Timon of Athens at Bard on the Beach

It was back to Bard on the Beach last night, this time to see the all-female, modern-dress production of Timon of Athens, directed by Meg Roe. Timon is not often performed, and for good reason. It is resolutely dark. It is unevenly written (likely as a result of it having been co-authored by Thomas Middleton, which would also explain the darkness). And it has a thoroughly improbable plot.

Timon, played here with towering intensity and singular vision by the great Colleen Wheeler, is generous in spreading her wealth to an admiring group of friends, who fawn over and flatter her in order to keep the gifts coming. We meet this group in the opening scene, when they arrive at Timon's well-appointed home, which set designer Drew Facey has conceived as a beautiful and sleek modernist jewel. One by one, we meet Lucius (Michelle Fisk), Sempronius (an imperious Patti Allan), and Ventidius (Quelemia Sparrow, doing her best Real Housewives of West Vancouver impression), all kitted out in expensive couture (the amazing costumes are by Mara Gottler). This trio mixes with Timon's servants, PAs Flavius (an excellent Moya O'Connell) and Flaminius (Ming Hudson) and the silent male help (Joel D. Montgrand and Sebastian Archibald, the cops from Lysistrata), and the other guests, including a poet (Jennifer Lines) and painter (Kate Besworth), a late-to-arrive Isidore (Adele Noronha) and Timon's one honest friend, Apemantus (Marci T. House, delivering an unblinkingly truthful performance). With Wheeler's Timon sweeping in on her five-inch heels to bestow and receive air kisses, Roe plays the beginning of this opening scene as an overlapping hubbub of voices, knowing that it doesn't matter what of these characters' empty words we actually hear. Everything in this world is about appearances.

Which is why, when Timon eventually learns from Flavius, who had been trying to warn her, that she is bankrupt and is facing a posse of creditors demanding payment, she attempts to save face by dispatching Flavius and Flaminius to her friends to ask for a loan. Lucius, Ventidius, and Sempronius each spurn her request and in her rage Timon plans a final vengeful dinner party, the occasion here for a succession of coups-de-théâtre. First there is the huge round suspended table that descends from its hiding place in the overhead lighting fixture, and that the help set with expert precision. Then there is the unplating of Timon's surprise main course: bowls of warm water and smoke, one of which she promptly throws in Sempronius' face. That moment elicited a collective gasp from the audience, but it's when Wheeler started tearing up the set, lifting up a succession of floor panels and pulling out the supporting wooden joists to reveal the bare earth underneath that full pandemonium broke out. In Shakespeare's play text, Timon retreats to a cave following the dinner, vowing to spurn society. It's a genius decision on Roe's part to stage this as Timon pulling apart the literal foundations of her world. And Wheeler goes at it with absolute gusto, her white pantsuit becoming stained with earth, and her soignée chignon turning into a riot of rogue curls and loose strands.

Of course this is also where the already bizarre plot of the play becomes truly incredible. For what should Timon discover in the earth underneath her house but a treasure trove of money and gold? By this point, however, Timon is past caring, and in her complete nihilism forswears both financial redemption and, it must be said, the ex machina device of a happy ending. This perhaps explains her final exchanges with Apemantus and Flavius, the former offering simple hard reality in place of pity, the latter just not wanting her boss to die alone. But that is just what Timon does, and unlike in most of Shakespeare's other tragedies there is no attempt to sum up the moral of the story.

That is perhaps why, as Roe suggests in her program notes, the play is such a powerful parable for our own uncertain times. Rapaciousness and falsity are in ascendence everywhere, it seems, and with greatly unequal social consequences. In this stripped-down, 90-minute assault of near unremitting cynicism Roe forces her audience to do two seemingly antithetical things: ask ourselves why we are enjoying watching someone else's misfortune; and challenge ourselves to find even a smidgen of hope amidst all this darkness.

P

Titus Bouffonius at The Cultch

In 2015 Rumble Theatre launched an ambitious project to commission new works from acclaimed Canadian playwrights based on classics from the Western dramatic canon, but adapted to a contemporary local/Pacific Northwest context. The first work in the series, Hiro Kanagawa's Indian Arm, based on Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf, premiered in April of that year and has just been awarded the 2017 Governor General's Award for English drama (my review of the original production can be found here). Last night, the second play in the series, by the two-time GG award-winning playwright Colleen Murphy, opened at The Cultch. The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (which from here on we'll simply abbreviate to Titus B) is Murphy's inspired take on Shakespeare's bloodiest and most violent play, Titus Andronicus being a revenge tragedy more in the mold of contemporary works by Thomas Kyd and Thomas Middleton than what we later came to expect from the author of Hamlet and Othello and Macbeth.

