Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✭✭✩
by Edward Bond, directed by Brenda Bazinet
Actors Repertory Company, George Ignatieff Theatre, Toronto
February 19-March 9, 2003
The story is simple--the implications are not. A young man has drowned during a storm at sea. His fiancée Rose (Janet Bourgeois) and his best friend Willy (Brett Christopher) are distraught. Meanwhile Mrs. Rafi (Hazel Desbarats), the queen bee of the social hierarchy, rehearses her amateur theatricals and Hatch (Alan Jordan), the village draper, goes mad believing aliens are already among us and bit by bit are replacing our brains with machines.
British playwright Edward Bond contrasts the suffocation of village society with the vastness of the sea that both creates and destroys. The path of man lies somewhere in between. The Sea (1973), probably Bond's finest play, combines farce and tragedy and presents succinctly his rationalist response to the question of how to live in the face of death.
The production needs more assured pacing and greater detail and the edge between shock and laughter isn't sharp enough. Fortunately, it also features some remarkably fine acting. Desbarats gives one of her best ever performances, capturing all the hauteur of an upper-class woman who bullies others because she thinks they expect it. Yet, she wins our sympathy when Mrs. Rafi momentarily lets us see the coward beneath the mask. Jordan frighteningly details the draper's descent from seeming eccentricity to true madness. Janet Bourgeois's intense focus communicates the depth of Rose's distress far beyond her few lines. Brett Christopher matches her in intensity in a nuanced portrait of a young man whose chance survival in the storm makes him question the fundamentals of the world around him.
Director Brenda Bazinet has to little effect moved the setting from England in 1907 to Newfoundland in 1913. In either case Bond's view, voiced by the local hermit (Sam Malkin), that industrialization is making us aliens in our own world, echoes even louder today.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-02-27.
Photo: Hanet Bourgeois and Brett Christopher. ©2003 Actors Repertory Company.
2003-02-27
The Sea