✭✭✭✩✩

by Wajdi Mouawad, directed by Bill Lane

Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

November 19-December 11, 2005

After winning the Governor General’s Award and France’s Prix Molière, Wajdi Mouawad’s Tideline (Littoral in French) from 1997 is finally receiving its English-language premiere.  Though tautly directed by Bill Lane, Factory Theatre’s production lasts 3 1/2 hours.  The bloated play could easily lose an hour and thereby increase its impact.  In its present form Tideline is by turns brilliant and banal, fascinating and pretentious.

The story is simple.  Wilfrid (Michael Rubenfeld) cannot bury his recently deceased father in Canada and so travels to his father’s unnamed homeland to bury him.  His companions include his garrulous father’s ghost (a restrained Sugith Varughese), and his imagination (an energetic Andrew Moodie) manifested, unnecessarily, in two forms as saviour knight and cliché-prone film director.  Once in his father’s homeland five strangers, four more than needed, join him one by one, all seeing in Wilfrid’s dead father their own.   

Act I, straying least from realism, is the most effective, while Acts 2 and 3 become increasingly symbolic, prolix and self-referential.  Rubenfeld holds our attention in Act 1, after which it’s the strangers played by Dalal Badr, Audrey Dwyer and Dylan Trowbridge who shine brightest.  In the end the living come to accept life, the dead death and we that Mouawad’s ambitious reach often exceeds his grasp.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-11-24.

Photo: Sugith Varughese and Michael Rubenfeld. ©Ed Gass-Donnelly.