Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✩✩✩
by R.H. Thomson, directed by Jonas Jurasas
Canadian Stage Company, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto
February 7-March 9, 2002
"Missing in Action"
"The Lost Boys", written and performed by R. H. Thomson, is one of the more tedious evenings I've spent in the theatre. The idea of making a play from the correspondence of one's family during World War I might seem like a good idea at first glance. But Thomson can't overcome the blandness of his material or make it even vaguely dramatic. What is worse, if Thomson has not sufficiently shaped the script, director Jonas Jurasas has done nothing to shape the production.
"The Lost Boys" premiered at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa in 2000. The current production, a co-production between the Manitoba Theatre Centre and Canadian Stage, played in Winnipeg in November 2001 before transferring to Toronto. R. H. Thomson is one of Canada's finest actors, but someone should have said before the play reached this stage, "Sorry. It just doesn't work".
Thomson had had the idea for 20 years that he should make something of one of his family's treasures--the letters from five of his great-uncles who fought in World War I written to their mother back home. Four of the five would die in battle or of its consequences. Thomson initially thought of making them into a television documentary, and indeed that's what he should have done. The letters could have acted as a Canadian family's voice in the Great War.
Instead, Thomson was encouraged to write a play foregrounding the letters themselves. The overriding difficulty is that the letters are not inherently interesting and even less dramatic. As Thomson admits in Act 2, Anglo-Canadians of that day, like their British, were trained not to express emotions, especially when they might distress the people back home. As a result the letters put a brave, even jolly, face on the war without describing its horror or verbalizing reactions to it. As Thomson told the Toronto Sun about the letters, "They were hard to figure out, because they were so trivial". Thomson notes this in the play by quoting one letter: "The mud is awful. Could you send me some socks?"
To shape this unpromising material, Thomson frames the play with an account of a vigil he held as a teenager in Belgium for these great-uncles he thought he should feel something for but knew, except for one, only through half-read letters. The intent is to make the play seem like one long vigil itself and to construe the action as Thomson's own discovery of the realities that lie unspoken beneath the letters' surface. Unfortunately, if the letters themselves are trivial the context he finds for them is little more than what one might read in any encyclopedia and his conclusions on the order of "War is hell" are clichéd. Thomson's attempts to give his private ruminations greater resonance by contrasting the "evolution" of Einstein's theories of the universe with the "devolution" of the generals' approach to the war are too forced to seem like more than inept stabs at profundity. The low point of the show is Thomson's detailing of his obsession with and success in finding the physical spot where his father died in a car accident. A play that has seemed extraordinarily self-indulgent finally slips into the confessional and becomes embarrassing.
The play vaguely follows the chronology of the war but Thomson's introduction of characters and themes is confusing. While he physically distinguishes the five brothers--Art, Joe, George. Jack and Harold--he does not successfully do so by voice so that we often are not sure which one is speaking when or whether it is Thomson himself speaking or Thomson as a teenager. With the great-uncles undercharacterized and with little of interest to say, we can't become involved with them, their fate or Thomson's quest to understand them. When we find Thomson re-enacting emotions he had to real events, his very acting undermines the "realness" it's meant to convey. Where he is most effective is in mime as when he enacts the "dance" of skeletons as they are pushed to the earth's surface. Recorded voices--Nancy Palk, Kate Hurman, Danielle Gregoire, Welcome Ngozi--are used to play the women the boys knew and an African Art speaks with. Palk is particularly moving as the "lost boys'" mother, Elizabeth Stratford.
With so many inherent problems the show needs a director far more incisive than Jonas Jurasas, who does nothing to focus the work. He illustrates but does not illuminate the text. Thomson mentions a bomb; we hear a bomb. Thomson mentions rain; we hear rain. Thomson mentions singing; we hear singing, and so on. He has Thomson move all over the stage and up a flight of stairs. But for long periods he has him sit still listening to the recorded voices reading. For all its surface motion the play is static.
The production's most notable aspect is its design. Astrid Janson has covered the otherwise bare stage with dirt and added a trench whence Thomson produces hidden props. Behind are three gauzy panels in front of a screen. Janson thus recreates the structure of the painting "La Rêve", owned my Mrs. Stratford, depicting soldiers asleep on the earth, their dreams appearing above the clouds in the background. To create this background lighting and visual designer Martin Conboy has done an extraordinary job of combining a wide range of lighting effects with projections, sometimes altered to create the illusion of motion, of facsimiles of letters, telegrams and other documents and portraits of the Stratford family along with archival photos from World War I on and off the battlefield. This and Duncan Morgan's vivid soundscape are ultimately more involving than any of Thomson's text.
As it is, "The Lost Boys" is rather like watching home-movies for two hours of people you don't know. They may be fascinating to the person narrating them, but if he can give no reason to be interested beyond his own fascination, they will seem pointless. It is dramatic truth, not fact alone, that makes a play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: R. H. Thomson in The Lost Boys. ©2002 Bruce Monk.
2002-02-14
The Lost Boys