Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✩✩✩
by David Macfarlane, directed by Andy McKim
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
March 29-May 1, 2005
It’s not a good sign when a play’s set is more interesting than the play. Yet, that’s the case with Fishwrap by David Macfarlane, now receiving its world premiere. Sue LePage has created a wonderful vision of the collapsing back room of a house. There are bare struts and lathing, holes in the floor and brick wall, plastic sheeting around the stairwell, improvised furniture, a desk made from a sink. We expect intriguing things to happen. Sadly, nothing does.
Macfarlane has won numerous awards for his books and journalism but playwriting does not seem his métier. For a play only 75 minutes long, Fishwrap is awkward and strangely unfocussed. After the first half, it seems to runs out of material and becomes repetitive. It concerns Vogel (John Jarvis), a freelance writer for The Daily Record, clearly based on The Globe and Mail, for which Macfarlane himself once wrote. Trusting in the security of his job (question: “Do freelancers do that?”), he has contracted major renovations to his house and gone to Africa on a working vacation. Stricken with a disease causing fever and delirium, he returns to a dilapidated house. Just before Christmas he is sacked, his wife leaves him and his bicycle is stolen.
Vogel could be a kind of comic Job, but Macfarlane is more intent on satirizing Canadian newspapers and their self-importance. Frequent Globe readers will enjoy the many thinly veiled jabs at that rag. Others may wonder what he’s talking about. Yet the satire is the best part of the play, since Macfarlane’s attempts at pathos too obviously strive after effect. Since, ultimately it is the theft of the bike more than losing his job that pushes Vogel over the edge, one wonders why Macfarlane didn’t begin there.
Jarvis gives a highly mannered performance, speaking more to the floor and back wall than out to the audience. It is true that Vogel is feverish, but Jarvis lurches about so much it looks as if he’s allergic to his clothing and his back is in spasm. He is best when calmest, imitating old Mr. Little painfully fetching his newspaper or Vogel’s bewildered innocence as a boy. If only Macfarlane’s play or Jarvis’s performance were as shockingly natural as the set, Fishwrap might seem fresher than yesterday’s news.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-03-31.
Photo: John Jarvis. ©2005 Cylla von Tiedemann.
2005-03-31
Fishwrap