✭✭✩✩✩ / ✭✭✩✩✩

by Sean Curran / by Harley Granville Barker,

directed by Andrew Freund

Vox Theatrix, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

June 18-28, 2002

The new theatre co-op Vox Theatrix presents a potentially intriguing double-bill of one-act plays on related themes.  The first, Together, Apart, is the first play by Newfoundland-born singer and actor Sean Curran.  The second, Farewell to the Theatre, is by Harley Granville Barker (1877-1946), the famous director and colleague of George Bernard Shaw.  Neither play fully succeeds.  The first has strong performances, but the play itself is weak.  The second is chock-full of wit and ideas but features a disastrously poor performance.

In Curran's play, Faith (Lada Darewych) and Hope (Regan Thiel), the daughters of a recently deceased Canadian author await the reading of the will by their father's lawyer (John Wallace).  To their surprise the sisters discover their widower father has remarried and worry what claims his second wife Clare (Marÿke Hendrikse) will make.  Symbolic names, a storm brewing outside mirroring the one inside, poorly motivated exits and entrances, illogical plotting all proclaim it a neophyte's work.  The characters all speak in melodramatic, incomplete sentences as if they knew unspeakable horrors, but this tactic merely delays revelations that turn out to be quite dull.  The actors struggle to make the hysterics seem naturalistic, but only Hendrikse turns in a completely consistent performance.

In its 45 minutes, Barker's play covers more topics than many plays four times its length.  Love, life, art, death, their limits and interrelations all combine in the witty dialogue of an artistically "dead" actress (Katherine Trowell) and her lawyer and would-be wooer (John Wallace).  Wallace is excellent at bringing out the lawyer's mixture of hope and resignation.  Trowell, however, undermines the whole show by speaking so softly she can hardly be heard even from the front row.  Besides that, she doesn't shape her lines meaningfully.  She lets one pithy epigram after the next fall flat sadly clouding the brilliance of this real gem of play.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2002-10-21.

Photo: Marÿke Hendrikse.