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by Brian Friel / Anton Chekhov,

directed by Douglas Beattie

Touchmark Theatre, River Run Centre, Guelph

February 11-18, 2006

"A Delightful Double-Bill"

Touchmark Theatre closes its 2005-06 season with a delightfully intriguing double-bill of Russian subject matter filtered through an Irish sensibility.  First comes “The Yalta Game” adapted by famed Irish playwright Brian Friel from Chekhov’s short story “Lady with the Lapdog” followed by “The Bear”, Friel’s adaptation of an early vaudeville by Chekhov.  Both works are expertly directed, designed and performed, just as we’ve come to expect from this fine company.

“The Yalta Game”, which premiered in Dublin in 2001, finds fiftyish roué Dmitry Gurov whiling away his time at a seaside café in Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea, where Chekhov himself used to spend his summers.  Within his purview comes a lady with a lapdog, Anna Sergeyevna, with whom he imagines and then succeeds in having a brief affair.  Once separated both come to realize that through what they thought of as merely a casual fling they have in fact met the love of their life.  Since they are both married to other people, what can they do? 

To this simple plot from Chekhov’s story, Friel adds “Yalta Game” of the title.  Late in the story Chekhov says of Dmitry “he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night”.  Friel begins the play with this idea.  His Dmitry sits at the café playing the “Yalta Game” by inventing secret or past lives for the various people who stroll by.  Anna is part of these general speculations before he meets her.  Since the play begins with Dmitry’s direct address to the audience, Friel encloses the action in a framework that makes it difficult to distinguish truth from fantasy.  Friel also has Anna directly address us, but is her voice a realist counterpoint to Dmitry’s or is it included in his fantasy?  Friel thus cleverly places us in the characters’ situation where imagination seems to triumph over reason.

Director and designer Douglas Beattie places the action on an empty, bi-level wooden stage where, except for a few tables and chairs, we have to imagine the various settings.  We also have to conjure up from the actors’ gestures the lapdog, who, at one point, is said not actually to be there.  Brian Tree is perfect as the fantasist cad, whose cynical view of the world is overturned by meeting Anna.  It is a finely detailed portrait of someone whose deprecating view of others proceeds from his own negative view of himself.  It’s a pleasure to see this Stratford veteran carry a play like this in a way that festival never seems to allow him.  Rebecca Northan is a sensitive, complex Anna, suggesting even before she speaks an unhappiness lurking beneath her surface placidity.  That it should burst out in passion and self-recrimination is no surprise.

“The Bear” is an excellent counterpart to “The Yalta Game”.  Here, too, a man and a woman move from being strangers to falling in love, but where the situation is imbued with sadness in “The Yalta Game”, it is purely comic in “The Bear”.  We meet the widow Elena, who has been mourning the death of her promiscuous husband for a year.  Her aged servant Luka urges her to give up her secluded life but Elena insists that she will remain faithful to her husband even if he never did to her.  Into her life barges a misogynist lieutenant Gregory, who demands that Elena pay him money her husband owed him or he will go bankrupt and will not leave until she does so.  Rather like a Russian provincial version of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict, we detect from the vehemence of their professed dislike of each other the spark of attraction.  In one of many ironies, the more we get to know Gregory the more he manifests all the worst traits of Elena’s late husband.

Thom Marriott, big and tall and with a booming voice is ideal as the bear-like soldier of the title.  He makes very clear how Elena’s standing up to him turns from anger to admiration to infatuation.  Rebecca Northan turns in a fine portrayal of Elena hinting through her irritation with Luka that despite what she claims her self-imposed seclusion is becoming irksome.  Brian Tree, in the more familiar role as the comic servant, sends the audience into paroxysms of laughter every time Luka, plagued painfully with arthritic knees, has to negotiate a step.  His look when Elena commands him “to throw out” the enormous Gregory is priceless.

In 2002 the Soulpepper Theatre Company of Toronto presented “The Bear” in an adaptation by Jason Sherman.  Both Sherman’s adaptation and Albert Schultz’s direction treated the play simply as farce.  In contrast, both Friel’s adaptation and Beattie’s direction seem more intent on seeing how this skit from 1888 looks forward to Chekhov’s four great full-length plays.  Friel’s adaptation makes more a point of the characters’ language showing how Elena fairly rapidly descends from hauteur to the gutter language of Gregory.  Beattie concentrates most of the physical comedy on the figure of Luka while exploring the psychological comedy of Elena and Gregory as they like Chekhov’s later characters juggle various states of conscious and unconscious self-deception.  As a result, what in other hands seems simply a funny skit takes on a greater, more satisfying resonance.

Given the wall-less set backed by a blank screen, much of the credit for establishing mood and sense of place must go to lighting designer Jeff Johnston-Collins and sound designer Luke De Ruiter, especially in “The Yalta Game” with its frequent changes of location.  Under Douglas Beattie Touchmark again achieves a level of production and performance equal to the best of our major classical theatre companies. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Brian Tree and Rebecca Northan. ©Douglas Beattie.