Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by John McGreevy
Luminato, Young Centre, Toronto
June 6-10, 2007
An Evening with Glenn Gould is a peculiar and not too successful double-bill assembled in celebration of what would have been the great pianist’s 75th birthday. The first half, an hour-long play about Gould, gives the evening its title. The second half is a screening of the television documentary Glenn Gould’s Toronto from 1979. The play was written and directed by Gould’s friend, filmmaker John McGreevy. The film was written by Gould and directed by McGreevy. The problem is that the film works so brilliantly at revealing not just Toronto but Gould himself that the play pales in comparison.
In the play McGreevy attempts to recreate October 4, 1982, the last night of Gould’s life. We see Ted Dykstra as Gould play the piano, dictate notes to himself, phone friends, take pills, interview himself, take more pills and listen to records before he eventually slumps over. The two main problems are that this series of circumstances is not dramatic and that McGreevy has not decided what relation the character Gould has with the audience. At times we watch Gould as if through an invisible fourth wall, at others Gould speaks to us directly, a paradoxical strategy for someone who is a recluse and hates public performance. Gould’s interview with himself comes out of nowhere and appears to be McGreevy’s means of cramming Gould’s views of art into a short time period.
What helps save the piece is Dykstra’s meticulous impersonation of Gould right down to his vocal and gestural tics and his technique of playing the piano. Yet, impersonation is not characterization. We are left with a picture of a hypochondriac control freak who believes that "Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness,” but we get little insight into why Gould is like this or what this has to do with genius.
The film gives us a very different picture. Gould narrates a travelogue of Toronto, the city where he lives but most of whose landmarks he has never seen. Unlike the play, what shines is Gould’s urbane, razor-like wit that exposes everything it touches including himself and his odd habits. Gould clearly enjoys playing the extrovert role of travel guide and the license it gives him to send up all the clichés of travelogues. He does not gush when he see the Eaton Centre for the first time but says, “It’s absurd! I don’t understand it.” And so it is with the Ex, Yonge Street, and the two city halls. He does not like Toronto itself but the fact that the city does not intrude on his privacy. Should Toronto become too much like New York, he thinks he could be happy in Leningrad. In the end we learn much more about Gould by the way he plays an unfamiliar role than we do from an actor, even as expert as Dykstra, who has mastered Gould’s external mannerisms.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-06-08.
Photo: Glenn Gould in Toronto in 1981. ©Alfred Eisenstaedt.
2007-06-08
An Evening with Glenn Gould