In the Next Room at the Jericho Arts Centre

Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is a strange work of theatre. Paradoxically, had it been even stranger--that is, had the playwright found a way both in content and form to match her provocative subject matter to a more radical and intersectional feminist/queer politics--the play might have been successful. But after first appearing to mock them, Ruhl instead opts to embrace the conventions of the nineteenth-century drawing room comedy, including its bourgeois hetero-patriarchal ending. This results in a play that veers wildly in its tone and that ends up reinscribing the very domestic structures--not least the whole idea of the family itself--it appears to be questioning. Director Keltie Forsyth, overseeing Ensemble Theatre Company's production of the play, which runs in repertory as part of their annual summer theatre festival until August 17, does her best to navigate these swings, but notwithstanding some fine performances and compelling dramatic moments, this staging leaves me flummoxed as to why the play (which ran on Broadway and was nominated for a handful of Tony awards) has garnered so much critical praise.

At the centre of the play, which is set in the late 1800s, just after the dawn of electricity, is Catherine Givings (Lindsay Nelson), an upper-middle-class woman in New York who is frustrated by the inattention of her husband, Dr. Givings (Sebastain Kroon), and also by her inability to breastfeed her newborn daughter. Dr. Givings' speciality is treating female hysteria and as a result of Edison's discovery of electrical current, Givings has found a sure-fire way to cure his patients: by applying a vibratory pulse to their pubic areas, which is supposed to relieve the pressure upon their wombs and restore them to a more contemplative mood. Thus does Ruhl introduce the conceit contained in the parenthesis of her play's title by anchoring her plot in actual history. Catherine, listening to her husband treat Mrs. Daldry (an excellent Christine Reinfort) "in the next room," becomes intrigued by her cries of pleasure and after forming a friendship with the woman over the course of successive visits (and also after sneaking into her husband's operating room and testing the machine on herself), Catherine convinces Mrs. Daldry that they should compare their respective responses to the vibrating machine's stimulus. But by this point we have learned that Mrs. Daldry much prefers the manual stimulation of Dr. Givings' assistant, Annie (Alexis Kellum-Creer), whose physiological and emotional attentions she finds much more satisfying than those of her husband (an incredibly stiff David Wallace).

Added to this mix are two sub-plots. The first concerns a black wet-nurse, Elizabeth (Mariam Barry, playing the character's suffering of numerous racist slights with just the right mix of dignity and quietly contained rage), hired to tend to the Givings' baby. The second involves a worldly painter, Leo Irving (Francis Winter), who has come to Dr. Givings for his own treatment for male hysteria (cue the vibrating anal probe). Catherine and Leo enjoy a brief flirtation that succeeds in arousing the jealousy of Dr. Givings; however, Leo only has eyes for Elizabeth. All of this culminates in a clumsy denouement that leaves no one happy except the white bourgeois heterosexual professional couple, who rediscover their passion for each other (and, it turns out, the sudden obsolescence of Dr. Givings' machine) by making love in the snow. To be sure, in this scene it is Catherine who takes control of the lovemaking, undressing her husband and making his nude body an object of erotic display. But the fact that she ends up on top in the play's concluding tableau does not, to my mind, make up for the fact that earlier in the second act the same-sex possibilities that Ruhl telegraphs in Mrs. Daldry and Annie's one shared kiss are shut down immediately and with absolute finality as soon as the two women break off from their lip-lock: "I don't suppose I shall ever see you again," Mrs. Daldry states to Annie as she moves with purpose towards the door. Similarly, the implicit critique of white liberal feminism that Ruhl seems to be embedding in her script via her suggestion that first wave suffrage in America depended on the labour of black women's bodies gets muddied by having the relationship between Catherine and Elizabeth triangulated through a man, and a rather caricatured cad at that.

I should emphasize that I see these problems as intrinsic to the structure of the play, not as symptomatic of specific choices made in this production. Indeed, given my misgivings (forgive the pun) about the play's politics, I think that Forsyth has done a remarkable job in spotlighting multiple connections between the women characters in particular, ones that suggest possible alternative outcomes for them all. On the topic of lighting, however, the dimming and raising of the lights every time Catherine turned off or on her newfangled electric lamp drove me a bit batty. As did the rickety door between the living room and Dr. Givings' operating theatre. However, Julie White's costumes were a marvel of period detail. Indeed, the successive scenes of Mrs. Daldry undressing and dressing with Annie's assistance before and after her treatments distilled for me into a wordless pantomime much that this play was trying to say about female repression and empowerment.

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The Romans in Britain at the Jericho Arts Centre

The plays of Howard Brenton are performed far less regularly in North America than those of British New Left contemporaries like David Hare and Caryl Churchill. That's a shame, because Brenton's work is every bit as formally inventive, historically capacious, and politically hard-hitting--and on the latter front often more so. So it comes as welcome news that Ensemble Theatre Company is presenting Brenton's 1980 play The Romans in Britain as part of its fourth summer season in residence at the Jericho Arts Centre; the play runs in repertory with Ensemble's productions of Harold Pinter's Betrayal and William Wycherly The Country Wife through August 20th.

