✭✭✭✭✩

by Michael Redhill, directed by Ross Manson

Volcano, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto

October 18-November 27, 2005

Michael Redhill’s latest work Goodness is a philosophical play about a character named Michael Redhill (played in Woody Allenish mode by Jordan Pettle), who has written a play about the process of writing a play about an account of genocide.  If this sounds overly complex, it is.  The structure places so many quotation marks around the action as to render it completely abstract.  Redhill the character’s Pirandellian interactions with his own characters further complicates matters with the old reality-or-illusion paradox, while paralleling Redhill’s divorce problems with genocide trivializes the subject.

Yet beneath the self-conscious metatheatrical bric-à-brac lies an intriguing story presenting a moral paradox.  Redhill learns from an aged recluse (a steely Lili Francks) that she once served as prison guard for suspected war criminal Matthias Todd (Victor Ertmanis deftly playing Todd both as he is and as others imagine him) on trial for murder in his unnamed home country.  The catch is that Todd has Alzheimer’s.  Can the man be tried for acts he truly cannot remember?  

That the story commands our attention is due entirely to Ross Manson’s incisive direction and the committed performances of the entire cast.  Goodness radically undermines commonly held beliefs that only good people suffer and that suffering brings knowledge.  If justice can never be impartial, what dark forces motivate our impulse to judge and condemn?

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-11-03.

Photo: Tara Hughes, Bernadeta Wrobel, Lili Francks, Victor Ertmanis, Jordan Pettle and Jack Nicholsen. ©2005 Michael Cooper.