Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✭✩
by Christopher Fry, directed by Douglas Beattie
Touchmark Theatre, River Run Centre, Guelph
Feb 14-21, 2004
"A Phoenix in Flight"
Touchmark Theatre has brought Guelph both well-known classics like “The Glass Menagerie” (in 2003) and “The Playboy of the Western World” (in 2001) but also lesser-known works like “Kingdom of Heaven” (in 1999) that do not deserve to be forgotten. Such is the case with its current production of Christopher Fry’s verse play “A Phoenix Too Frequent” that reveals the work as a witty, vibrant comedy about human foibles sure to raise anyone’s spirits.
British playwright Christopher Fry (born in 1907 and still with us) is best known for his play “The Lady’s Not for Burning” (1948) last seen in Ontario at the Shaw Festival in 1998. He was one of a number of postwar playwrights like T. S. Eliot and Archibald MacLeish, who championed the cause of drama in verse. The kitchen-sink realism of plays in the 1950s and the existential minimalism of Beckett and Pinter made the idea of a rich poetic language in the modern theatre seem hopelessly old-fashioned. However, enough time has passed by now that we should be able to appreciate his plays for their inherent worth rather than their adherence to a particular trend. Indeed, after the deliberately flat language of so much modern drama, the exuberance of Fry’s language in “Phoenix” feels like a breath of fresh air.
Fry’s 90-minute play is a comic version of the once well-known tale of the “Widow of Ephesus” told in Petronius’ “Satyricon”. The Widow, here named Dynamene, has vowed to starve herself to death in the tomb of her husband Virilius. Her faithful servant Doto, with seemingly nothing else to do, has decided to follow her mistress into death. The situation becomes complicated when a Roman soldier, Tegeus, guarding six recently hanged prisoners, follows the light into the tomb and finds the women. His admiration for Dynamene’s faithfulness soon turns to love while Dynamene is torn between her vow and the possibility of new life.
For this production director and designer Douglas Beattie has configured the seating in Co-operator’s Hall at the River Run Centre into two banks on either side of a runway stage. This brings the audience much closer to the stage and reinforces the intimacy of the play’s setting. His design itself is handsome and well-proportioned with the columned tomb entrance upstage and the large altar-like sepulcher at the very end of the runway. Since the three characters share bread and wine with the pretense of honouring Virilius the shape Beattie gives the sepulchre enhances the parody of communion Fry has built into the action. Lighting designer Renée Brode‘s beautifully mottled lighting accomplishes the difficult task of suggesting murk while still allowing us to see clearly.
All three actors make Fry’s verse sound both natural and clear, though it is Michael Spencer-Davis as Tegeus who best brings out its sensuous beauty. His performance is also the most nuanced in portraying a man whose love of Dynamene’s virtue imperceptibly turns to love. Liza Balkan is hilarious as Doto particularly in her detailing of the servant’s increasing level of drunkenness on Tegeus’s wine and the corresponding level of randiness it provokes. Shauna Black well portrays a young wife whose vow to her accountant-like husband may have been more one of duty than love, but ideally her tone should be more varied and one would have liked to see more of an internal struggle between what Dynamene thinks she ought to do and the stirrings of love she starts to feel for Tegeus.
All in all it is a delightful evening that tickles the ears and the mind with Fry's scintillating language and insight into human nature. It demonstrates that Fry in the right hands can be as vital as any other great 20th-century playwright. Beattie has such a natural way with this playwright, we hope Touchmark will explore him further.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Michael Spencer-Davis and Liza Balkan. ©2004 Douglas Beattie.
2004-02-23
A Phoenix Too Frequent