Murphy is no stranger to dark material. Her play Pig Girl, inspired by the Robert Pickton case, depicts in one of its parallel plots the murder of an Indigenous woman in real time. But whereas Julie Taymor's 1999 film adaptation of Titus played to the gory appetites of screen audiences, bathing scenes in spectacular hues of red while also taking itself far too seriously, in Titus B Murphy chooses to mine the black humour of Shakespeare's original text, adopting a caustically farcical tone precisely in order to mock our fascination with generational violence. And she does so by drawing on the tradition of bouffon, her time writing the play having coincided with a playwright-in-residence gig at the University of Alberta, where Michael Kennard (one half of Mump and Smoot and a consultant on this show) teaches the art of clown. Thus, unlike with Kanagawa's take on Ibsen, Murphy's adaptation of Shakespeare is more one of style than of content. The characters and plot (albeit radically telescoped) remain the same, and large chunks of Shakespeare's dialogue are recited by the actors; however, at the top of the show a frame narrative introduces us to the members of the The Society of the Destitute, a taxpayer-funded community theatre troupe comprised of the very bottom layer of the 99% that will be putting on a show for us well-heeled types in the audience. Sob (Peter Anderson) plays the Roman general Titus; Spark (Naomi Wright) is Tamora, Queen of the Goths; Leap (Pippa Mackie) is a sexually aware Lavinia, daughter to Titus; Fink (a completely unrecognizable Craig Erickson) assails the dual roles of brothers Saturninus and Bassianus; and Boots (Sarah Afful) takes on the role of Aaron, though he would really prefer to be playing Macbeth.

Indeed, a whole bunch of other Shakespearean references get thrown our way throughout the ensuring 90 minutes, and if it quickly becomes clear that, notwithstanding their occasional lapses in delivering their lines, this rag-tag bunch of fringe performers knows the Bard's canon like the back of their characters' soon to be lopped off hands, we are also repeatedly reminded of why they eventually chose to stage this one: because it contains fourteen murders (a chalkboard keeps track of the victims). All of the deaths are depicted in a grotesquely cartoonish manner on stage, complete with plastic knives and ketchup bottles of fake splattering blood in the climactic scene where Titus serves up his revenge to Tamora and Saturninus in the form of a meat pie (its telegraphed appearance serving as a running gag throughout the play). And on the subject of meat pies, it should be noted that Murphy, like Stephen Sondheim in Sweeney Todd, also seems to be drawing on the traditions of Victorian melodrama, not least in her incorporation of music and song (the composer is Mishelle Cuttler). As with the story of Todd, who has been wronged by the legal justice system that has also robbed him of his wife and child, in Murphy's version of Titus's revenge plot there is a strong critique of the state, and especially a child and family welfare system that seems to prey on the most vulnerable in our society. To this end, the murders of Titus's and Tamora's sons are represented in this version via the dismembering, beheading and crucifixion of a succession of plastic baby dolls. And the real horror in watching comes not from registering the immense glee with which the performers attack this task, but in noting how hard we are laughing.

Stephen Drover's maximalist direction is perfectly suited to this material. I imagine that the operative word in rehearsal was "more": as in more mugging; more writhing; more fake blood. Production designer Drew Facey has constructed a set that nicely captures the play's gallows humour, including a final reveal that really hammers home Murphy's Swiftian point about the state eating its young. Finally, all of the actors are superb, inhabiting their bouffon humps and displaying their blackened teeth with slouchy, wide-mouthed delight. They are also able to move on a dime between line-perfect readings of Shakespeare's poetry and the contemporary comic asides interpolated by Murphy, and are clearly revelling in the physical comedy and direct cajoling of the audience. Sometimes that cajoling is scripted and sometimes it arises in the moment, as when last night, during Lavinia's "big feminist speech" about how only she has a right to decide who does what to her body, a cell phone went off. Without missing a beat, and following Mackie's lead by staying in full clown mode, the entire cast did a blistering take down of the offender and then adroitly picked things up from where they left off. Then again, maybe the interruption and ensuing admonishment was planned. Either way, it worked within the overall ethos and tone of the piece.

This is a production that takes its mandate to offend extremely seriously, and no matter our level of discomfort upon exiting the theatre we should be extremely thankful for this. We should also be thankful that we have in this country a playwright as fearless as Murphy. Formally there doesn't seem to be anything she can't do (witness the epic imagination of The Breathing Hole, which premiered earlier this year at Stratford); and in terms of subject matter, she is unafraid to stare into the abyss, and then to stare us down with what she has found there.

P

The Marriage of Figaro at the Vancouver Playhouse

The Vancouver Opera has just wrapped up its inaugural festival format--in which it has moved its operations from a full season of stand-alone productions spread out over the course of a calendar year to a two and a half week festival incorporating three works in repertory and a number of parallel concerts, talks, installations, and related events. Richard and I finally got to see one of the main stage productions yesterday afternoon when we attended one of the final performances of The Marriage of Figaro, which was playing at the Vancouver Playhouse.

