Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✭✩
by Yasmina Reza
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
October 5-November 7, 2004
Art by French author Yasmina Reza became a worldwide hit in 1994. Reza’s next play, The Unexpected Man (L’Homme du hasard) from 1995, is only now receiving its Toronto premiere at the Tarragon. It is a miniature masterpiece, a quieter play, without the extremes of mood of Art, but one where Reza shows the same gift for revealing the unexpectedly profound resonances of what seems a very simple situation.
A Man (a humorously crotchety Les Carlson) and a Woman (a radiant Deborah Kipp) are alone in a train compartment from Paris to Frankfurt. He is a famous, aging author. She loves his work and has his latest novel, The Unexpected Man, in her handbag. For most of the play’s 70 minutes we hear only their alternating internal monologues. He is rapt in thought trying to understand the reasons, familial, medical and creative, that seem to have made him so bitter. She, still mourning the death of a friend, gradually assesses the risks of reading the novelist’s book in his presence. Both look for ways to begin a conversation.
The play subtly examines the paradox that we know artists more fully through their work than through their lives. What do the artist and the reader put into a work of art that makes them connect? Besides this, what is the nature of individuality? To what extent does our voyage through time and space, in life or on a train, continually change us? And what is the relation of chance and design? All this Reza draws merely from the careful delineation of the foibles of two mature, highly intelligent characters.
The unnecessary miking of the monologues and Rick Hyslop’s soundscape that too often competes with what is said are the only drawbacks in Chris Abraham’s otherwise precise, evocative production so beautifully lit by Kevin Lamotte. Let’s have more Reza soon.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-10-14.
Photo: Les Carlson and Deborah Kipp. ©2004 Tarragon Theatre.
2004-10-14
The Unexpected Man