✭✭✭✭✩

by Frank McGuinness, directed by Tegan Shohet

Adeona Productions, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

December 6-13, 2008

Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me about three men held hostage in Beirut may have been written in 1992 but, sadly, it could have been written yesterday.  The stories of Irish teacher Brian Keenan and British journalist John McCarthy, who were held captive in a windowless cell for almost five years in the late 1980s inspired McGuinness, but his play is uninterested in the politics of the Lebanon Hostage Crisis of that period.  Rather McGuinness focusses on the relations of the three hostages and their strategies of survival.  As directed by Tegan Shohet and magnificently performed by an ideal trio of actors, the play is immensely powerful.

Ryan Hollyman plays Adam, an American doctor, now in his fourth month of captivity, who uses physical exercise as his main weapon against despair.  In one of his best-ever performances David Ferry is Michael, an Irish journalist, who replays horse races in is mind to keep up his spirits.  Soon they are joined by Michael, played by R.H. Thomson, a British teacher of English, whom Adam and Michael initiate into their tactics for survival.  All three have one leg chained to the wall of a continually lighted cell so that they lose track of whether it is night or day.  Game-playing is their primary occupation, whether imagining films they’d like to make, letters they’d like to write or re-enacting sporting events.  This and their airing of national prejudices provides much of the humour in an otherwise grim situation.  Thomson’s recreation of Virginia Wade’s victory at Wimbledon 1977 in the presence of the Queen is especially hilarious.  Nevertheless, these games inadvertently recall what they’re meant to hide--the men’s pain of their loss of freedom and their families, fear of death and of being forgotten, rage at the senselessness of their situation.  They struggle not to break down because that is what their captors want, but the energy to keep the truth at bay lasts only so long.

The play’s first act seems much like Waiting for Godot translated from Beckett’s abstract setting into the real world.  By intermission we have little sense of where the play is heading or what McGuinness’s real point may be.  That all changes with Act 2.  When Edward and Michael go for an imaginary flight over Europe, we find that we, too, are now involved in their fantasies.  At the start of the play we assume that the title, borrowed from a famous Gershwin song, is an ironic reference to the hostages’ unseen captors.  By the end we see that is also refers to fundamental human need for companionship that above all else helps us bear the the unbearable.  More than any conventional Christmas play, this work leaves us profoundly thankful for the life, freedoms and friends we have.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-12-09.

Photo: David Ferry, R.H. Thompson and Ryan Hollyman. ©Cylla von Tiedemann