Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
✭✭✩✩✩
by David French, directed by Bill Glassco
Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
November 13-December 16, 2001
"What Did You Do in the War, Pa?"
"Soldier's Heart" is the latest installment in David's French's acclaimed series of plays chronicling the tribulations of the Mercer family from life in their native Newfoundland to their relocation to Toronto. It is the latest installment and also the least. Unlike the previous four plays, "Soldier's Heart" is unconvincing on every level. The flaws in dramaturgy are so deep neither the cast nor a director who has been the main proponent of French can disguise them.
All five plays place the tensions inside the family within specific historical periods. French's first two, "Leaving Home" (1972) and "Of the Fields, Lately" (1973), showed Jacob Mercer's conflicts with his sons in the 1950s and 1960s respectively. French then backtracked in "Salt-Water Moon" (1984) to show the courtship of Jacob and his future wife in 1926 Newfoundland. "1949" (1988) gave us Mercers on the eve of Newfoundland's entry into Confederation. With "Soldier's Heart" French backtracks again to June 30, 1924, two years before "Salt-Water Moon", with the 16-year-old Jacob Mercer, bags packed, waiting for the Caribou to take him away from his family to St, John's. The date, coincidentally, is exactly eight years after the Battle of the Somme.
As we soon discover, Jacob's mother has suggested he leave after Jacob's father, Esau, caught in a sudden flashback to World War I, tried to attack Jacob with a knife. Jacob, unbelievably for his age, time and place, rather than being put off by his father's attack sees it as a cry for help. Like some sort of junior psychotherapist, he is consumed with the notion that if only Esau will talk to him about what happened at the Somme where Esau's brother Will was killed he will exorcise the memories that haunt him and thus conquer his "soldier's heart" which, as we are told, is now known as "shell shock". Esau had promised to tell him about the war when he first returned from Europe, but has never kept that promise. Not content with Esau's silence, Jacob has pumped all the locals once in the Newfoundland regiment, including the stationmaster Bert, for all the details they can remember about their years overseas. In the tradition of classic American drama, a terrible secret known to Bert and Esau eventually comes to light. Rather than being shocked by the revelation, Jacob, improbably, is easily able to put Esau's horrible deed into context and forgive him. All three sing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary", and we are to believe that the terror Esau has relived for eight years is now over.
The dialogue is as unconvincing as the plot. Since Jacob already knows most of what Esau did in the war, he is constantly prompting him to tell him information that he already knows with the excuse that he has to hear it "from your mouth". Repeatedly Esau gets angry and refuses to say anything, Bert chimes in with his own memories and Esau, for unknown reasons, immediately joins him. The artifice of this procedure as we move from Esau's training in Scotland to Gallipoli to France is obvious long before we get to the "secret". Bert, meanwhile, has rather inconsistently been encouraging Esau to talk and warning Jacob not to ask Esau too many questions. Once at the "secret" Bert abandons the former for the latter at which point Esau, again for unknown reasons, decides to press on with the worst of his tale. The information about the Newfoundlanders in World War I is quite interesting, but French is unable to make what sounds like a voiceover for a documentary into anything resembling natural speech.
Bill Glassco has directed the premières of all of David French's Mercer plays. It is thus all the more surprising that the characters are so ineffectually portrayed. Glassco allows the three actors to make only rudimentary attempts at a Newfoundland accent. Only Darren Keay (Jacob) gets the rhythm right. Oliver Becker (Esau), who has mastered other accents in the past, seems to have no clue how to do it. Keay is excellent as the angry youth of the first part, but once the play settles into his constant prompting of "Tell me more", there's little he can do to make the artifice of the situation seem natural. Randy Hughson (Bert) plays the most realistic of the three characters. But his vacillations during the questioning are nothing more than French's inept attempt to create tension. I have admired Oliver Becker in the past but he seems as much at a loss with his character as with his accent. If Esau truly is so adamant about saying nothing about the war--which is the whole premise of the play--why does Glassco have him chime in so readily with facts along with Bert and why does Becker not muster some sense of conflicting emotions when he does so?
At least Sue LePage's costumes capture the period and her set of an isolated train station looks under Robert Thomson's moody lighting at once realistic and symbolic. Yet, it is not clear why she did not turn the set to the right by 45˚ to make it more visually interesting and to put the playing area within sight of the whole auditorium.
Rabid followers of the Mercer plays will want to see "Soldier's Heart" even if it provides little insight into the rest of the series. Those curious about these plays should wait for a revival of one of the earlier four. The play is only 85 minutes long, but I would rather spend the time reading the history itself French used as a background rather than see it dressed up as this ill-conceived, ill-executed play.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Darren Keay, Oliver Becker and Randy Hughson. ©2001 Cylla von Tiedemann.
2001-11-21
Soldier’s Heart