✭✭✭✩✩

by Anne Hardcastle, directed by Kelly Thornton

Nightwood Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

November 8, 2008

Anne Hardcastle’s stage adaptation of Helen Humphreys' 2004 novel Wild Dogs falls into the trap of over-reverence for the source material that plagues so many adaptations.  Humphrey’s novel tells its story from the points of view of seven narrators.  Hardcastle’s adaptation also uses seven narrators, but that is precisely the problem.  She has the characters primarily tell what they do, say and think rather than allow us to discover this through dialogue, the medium of drama.  Hardcastle has interleaved the monologues that make up Humphreys' novel but that has not rendered the action dramatic.  Hardcastle has preserved Humphreys' highly poetical prose including her compulsion to over-explain every parallel she draws and every symbol she uses. 

The subject is a group of six diverse people who gather at dusk every night on the verge of a woods to call to the dogs they once owned.  The dogs now run wild as a pack while their owners hope their former bond of love will reassert itself and their dogs will come back.  What is the relation of the tamed and the wild?  Is love itself better left wild or tamed?  Does our identity come from the group we belong to or from within ourselves?  Humphreys' novel and Hardcastle’s adaptation asks all these questions and more which would be fascinating if they did not triple-underscore them as Important Questions.  The use of multiple narrators could create the Rashomon effect of one event seen from radically different perspectives.  On stage all we get is a single unambiguous story, its ending seen halfway through, told us a by a de facto seven-member chorus.

  

The play itself may be insufficiently dramatic, but it could hardly be better cast or acted.  As the central figure Alice, Tamara Podemski creates the play’s most fully realized character with whimsy butting against wisdom, desire against reason.  As her lover Rachel, whose gender is hidden from readers for half the novel, Raven Dauda gives a strong performance of a strong character who cannot reconcile her needs for love and independence.  Special mention should be given newcomers Taylor Trowbridge as the mentally damaged Lily and young Stephen Joffe as Jamie, a good kid in a bad crowd, who act with nuance and proficiency far beyond their years.  Were it a radio play, set free from the fixed realities of the stage, Hardcastle’s adaptation would more fully engage the imagination.                    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-10-13.

Photo: Raven Dauda, Les Carlson, Steve Cumyn, Taylor Trowbridge and Tamara Podemski.

©Robert Popkin.