with sofa, TV, coffee-table, and a Christmas tree from time to time. Then there is the wooden skyscraper model — Jean's last design project — off to stage left. There is nothing ostentatious about its placement, but it always draws our eye. The set needs to be full in order for the play to work. The characters need something solid behind them in order to contrast with the way they are disintegrating. This brings up a curious question about stylistic choice. After all, All My Sons had a fragmenting set existing in tandem with its fragmenting characters; such a decision worked for that play, and the opposite decision works for The December Man. The set remains solid and encompassing as a demonstration of how cruelly impartial the physical world is to the emotional scars laid by the tragedy.
Brian Cochrane may have, at some point, directed a happy play, but I did not see it. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that this project makes his last Live Five entry, East of Berlin, look positively farcical. But he does bleak extraordinarily well. He brings Colleen Murphy's script to live in the most primal way, red hot and unflinching. I have been unsettled by plays before, and this was one of the more unsettling (though it's still got nothing on The Pillowman). As I said before, it is a play of small moments, and I can see the level of craft and detail that went into each one.
When tragedy happens, we tend to ask why. Then we don't get an answer and we move on. But for some people those people much more profoundly touched by the tragedy, they can't stop asking. As Benoit and Kathleen search backwards, peeling back the months and the years, attempting to find some explanation for why this happened to them, the play itself worms its way back through time, and at each stop the picture only gets more confusing. But amid that confusion shines one simple truth: that the search for meaning validates our loss. Each of the characters answers his or her own question of meaning, and while the choice they end up with is not a comfortable one for us to watch, it gives meaning to them. And therein lies the hope.
The December Man is a bleak play. It is a gripping and soul-rending exploration into the nature of hopelessness. Yet, paradoxically, it is also about hope, about that persistent little flicker that soldiers on in the face of insurmountable odds.
Live Five's second show of the season tackles the nebulous distinction between life and living. The plot centres on the events of the "Montreal Massacre" — a shooting spree at the Ecole Polytechnique in December 1989, where Marc Lépine killed 14 women before shooting himself. Our principal characters are an elderly Franco-Irish couple consumed with grief after the suicide of their son, an engineering student racked with survivor's guilt in the years following the massacre. The play is told in reverse-chronological order; each scene takes place several months before the previous one. This technique adds tremendous strength to the narrative structure, because instead of simply seeing their family deteriorate, we see a more tragic picture that layers on dramatic irony while peeling back the layers of history in a constant search for meaning, just as we all do when confronted by tragedy.
There was an intimate house at the showing I attended, and the ushers encouraged us to sit as close to the front as we were comfortable. I ordinarily stay away from the front row, but in this case I decided to take the plunge. Anyone else going to see the show, I encourage them to do the same. This is a play best experienced at arm's length. It is built on tiny moments, and it is unwise to miss a single one of them. These moments start from the very beginning, when we see Kent Allen shamble onstage as the father, Benoit, his face stained in a look of anguish that tells us all we need to know. Their dress is formal, but it is clearly funereal rather than celebratory.
The cast takes on a tremendous amount of stress in order for the emotional reality of the play to land. Aaron Hursh plays Jean, the tragic son, whom we spend three scenes waiting for before he returns from the dead, as it were. At that point we begin to understand the legacy of the play: the sense of haunting torment his parents have been carrying around with them after his death now passes back to him. Hursh plays understated, almost muffled, with a few intense emotional spikes, such as when we see him having night terrors. When we first see him he is dazed and disjointed, not entirely registering the world around him; and as he moves back in time we see an increasing effort to piece his mind back together, while we know that it will never quite happen.
Kent Allen plays a very precarious game, teetering on the edge of emotional collapse without toppling over. He takes on the role of the father, exhausted and defeated, having come from nothing and desiring only to provide a life for his family. Seeing that he has failed to secure that very basic thing, he takes the responsibility for Jean's death on himself. Allen performs this role with grace gravity (not to mention a very natural Quebecois accent), but is not afraid to inject small moments of humour.
The heart of the play, however, is Sharon Bakker, as the mother Kathleen, who is onstage for all but about five minutes of the production. Incidentally, I've already seen Bakker play a grieving mother this season, as Mrs. Gottlieb in Dead Man's Cell Phone. But while the former played to stylistic conventions and overexaggerated emotions, The December Man is painfully down to Earth. I can only marvel at Bakker's emotional availability; she proceeds through the play like an open nerve ending, firing at the slightest stimulus. In the early scenes she hovers constantly in the grips of anguish; in later scenes she oscillates between doting mother desperate to maintain a happy home and those gnawing moments of insecurity about what is happening with Jean. She is a six-sided die being shaken this way and that, but every moment is raw and visceral.
Jenna Maren's set is unusually intricate for the Refinery. It is a very complete feeling living room box set, with sofa, TV, coffee-table, and a Christmas tree from time to time. Then there is the wooden skyscraper model — Jean's last design project — off to stage left. There is nothing ostentatious about its placement, but it always draws our eye. The set needs to be full in order for the play to work. The characters need something solid behind them in order to contrast with the way they are disintegrating. This brings up a curious question about stylistic choice. After all, All My Sons had a fragmenting set existing in tandem with its fragmenting characters; such a decision worked for that play, and the opposite decision works for The December Man. The set remains solid and encompassing as a demonstration of how cruelly impartial the physical world is to the emotional scars laid by the tragedy.
