Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✩✩
by Ahmed Ghazali, translated by Bobby Theodore,
directed by Soheil Parsa
Cahoots Theatre/Modern Times Stage Company,
Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
February 13-March 11, 2007
Three theatre companies have banded together to present the English-language premiere of Moroccan-Canadian Ahmed Ghazali’s first play The Sheep and the Whale (Le Mouton et la baleine). It’s an ambitious but uneven work about the plight of refugees that could have been written yesterday instead of in 1999.
In a storm in the Strait of Gibraltar a Russian freighter tries to rescue a group of Moroccan refugees and finds only one survivor. The ship remains in limbo when neither Spain nor Morocco will take the bodies. The incident causes two French tourists on board, Hassan (Andy Velasquez), once a Moroccan refugee himself, and his stressed-out wife Hélène (Soo Garay), not very convincingly to re-examine their lives. In a style veering uncomfortably between the realistic and the poetic, Ghazali uses the situation to attack the callousness of Europeans toward refugees and to explore the problems of identity refugees suffer once settled in Europe. Strangely, Ghazali has time to include a heavy-handed satire of Americans and globalization but says nothing about the refugees themselves or why they have risked their lives to flee to an unwelcoming Europe.
Director Soheil Parsa makes the play a vivid experience. Designer Camellia Koo ingeniously conjures up the world of a container ship and sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne deserves special praise for brilliant soundscape that will make you think the theatre itself is awash in a storm.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-03-01.
Photo: Soo Garay and Andy Velasquez.
2007-03-01
The Sheep and the Whale