I have to say that this production, following upon the PuSh Festival's very successful presentation of Third World Bunfight's version of Verdi's Macbeth, has confirmed that the Playhouse is now my preferred venue to see opera in the city. The intimacy of the space makes the music and singing feel at once warmer and fuller, and the action just generally more alive. Additionally, given that Mozart's score (which is closer to chamber opera than the grand 19th-century romantic works of Verdi) calls for the recitative parts of the libretto to be sung to a harpsichord, being that much closer to the orchestra means that every note feels that much more resonant.

Of course proximity also means that the design of your production needs to hold up to thorough visual scrutiny. Happily on that front this version exceeds expectations. Director Rachel Peake has opted for a modern-dress take on the comic plot, but one that allows for a few historical anachronisms. As such, Drew Facey's gorgeous set--which morphs over the course of the opera's four acts from the interior of servant Susanna's chambers to those of her mistress, Countess Almaviva, to the grand hall and finally the exterior gardens of the estate--references 18th-century neoclassicism in its pediments and brocaded walls, but it is also sleekly and unfussily modern, with minimal furnishings and, most arrestingly, a mirrored floor for the interior scenes. The costumes, by hot young Albertan designer Sid Neigum, alternate between finely tailored monochromes for the lovers Susanna and Figaro to riotous patterns for the buffon characters of Cherubino and Barbarina, and from the plainly utilitarian (the quasi-military fatigues worn by the Count) to the overly decorative (the hooped dress worn by the Countess in Act 3). All of this is beautifully lit by lighting designer John Webber.

The performances were also uniformly excellent. The new paradigm in opera these days is for singers, no matter how fine the voice, to also be actors, and Peake draws fine comic texture--and timing--from the entire cast. Because this is opera buffa, most of the characters are broad and recognizable types; nevertheless, for us to be seduced by the sentiment of the arias, not to mention accept the implausibility of the plot, we have to believe the Countess' pain and the see-saw outrage of Figaro and Susanna at each other's apparent infidelity. On this front, the characters' various asides--a key part of the myriad stratagems and deceptions and counterplots set in motion in this opera--are especially well handled, not least in the opening act's catfight between Susanna and Marcellina, the latter seeking Figaro as her own boy-toy, only to have it revealed in Act 3 that she is his long-lost mother!

For me, the women in this production outshone the men in terms of overall vocal quality. Caitlin Wood as Susanna, Leslie Ann Bradley as Countess Almaviva, and the wonderful Mireille Lebel as a willowy and physically elastic Cherubino were special standouts. Among the men I was most captivated by Phillip Addis as Count Almaviva, both in terms of singing and acting. Alex Lawrence was suitably dashing as our put-upon hero, Figaro, but he had some trouble with breath in his lower register (which, to be sure, is pretty low given that Figaro is written as a baritone and not a tenor), and there were a few cracks in the upper register as well. But these are minor quibbles and the entire cast and crew are to be commended for this spirited and refreshed take on a classic from the operatic repertoire.

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Blasted at Performance Works

Pedophilia (possibly incestuous), rape (vaginal and anal), cannibalism: just your typical Sunday afternoon at the theatre. At least it was for those of us in the audience at Performance Works yesterday, there to take in Pi Theatre's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted, directed by Richard Wolfe and on through Saturday, April 25th. The play premiered at the Royal Court in London in 1995, where its increasingly horrific catalogue of acts of violence and sexual degradation incensed critics. Never mind that Kane was referencing the very real atrocities then taking place in Bosnia, nor that she was consciously drawing on Greek tragedy--albeit in a way that makes plainly visible all the physical nastiness that in the classical tradition happened off-stage. To upstanding London theatregoers of the time, Kane was being unnecessarily provocative, too "in yer face," to reference the label that, for better or worse, got attached to Kane and several of her fellow upstart UK playwrighting contemporaries.

