Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✩✩✩
written and directed by Morris Panych
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
September 26-October 27, 2007
Benevolence is Morris Panych’s third world premiere this year after What Lies Before Us at CanStage and Hotel Peccadillo at the Shaw Festival. You can’t help but wonder whether Panych should concentrate on quality rather than quantity. The theme of Benevolence is not new. Jean Renoir’s film Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) and the plays Biedermann and the Arsonists (1953) by Max Frisch and The Caretaker (1960) by Harold Pinter all deal with characters who help men who are down-and-out only to be taken advantage of by them. All three are more politically astute not to mention simply more plausible than Panych’s play.
Set entirely in a derelict porn theatre, the action traces the consequences of salesman Oswald Eichersen (Tom Rooney) having given $100 to a homeless man Terence Lomy (Stephen Ouimette). Eichersen’s kindness inspires Lomy to do good deeds for Eichersen that will “free” him from the constrained life he seems to hate. The trouble is that Lomy’s uses theft and murder to accomplish these “good deeds.” Throughout the play people ask Eichersen “Why don’t you call the police?” Eichersen never does even though it is illogical for a character portrayed as so obsessed with propriety and control. Panych, of course, would have no plot if Eichersen did. Panych should either come up with a good reason why Eichersen does not call the police or should suggest that Eichersen subconsciously enjoys having his life disrupted by an outsider. Yet, Panych does neither and piles up so many implausibilities by the end that we really don’t care what happens.
The situation of benevolence turning into a nightmare has myriad possibilities that Renoir, Frisch and Pinter explore but that Panych ignores. The programme debates the ethics of giving or giving money to beggars but not the play. As a director, Panych favours repetition over development. He has Rooney iterate Eichersen’s objections to Lomy in exactly the same manner throughout the play even though Eichersen’s does nothing to change the situation. Some think Lomy might be insane, but Panych directs Ouimette to give no hint of this possibility. As Eichersen’s girlfriend Audrey, Jennifer Wigmore’s uptight manner of speech and gesture change not a whit even when her entire worldview has supposedly changed. Gina Wilkinson comes off best as the mentally unglued prostitute Jackie.
The most impressive aspect of the show is its physical production. Designer Ken MacDonald has recreated down to mounds of choice litter and duct-tape patched seats the grungiest 60-seat movie theatre you’ve ever seen. Lighting designer Andrea Lundy deserves yet another award for so accurately imagining how a theatre would look when bathed in the changing coloured light reflected from a movie screen. This amazingly detailed stage picture makes you certain something remarkable and exciting will happen. It’s too bad nothing does.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-07-28.
Photo: Tom Rooney and Stephen Ouimette. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2007-09-28
Benevolence