Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✭✭
by David French, directed by Ted Dykstra
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
May 3-June 16, 2007
Soulpepper is giving David French’s Leaving Home, a classic of Canadian theatre, its first Toronto remount since its premiere in 1972. You could hardly imagine a better production. The cast, the design, the direction are all superb, leaving only questions about the play itself. If you’ve ever wondered what people mean by “kitchen-sink drama,” you need only look at this play with a functioning kitchen in which actor Diane D’Aquila cooks a full meal on stage before the play even begins. The play was important for igniting the fervor for Canadian drama in Canada, but it must be admitted that its style and subject matter were already old-fashioned when the play first opened.
Leaving Home is the first of five plays that David French wrote about the Mercers, a Newfoundland family who move to Toronto for a better life but ultimately never feel at home there. The play is primarily a character study of Jacob Mercer (Kenneth Welsh), the head of the family, a hard-drinking man of little education whose macho upbringing has given him little means of communicating his feelings. His underlying sense of inadequacy grows as his sons become more educated and look down on him as a bully or clown. Jacob’s overreaction to every situation in turn causes his wife Mary (D’Aquila), his younger son Bill (Anthony Johnston) and especially his older son Ben (Jeff Lillico) to hide information from him thus only alienating him further from his family. Jacob has already settled down from one blowup when he discovered Bill had got his Catholic girlfriend Kathy (Martha MacIsaac) pregnant and would have to marry her. A second blowup is due when he finds out that Ben is planning to leave home and move in with the newlyweds simply because he can’t stand life with Jacob anymore.
Jacob is the kind of character I, like Ben, almost instinctively dislike. Yet, Welsh’s phenomenal performance reveals that beneath Jacob’s galling bravado and utter foolishness is a being who talks big and acts violently simply because he is afraid of a world he no longer understands. D’Aquila gives a beautifully judged performance as maternal strength personified whose quiet understanding holds the family together. Johnston and Lillico are perfect as brothers, the first reacting with weakness to their situation, the second with barely contained fury. MacIsaac captures all the trepidation of a young woman wanting love but unprepared for marriage. Yet it is Jane Spidell, as Kathy’s raunchy, loud-mouthed mother, who nearly steals the show because she gives her character such overwhelming vitality.
Patrick Clark give this slice-of-life play a slice-of-house set where the highly detailed kitchen and living/dining-room are shown sawn diagonally from back to front through walls, windows and doors. Director Ted Dykstra has done a masterful job of “invisible” direction to keep the actors’ behaviour as realistic as possible. Indeed, the play’s main virtue is its collection of meaty, complex parts. When all are performed with such excellence as here the result is exhilarating.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-05-04.
Photo: Diane D’Aquila and Kenneth Welsh. Photo by Cylla Tiedemann.
2007-05-04
Leaving Home