Now, of course, twenty years after its premiere (and sixteen after Kane's suicide in 1999) the play feels more relevant than ever, what with the various acts of unspeakable brutality we daily witness in the media emanating from Syria, or Iraq, or Kenya, or the Ukraine--not to mention the armed interventions our own governments in the West have undertaken in order to ensure, or so we are told, that such acts don't reach our shores. To that end, a nice touch by Wolfe in this production is having the voice of current UK Prime Minister David Cameron extolling on the radio at various points all that his government has done in the name of defending the integrity of the British Isles against the infidel hordes clawing at the gates. However, to Ian (Michael Kopsa), the male protagonist of Kane's play, such measures are too little and have come too late. A virulently racist, misogynistic and homophobic journalist whose specialty is covering sensational stories involving sex and murder--but who may also be an undercover government operative (he carries a gun)--the fiftyish Ian has taken refuge in a hotel room in the middle of the vile, foul-smelling city (we presume London, but in fact it's Leeds) he has come to loathe--in part because according to him it's now overrun with "Wogs." Joining Ian is Cate (Cherise Clarke), a much younger and extremely quiescent woman who just may be: a) mentally disabled; b) Ian's daughter; c) Ian's former lover; d) all of the above. At any rate, much of the first half of the play concerns Ian's attempts to cajole Cate into having sex with him, and Cate's attempts to fend him off.  When rhetorical persuasion fails, Ian simply takes what he has been denied when Cate is unable to defend herself: dry humping her on the floor when she is unconscious as a result of one of her fits and, it is suggested after one of the play's strategic blackouts, raping her when she is out cold during the night.

The relationship between Ian and Cate would quickly descend into caricature were it not for two things. First, Kane, is at pains to show us that her protagonists are much more complex than we might at first credit them to be. Ian's rage at the world comes from a deep vulnerability, a compensatory realization that as an aging white, middle class man whose body is rapidly betraying him (and whose past sins may be catching up with him), all he wants is for someone to love him. For her part, Cate has an inner core of strength, as well as a capacity for cold assessment of the situation when she needs it. She realizes that Ian is pathetic and ridiculous, and announces as much to him; but she also has compassion for him, as she does for humanity in general (there are several references to her taking care of her mother and brother, and she is shown caring for and, after it dies, burying an abandoned baby later in the play). Indeed, it is a mark of Kane's subtlety as a playwright that, almost without us knowing it, and in apparent contradiction of what we are witnessing physically on stage, we end up feeling that there is a real bond--something that indeed approximates love--between these two damaged souls. It helps, in this regard, that the roles are played by actors as talented as Kopsa and Clarke, who in their very demanding emotional and physical interactions over the course of the play effortlessly convey the complex shared history of their characters. In fact, the play ends with a quiet scene between the couple that, precisely because of all the horror that precedes it, is shatteringly tender, and that involves Ian uttering to Cate a simple "thank you."

Except that it's not that simple, and for Ian and us in the audience to feel any measure of grace at play's end we first have to earn it. Which is where the second, and primarily structural, innovation of Kane's writing comes in. She shows us that the domestic violence between Ian and Cate inside their hotel room is parallel to, and in fact an extension of, the military violence outside by having the latter literally intrude on the former. I am referring here to the appearance of the third character in the play, the Soldier (Raresh DiMofte), whose specific allegiance (apart from that he shows to the memory of his slaughtered girlfriend) is never identified, just as the factional conflict that mysteriously creeps up on Ian and Cate remains primarily allegorical. The Soldier is Ian's shadow self, the abjected other whose return is designed to remind Ian--and us--that, in direct antithesis to the compassion represented by Cate (who, crucially, during the scenes between the two men is locked in the bathroom), perhaps what most marks us as human is that we are capable of both imagining and doing just about anything. It's a brutal truth that is almost impossible to confront--which perhaps explains why, after he sodomizes him, the Soldier chews out Ian's eyes. As I said, Kane knew her Greek tragedy.

This is the second staging of Blasted that I have seen, the first being the celebrated Soho Rep run in New York in 2008 that starred the amazing Reed Birney and Marin Ireland. I have deliberately avoided comparing the two, as I wanted to judge Wolfe's production on its own terms. To that end, my first props go to the design team (led by the ubiquitous and super-talented Drew Facey--see my previous review of Indian Arm); not only have they created a more than credibly generic hotel room, but they manage to blow it up in a believable fashion. That I have spent more time in this review than in my previous one (which you can read here) contemplating the sophistication of Kane's script speaks to Wolfe's attentive care to its layered complexity. I do think the pacing in the second half flags a bit--the blackouts that mark the space between Ian's successive "states of emergency" could come more quickly (though I do understand that there are some basic technical encumbrances that are also being dealt with here). Finally, there is the question of nudity. Given what happens in the play, a degree of it is more or less to be expected. And yet, whereas we see Clarke full frontally in a longish scene where, following Ian's night-time sexual assault, she gets out of bed and traumatically stumbles into her clothes, we only ever see Kopsa's backside--despite ample opportunity, given what happens to him, to display more (and this goes for DiMofte as well). Not that I'm making an argument for upping the titillation quotient. And I have no idea whether this was a primarily directorial or an actorly decision. In the absence of that information, however, the decision does seem to replicate some familiar tropes of gendered gratuity--tropes that Kane's play, I would argue, expressly critiques.

P.