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by David Edgar, directed by Mladen Kiselov

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 10-September 21, 2007

“Theatre of Revelations”

It’s been a long time since the Stratford Festival has programmed a serious contemporary British play.  If “contemporary” means written within twenty years or less before a Stratford production, we have to look all the back to “Amadeus” (1979) by Peter Shaffer in 1995, “Home” (1970) by David Storey in 1990 or “Not About Heroes” (1982) by Stephen MacDonald in 1987.  David Edgar’s “Pentecost” (1994) gives us an idea of what we’ve been missing.  It is an ambitious, large-scale play of ideas, challenging to both the audience and actors.  Under Bulgarian-born director Mladen Kiselov the company absolutely shines.  They show a commitment to the work stronger than anything I’ve seen in a non-musical at Stratford in years.  The play itself may overreach its grasp, but the performances and production are thrilling.

The play takes place in an unnamed Balkan country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  In a small village Gabriella Pecs, a local art curator, has discovered a fresco that could rewrite art history in Western Europe.  If her hunch about the date of the fresco is correct, a local artist from her otherwise insignificant homeland may have beat Giotto by painting the first European artwork to use perspective.  Pecs enlists the help of Oliver Davenport, a visiting British art historian, to help authenticate her find.  Since in the past the church has been both Catholic and Orthodox, a prison and a museum, representatives of church and state soon at loggerheads about who owns the building and thus the potentially priceless work of art and Leo Katz, an American art historian is brought in to discredit the views of Pecs and Davenport.  Besides this Pecs and Davenport want to move the fresco to a safer more controlled environment because of nearly pollution sources.  Before anything can be settled, a group of refugees break into the church and hold the art historians hostage, threatening to kill them and destroy the fresco if their demands are not met. 

This is just the first act of the three-hour play and the number of ideas Edgar throws out about the interrelations of East and West, art history, politics, religion, ownership and exploitation is dazzling.  The second act, unfortunately, simply doesn’t measure up to the first.  The ever-widening play of ideas suddenly collapses into a rather conventional hostage drama with, threats, emissaries and negotiations.  To fill out the play Edgar gives us the background stories of all ten refugees and then, despite efforts to keep the hostages and their captors separate, the two groups holed up together inevitably join in entertaining each other and begin breaking down the psychological walls between them.  We are meant to see a parallel between the refugees of complex provenance and the fresco.  We are also meant to the refugees as symbolic of all the other groups who have passed through the country claiming the church as their own.  When Edgar tries to return to the topic of art history, it seems forced with all the refugees listening in unlikely rapt attention as Davenport explains his insight into the fresco.  The urgency Edgar gives to removing the fresco is a false prod to the plot since any fresco of the importance he suggests would have to be studied in situ so that scholars could learn more about the circumstances of its creation.  In act 2 we keep hoping for the exhilaration of the first act to return but it never does.

Despite this, what does hold our attention is the intensity of all the performances in large parts and small.  Lucy Peacock makes Pecs warm and intelligent.  She catches the humour and passion of a woman who has learned English from outdated textbooks but whose enthusiasm shines through.  When Pecs loses heart so do we.  John Koensgen plays Davenport as a typical proper Englishman who gradually lets down his guard to get caught up in Pecs’s quest and eventually in Pecs herself.  Jonathan Goad, in one of his best ever performances, is perfect as Katz, Davenport’s American foil.  He starts off as a cynically swaggering American know-it-all, but even he eventually puts off this pose to reveal a profound love of art beneath.  

Dan Chameroy is excellent as Father Petr Karolyi, a local Catholic educated in Britain when his country was under Communist rule, who now is impatient with its slowness to modernize.  His opponent is the Orthodox Father Sergei Bojovic, played by Stephen Russell as a gruff, intractable old man disdainful of all that is new.  Kiselov is especially good at coaching actors to reproduce the studied arrogance of East European petty officials.  Brian Hamman as Mikhail Czaba captures the slimy thuggishness of one arm of the government while Nora McLellan as the Cultural Minister Anna Jedlikova, shows calculation and empathy warring beneath a surface of icy hauteur.  Among the refugees, Adrienne Gould as their leader Yasmin commands the stage with absolute assurance.  Barbara Fulton reveals the frightening emotional instability of Fatima.  And Nora McLellan is hardly recognizable in her second role as the outwardly and inwardly disheveled Marina. 

Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter, commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, understood among Orthodox Christians as the reversal of the effects of the Tower of Babel.  Edgar recreates Babel on stage since only three of the 23 speaking characters are portrayed as native English speakers.  The English-speaking ability of the rest lies at all levels between complete fluency and totally inability.  The nature of the play requires the actors to speak with authority a huge range of other languages from Latin, Greek and Arabic to French, German, Italian, Russian, Bulgarian and many more.  Often at Stratford casts can’t even get simple British or Southern U. S. accents right.  But here, the actors (with the help of fourteen dialect coaches) speak their macaronic lines with amazing confidence and accuracy.  It seems quite clear that Kiselov has gone through the life history of each character in great detail with each actor.  That would explain why the complex life of this unnamed country comes across as so rich and real.   

Eo Sharp’s skeletal set conjures up the atmosphere of a dilapidated church with Mick McDonald’s video projections of early 14th-century frescoes to place the play’s fictional fresco in context and to emphasize thematic elements in the play.  Sharp’s costume design is extraordinarily detailed.  What she captures especially well are the various levels of tackiness of a recently Communist country where clothes are worn because they are thought to look expensive or fashionable not because they actually are.  It’s a difficult style to create without mocking the characters who wear it, but Sharp manages to do it with great precision.  On the negative side, Robert Thomson’s lighting seems mainly oriented towards those in the centre section.  Audience members in the side sections may find that the glare from certain lights in the voms makes it difficult to see the stage clearly.

“Pentecost” feels like a breath of fresh air at Stratford.  For once, outside the musicals, everyone on stage seems to know exactly what they were doing and why.  For once there is a real sense of ensemble and unity of purpose.  For once, too, a modern play does not deal in platitudes but with the knottiest contemporary problems in art, politics and religion.  If Edgar’s play ultimately disappoints in its second half, the Stratford cast and production do not.  The show gives us an exciting glimpse of what Stratford productions could be like when an insightful director inspires his actors and demands, and knows how to get, the very best from them.             

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: André Sills and Adrienne Gould. ©David Hou.