Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
✭✭✭✭✩
by Conor McPherson, directed by Dean Gabourie
ACME Theatre Co., Artword Theatre, Toronto
September 21-October 8, 2000
“When I was a boy, I was afraid of the dark... What was there”.
A Dublin theatre critic pimps for a group of London vampires--yes, that's the story of Conor McPherson's one-man play "St. Nicholas". After an acclaimed run of an abridged version at the SummerWorks Theatre Festival (Toronto's other fringe festival) in 1999, the ACME Theatre Co. now brings us a full-length production. McPherson wrote this play in 1997, just before "The Weir", which won him so much acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. All of McPherson's work to date has had to do with story-telling, and "St. Nicholas" could almost be considered a study for "The Weir" and explanation of the meaning of story-telling in his other works. Where "The Weir" presents us with five people telling each other ghost stories, "St. Nicholas" presents us with one man telling the audience a story about vampires. Where "The Weir" is totally naturalistic with no breaking of the fourth wall, in "St. Nicholas" the wall is broken in its very first moments since the sole actor addresses his bizarre story directly to the audience throughout and even invites us to speculate on why we may find it hard to believe. I would recommend "St. Nicholas" to anyone who has already seen "The Weir" or who is planning on seeing the CanStage production later this year both because it sheds so much light on the other work and because it is a fascinating play in its own right.
The story the actor tells us in "St. Nicholas" falls neatly into two halves, separated by an intermission. In the first half we learn that the actor speaking to us is portraying that most loathed of beings--a theatre critic. He enjoys the power he wields in making and breaking people's careers. He has a comfortable life in Dublin with the requisite wife and two children, one of each sex. He feels he knows none of his family, especially his daughter, and he longs for something more--to be a "real" writer or somehow to have real power, rather than making his living off of the artistic endeavours of other. He drifts into alcoholism and a one point becomes so enamoured of the star of a Dublin production of "Salome" that when the show transfers to London, he flies there in hopes of seeing this young woman again. After a major drinking binge and failure to have any real contact with her, he wanders aimlessly and passes out. When he awakens he encounters a young man named William, who is a vampire. In the second half, William not only invites the critic to his home but offers to let him live there if he will regularly procure for him and his female companions young healthy people for their nourishment. To reveal any more of this tale would spoil it, but I guarantee you will hanging on every word.
In Adam Bramble director Dean Gabourie has found an excellent actor to portray the Critic. According to McPherson's foreword to the play, the actor playing the Critic "doesn't act anything out. He just tells us the story". I can imagine any number of actors who would turn this one-man show into a star vehicle and thus go counter to what the playwright specifies. Bramble, however, shows the right humility in relation to the text--he is there as a medium for the text and not to promote himself. It is unfortunate that he uses a British rather than Irish accent which would make the rhythms of the text sound more natural. At the final preview performance I attended, there was also a certain tentative quality about his movement and his pauses and re-entries into the story which I hope will work themselves out over time. Yet, he does succeed in making us interested in what happens to this thoroughly dislikable man, who is pleased to give bad reviews to everything he sees, often writing them before the event.
Camellia Koo's set consists only of a chair, table and piano, but she did find the perfect antique chair to suit the Gothic atmosphere. Eric Sage and Judith Sandiford's lighting is especially good in creating a creepy greenish aura for the vampires' home, but their changes of light tend to be too rapid to suit the mood. Peter Chapman's sound design includes bar noises and jingle bells whenever the title character is mentioned which are too abrupt and too loud.
One might well wonder whether this show would be more effective as a radio play instead of being staged since a person's imagination would be freer to engage with the text. That is, however, precisely why McPherson wrote it as a stage play. He has the Critic interrupt his narrative to step off the stage and wander into the audience to question whether the tenets we hold true in science are any more fantastic than his story. Both, he claims, are ultimately questions of belief. This digression, like the play's staging itself, is meant to remind us constantly of the artifice of our situation as audience--that we decide to believe the actor is a character and that his story is true. McPherson leaves the conclusion deliberately ambiguous. Was this encounter with vampires the product of an alcohol-drenched mind, a dreamt vision of journalists living off the lives of others or an actual supernatural event? As with old St. Nicholas, some things exist and can change us simply because we are willing to believe.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Adam Bramble.
2000-09-27
St. Nicholas