Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✭✩✩
by Aleksandr Vvedensky, directed by Aleksandar Lukac
Talk Is Free Theatre, Poor Alex Theatre, Toronto
February 14-March 2, 2002
"Merry Anti-Christmas"
One of the good things about living in Toronto is the presence of so many small theatre companies willing to wrench little-know works from obscurity. Such is the case with the new Talk Is Free Theatre who bring us Aleksandr Vvedensky's 1938 comedy "Christmas at the Ivanovs", subtitled "An Anti-Christmas Anti-Play". I saw the play during its short run last year at the Robert Gill Theatre and was delighted to glimpse something of Russian Absurdism, a movement previously unknown to me. Director Aleksandar Lukac has now brought his production with many of the same actors to the Poor Alex Theatre and to a potentially larger audience. Check your reason at the door because Vvedensky makes Ionesco look as staid as Ibsen.
Aleksandr Vvedensky (1904-1941) was a member of OBERIU, sometimes called Russia's "last avant-garde movement". (The name is an acronym for Obyedineniye Realnogo Isskustva, "The Association for Real Art".) Vvedensky and the better-known OBERIU member Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) wrote "real art" based on the premise that the world is absurd. They satirized literary conventions and did away away with logic since they did not reflect this reality. Needless to say, this idea clashed with the Stalinist view (later to become "Socialist realism") of what literature should be. OBERIU members were not allowed to publish or perform their works and were assigned jobs in the children's literature departments of state publishers. Eventually Vvedensky and Kharms were arrested and died in prison. Only in the 1970s and '80s were their works assembled and published prompting their current wave of popularity.
To reflect the absurdity of the world "Christmas at the Ivanovs" is built on internal contradictions. Thus, despite the title the play is not about the Ivanovs but the Puzyrovs. On Christmas Eve, while cooks are slaughtering chickens and suckling pigs, the Nurse Adelina Schmetterling is bathing the seven Puzyrov children who range in age from 1to 82. One child, Sonia Ostrova, 32, becomes so obnoxious in bragging about her breasts and in insulting the Nurse's private parts that the Nurse in fit of rage beheads her with an axe. Will the Puzyrovs be able to have a happy Christmas despite this tragedy? Will the Nurse be brought to justice? These are the questions the play nominally pursues though in fact they simply provide a framework for a series of sketches satirizing the police, doctors and judges and along with them reason, language, sentimentality, story-telling and the theatre itself.
Lukac's concept is to present "Ivanovs" in the form of an improvisational cabaret. The play itself is only about 25 pages long, but Lukac has lengthened it to two hours through the insertion of musical numbers, some of Kharms's mini-stories and extended improvisations on the play's view of human interactions as game-playing. He introduces a Narrator to read and embellish the stage directions. Kurt Smeaton makes him hilariously officious, incompetent, not especially articulate but ruthlessly dictatorial. A kind of sadistic game develops between him and the cast as he deliberately narrates actions he knows they cannot perform. The two policemen are not prominent figures in Vvedensky's text, but thanks to Philip Riccio and David Dodsley they become the most memorable characters in the play. Their two main scenes--a Möbius-like intragastric quest to find the map the captain has swallowed and their insistence on interrogating the Nurse despite her willingness to confess--are side-splittingly funny and bring to mind the best of Monty Python.
Michelle Polak and Darcy Murphy are very effective as Mother and Father Puzyrov who blame their evening at the ballet for Sonia's death. In one remarkable scene their grieving becomes a competition leading to their sexual arousal and coupling over their daughter's corpse. Keith Barker is excellent as the precocious one-year-old Petya, who already can speak his thoughts and is traumatized by the scene above. As one might expect the character who seems the least insane is the axe-wielding Nurse herself. Michaela Hayek gives her great intensity despite her character's increasingly bizarre situation. The Nurse's momentary fit of madness comes to seem minor compared to the institutional madness around her.
Julie Dumais does fine job in the more than six roles she plays. Tim Gentle is best as the zealous would-be king of the gastric parasites, but his tendency to shout all his lines undermines his effectiveness. Mima Vulovic could make more of her role as the paranoid doctor running an insane asylum.
The play takes place on a nearly bare stage dominated by clock with detachable numbers, cast off one by one as the Narrator proceeds through the story. Andjelija Djuric has caught the deliberately make-shift, deconstructionist nature of Lukac's conception by having the asymmetrical proscenium rise to haphazardly nailed bare boards at the top. Her costumes have an appropriate whiff of fairy-tale about them especially in Mother Puryrov's opulent gown and the policemen's dress uniforms. And she does think of a clever way to dress Dodsley as a future Christmas tree. Sandra Marcroft's lighting underscores the cabaret feel of the show, as does the live music of Dragoslav Tanaskovic and Ilja Lukac. You may find it hard to get the title song out of your head.
As with any show using improvisation, some scenes come off better than others. The first act provides a steady build in inspired lunacy, but the second falls off in interest after the policemen's interrogation of the Nurse. Inserting additional material may not be a good idea in the subsequent scenes in the asylum or in court where similar situations have already been explored to better effect in the police scenes. There were no previews, always a boon to this kind of show, so that opening night had pretty much the rough-and-tumble character of a first preview. Having seen the show last year near the end of its run, I don't doubt it will grow tauter and more confident the more it plays.
Lukac and his company have made sure this nearly forgotten experimental play still has an experimental edge. It reminds us why absurdism, since it holds nothing as absolute, could seem so dangerous to a totalitarian state. Anyone with a taste for the absurd from Ionesco to Monty Python won't want to miss it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Alexandrer Vvedensky.
2002-02-19
Christmas at the Ivanovs