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by Dean Gilmour, Michele Smith & the Company,

directed by Dean Gilmour & Michele Smith

Theatre Smith-Gilmour with Factory Theatre,

Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

March 4-April 4, 2004

Dr. Chekhov: Ward 6 is the final installment in what Theatre Smith-Gilmour calls its “Chekhov Trilogy” that began in 1999 with its highly successful Chekhov Shorts.  Ward 6, the darkest, most disturbing of the three plays, receives a quietly powerful production.

Chekhov wrote Ward 6 in 1892 after a visit to an insane asylum in Siberia.  Shaken by the horrors he saw there he wrote this parable about the influence of political power in defining sanity that looks forward to the nightmarish world of Kafka.  The story and the Smith-Gilmour adaptation focus first on 

Ivan (Dean Gilmour), an educated, hypersensitive man whom a series of professional and personal disasters drives to paranoia and incarceration in the dreaded Ward 6.  The focus then shifts to the hospital’s new doctor Andrey (Michele Smith), who, shocked by the condition of the patients, stops coming to work and uses his penchant for stoic philosophy to rationalize his action.  Why prevent suffering, when suffering ennobles?  Why prevent death when we all must die?  Eventually Andrey discovers that the only person with whom he can have an intellectually stimulating conversation is Ivan, who believes that the pain of reality crushes all philosophy.

The play’s 100 minutes glide by at a slow but relentless pace through scenes of comedy and philosophical debate to a truly horrifying conclusion.  The company’s trademark minimalist staging and its precise physical acting style poised between caricature and naturalism only emphasize the sense of an unfolding nightmare.  Some may find that Smith’s heavy accent makes Andrey’s philosophical disquisitions hard to follow, but her intense focus and gift for characterization carry her through.  Gilmour shifts effortlessly between objective narrator and disturbed patient.  The talented Paul Fauteux and Ann-Marie Kerr  metamorphose into numerous supporting characters.  The show is a chilling indictment of what happens when sanity is equated with conformity.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-03-11.

Photo: Michele Smith, Dean Gilmour, Paul Fauteux and Ann-Marie Kerr. ©2004 Theatre Smith-Gilmour.