✭✭✭✩✩ / ✭✭✩✩✩
<b>by Harold Pinter / Luigi Pirandello, directed by Levon Halftvan
Lemaz Productions, Artword Theatre, Toronto
February 17-March 6, 2005
</b>
Pinter’s <i>The Lover</i> (1963) and Pirandello’s <i>I’m Dreaming, But Am I? </i>(1929) should make a good pairing since both use the triangle of husband, wife and lover to explore the boundaries between reality and illusion. The current Lemaz production of Pinter’s hour-long play is strong if flawed while Pirandello’s 30-minute teaser misfires.
In Pinter’s enigmatic drama, Sarah (a luminous Brenda Bazinet) and Michael (a stodgy John Evans) are happily married with the one quirk that neither objects to the other regularly seeing a lover. Yet, given the couple’s enjoyment of game-playing, we are never sure whether the couple’s “lovers” are not in fact the sexual aspects of the couple itself. Director Levon Haftvan, designer Behzad Adineh and lighting designer Trevor Schwellnus create many striking visual images, but the main problem is with language. Bazinet knows how to inject Pinter’s spare dialogue with multiple implications; Evans does not. As a result the atmosphere is neither as comic nor as menacing as it should be.
In the Pirandello, a sleeping woman (Bazinet) wakes twice to two different scenarios resulting from an admirer giving her a pearl necklace. In the first her husband (Evans) is violent; in the second ignorant. As per the title, we should not know which of the versions (if either) is the dream. Yet, Haftvan clearly directs the first as dream, the second as reality thus making a slight play seem even slighter.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in <i>Eye Weekly</i> 2005-02-24.
Photo: John Evans and Brenda Bazinet.
<b>2005-02-24</b>
<b>The Lover / I’m Dreaming, But Am I?</b>