The conceit of Brenton's play is to juxtapose and invite historical comparison between the Roman invasion of Britain in 54 BCE and England's military occupation of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 70s; he also throws in some scenes depicting the Saxon invasion and war with the Romano-Celts in the 4th century AD, though wisely decides to forgo a staging of the Norman conquest in 1066. The play opens with two petty criminals (Yurij Kis and Matthew Bissett) on the run. Having killed a man and stolen his iron and wine, they are hoping to make it to the Irish Sea ahead of the advancing Romans, terrifying stories of which are already sweeping the land--including the fact that the Romans are said to have eagle heads, an allusion to their iconic centurion helmets (duly reproduced by expert costume designer Julie White). Publicly, however, one Celtic family, led by a formidable matriarch played with assured command by Rebecca Walters, is having none of the rumours, arguing that the Romans are just a ruse to get them to abandon their land. The folly of such thinking is brought to stark and brutal light in the next scene, when the sons of said family, having just enjoyed a pleasant afternoon swim, find themselves staring down the swords of three Roman centurions. What follows earned the play lasting notoriety when it premiered at London's National Theatre, the graphic depiction of an attempted rape of one of the sons--also a Druid priest, and here played by Ensemble company member Ennis Hannah with a palpable mix of defiance and vulnerability--having provoked a legal charge of "gross indecency" by one offended and over-zealous patron, Mary Whitehouse. While director Richard Wolfe does not shy away from foregrounding the physical violence in this scene, what shocks the most is Brenton's language, liberally salted with obscenities that transcend historical time periods and reflecting the casual brutality of the soldiers' actions: indeed, the Roman rapist is most upset that his victim's soiling of himself has caused him to lose his hard-on. (Brenton is quite fond of the scatological, and there is a running joke about the building of latrines that spans the play's different temporalities.)

At the end of the first act, one lowly female slave, having just avenged herself by killing her own rapist (one of the criminals from the first scene), raises a rock against the anonymous hordes who will surely continue to come. And, indeed, this is the cue for a coup de théâtre that will also serve as Brenton's transition to his depiction of more contemporary "troubles" on the British Isles: for the slave woman's rock-wielding arm is immediately answered by the arrival of half a dozen fatigues-clad and machine gun-toting British paramilitary. Plus ça change. What makes the second half of Brenton's play continue to resonate, even after the Easter Accords and almost 20 years of tenuous peace in Ireland, is that he doesn't force the historical parallels; he merely lays bare the evidence by counterpointing scenes. Thus, in the 1970s we are presented with Tom Chichester, an English intelligence officer attempting to infiltrate the IRA by posing as a sympathizer and runner of illegal Communist weapons having uneasy dreams in a wheat field of past atrocities, including the death of a Saxon soldier, an act of patricide by two Celtic sisters, and the murder of a Romano-Celt lady by her servant-turned-lover. (At last night's performance the role of Tom, as well as that of Julius Caesar in Act 1, was taken on with last-minute aplomb by the on-book Ensemble AD, Tariq Leslie, who was subbing for an absent cast mate.) Tom's own eventual murder by the IRA members who expose him underscores the brutal logic of endless wars begat by self-perpetuating imperial powers, a lesson as applicable to Iraq and Syria and the DRC and the Ukraine and the war against ISIS today as it was to Northern Ireland or Vietnam or any number of African states in the 1960s and 70s: as one of the IRA cell members puts it, in war the rules are simple, whereas in peace they are much less clearly defined.

Nevertheless, Brenton ends his play with an epilogue that takes us back to the 4th century, where the two sisters form an alliance with two runaway cooks, formerly part of the retinue of the murdered lady. The male cook starts to tell a story of a legendary king in whose name a long peace is established in the land; when the sisters ask the name of this king, the male cook turns to his female companion, who says: "Arthur? I don't know, Arthur?" That Brenton has to turn to myth to construct a plausibly perfectible narrative of national solidarity for Britain--just as successive generations from the Middle Ages to the Victorian era would likewise recycle Arthurian legend to shore up their sense of identity--is telling. Indeed, this scene and the play as a whole had special resonance for me post-Brexit, when the political chimera of a united (and ethnically pure) Albion is also being returned to as justification for anti-immigrant sentiment and ugly acts of racism. As interesting to me is that Brenton begins and ends his play with scenes depicting members of the lumpenproletariat (criminals, slaves, refugees and other members of the lower orders whom Marx theorized could not be trusted to achieve class consciousness and join the workers' struggle), suggesting perhaps that if the revolution continues to perpetuate the crimes of the imperial state, then perhaps it's best to eschew organized system of power altogether. In our present post-Occupy and hacktivist era, with multiple forms of precarity (economic and otherwise) extending through various strata of society, it's a bracing sentiment that likewise continues to resonate. And it offers lessons to those guilelessly angry followers of Donald Trump who continue to think he has even the remotest clue (let alone a genuine desire) about how to make America great again. Faded empires do not return to past glory; they simply sputter on, mired in the detritus that is their legacy.

All of which is to say that this production deserves to be seen. Mounted in the round, and with Ensemble's incredibly hard-working cast of 16 taking on a remarkable 45 different parts, the staging is as sensorially affecting (dirt and stones litter the floor, we hear the howling of dogs and the cawing of birds, and live drums beat throughout) as it is intellectually invigorating. Sitting in the front row, I was able to feel the pulsating physicality underscoring so many of the performances--even when characters are cowering behind rocks or bushels of wheat, hoping to remain unseen. The simple yet highly effective choral movement that Ziyian Kwan has choreographed for the opening of each act helps to telegraph this reciprocal kinaesthetic bond between the performers and spectators, something amplified by Wolfe's decision to have most of the ensemble, when not onstage, remain visible and seated alongside the audience on opposite risers--as if they, too, are powerless to stop the terrible onslaught of history.

From 1978-1980, Hare, Churchill and Brenton scored a theatrical trifecta with plays that deconstructed, in both form and content, the legacy of British imperialism. And yet while Hare's Plenty and Churchill's Cloud Nine have definitively entered the Western dramatic canon and are often remounted (with a revival of Plenty starring Rachel Weisz scheduled for New York's Public Theatre this fall), Brenton's Romans in Britain remains more on the fringe. Kudos to Ensemble and director Richard Wolfe for giving Vancouver audiences a rare opportunity to see this important and still powerful work.

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