Brian Cochrane may have, at some point, directed a happy play, but I did not see it. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that this project makes his last Live Five entry, East of Berlin, look positively farcical. But he does bleak extraordinarily well. He brings Colleen Murphy's script to live in the most primal way, red hot and unflinching. I have been unsettled by plays before, and this was one of the more unsettling (though it's still got nothing on The Pillowman). As I said before, it is a play of small moments, and I can see the level of craft and detail that went into each one.
When tragedy happens, we tend to ask why. Then we don't get an answer and we move on. But for some people those people much more profoundly touched by the tragedy, they can't stop asking. As Benoit and Kathleen search backwards, peeling back the months and the years, attempting to find some explanation for why this happened to them, the play itself worms its way back through time, and at each stop the picture only gets more confusing. But amid that confusion shines one simple truth: that the search for meaning validates our loss. Each of the characters answers his or her own question of meaning, and while the choice they end up with is not a comfortable one for us to watch, it gives meaning to them. And therein lies the hope.
Wednesday 14 November 2012
Confession time
So here's the thing: I've had a half-finished Farragut North review sitting her for quite some time, and I was not quite able to bring myself to finish it. Such a predicament obviously makes doing a theatre Blog difficult.
I suppose I was the victim of a two-fold reflexive insecurity. On one hand, I was worried that I'd write up a lame review and people would read it. On the other hand, I was afraid I'd write an excellent review that would sit there utterly ignored except for when my closest friends would glance over it during those times I specifically reminded them it existed. Neither of these insecurities have subsided any, but I decided to suffer through it. Since I suddenly find myself watching three plays in the span of one week, I decided I had to bite the bullet and get back into the swing of things. If nothing else, these reviews should be useful for my own personal development. And I don't need to take it too seriously, because it is, after all, "Just a Blog" (you know, I capitalised Blog back in my first entry, and now I'm just stuck doing it forever).
I'll admit, I had big dreams when I first started planning this out. I imagined being met with overnight success and wild fanfare, and that by this time I'd be able to stroll into any play in the city saying, "Bitch, please, I'm the Prairie Groundling. Impress me." This is obviously not going to happen (but my deep-seated desire to be a theatre bigshot manifested itself when I casually strolled into History of Breathing tonight without showing my ticket, and I didn't even realise it). But theatre in Saskatoon is growing, and it will continue to grow for some time, which means we will, at one point, require a culture of legitimate theatre reviews. I'm not promising to be the saviour to usher in this golden age, but I at least know that in the future I will be able to look back on this Blog and say that I was the guy who did this thing, and that's good enough for me.
But yes, Farragut North. I thought that I could use Live Five as the real springboard for this Blog, but then it occurred to me that I still haven't the slightest clue how one actually markets a Blog. I still don't, but that's a question for another night. I apologise to Charlie Peters, because he was one of the people who initially encouraged me in this endeavour, and I couldn't even give his play a proper treatment. But I will finish the review, as best as I am able, and I will post it here. That much is a guarantee.
See you all tomorrow night.
I suppose I was the victim of a two-fold reflexive insecurity. On one hand, I was worried that I'd write up a lame review and people would read it. On the other hand, I was afraid I'd write an excellent review that would sit there utterly ignored except for when my closest friends would glance over it during those times I specifically reminded them it existed. Neither of these insecurities have subsided any, but I decided to suffer through it. Since I suddenly find myself watching three plays in the span of one week, I decided I had to bite the bullet and get back into the swing of things. If nothing else, these reviews should be useful for my own personal development. And I don't need to take it too seriously, because it is, after all, "Just a Blog" (you know, I capitalised Blog back in my first entry, and now I'm just stuck doing it forever).
I'll admit, I had big dreams when I first started planning this out. I imagined being met with overnight success and wild fanfare, and that by this time I'd be able to stroll into any play in the city saying, "Bitch, please, I'm the Prairie Groundling. Impress me." This is obviously not going to happen (but my deep-seated desire to be a theatre bigshot manifested itself when I casually strolled into History of Breathing tonight without showing my ticket, and I didn't even realise it). But theatre in Saskatoon is growing, and it will continue to grow for some time, which means we will, at one point, require a culture of legitimate theatre reviews. I'm not promising to be the saviour to usher in this golden age, but I at least know that in the future I will be able to look back on this Blog and say that I was the guy who did this thing, and that's good enough for me.
But yes, Farragut North. I thought that I could use Live Five as the real springboard for this Blog, but then it occurred to me that I still haven't the slightest clue how one actually markets a Blog. I still don't, but that's a question for another night. I apologise to Charlie Peters, because he was one of the people who initially encouraged me in this endeavour, and I couldn't even give his play a proper treatment. But I will finish the review, as best as I am able, and I will post it here. That much is a guarantee.
See you all tomorrow night.
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