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by Colleen Murphy, directed by Micheline Chevrier Canadian Stage Company/Citadel Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

May 17, 2008

If we were to judge the Canadian Stage Company/Citadel Theatre production of Colleen Murphy’s The December Man solely on the basis of its acting, we would give it full marks.  All three cast members are profoundly immersed in their characters and give intensely naturalistic performances.  Jeff Irving is Jean Fournier, a fictional character who was one of the men ordered out of the room at the École Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989 before before a gunman murdered fourteen women for being “feminists.”  Brian Dooley and Nicola Lipman play his bewildered working-class parents Benoît and Kathleen, unable to see how Jeans survivor guilt is destroying his will to live, unable to see how his decline is destroying them.  These performances draw us into Colleen Murphy’s play, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Drama in 2007, and almost make it believable.

Unfortunately, Murphy’s play evades a host of questions.  She tells the story in reverse chronological order beginning with the scene, powerful in its understatement, suicide of Benoît and Kathleen, who no longer feel they can go on living after what has happened to Jean.  This does open up a mystery but by the third scene we know the whole story.  The following five scenes have the mind-numbing effect of watching a crashed car uncrumple backwards in slow motion to its point of impact.  Kathleen, whom Murphy presents as a devout Catholic, is worried that suicide is a mortal sin but still believes she and Benoît will see Jean in heaven.  If she knew her catechism, she should be more than worried.  Knowingly committing a mortal sin condemns the soul to hell. 

The prime difficulty is that Murphy has not decided whether her play is general or specific.  Her point seems to be to show in general the collateral damage that a disaster can wreak in its wake.  Yet, her highly contrived specific example of the Fourniers cannot be explained by the Montreal massacre, but rather the inner psychological workings of the Fournier family.  After all, relatives of millions of people who have actually lost children in natural or man-made disasters do not choose suicide but somehow continue living despite their permanent scars.  We would otherwise never see parents commemorating their children’s deaths.  Lost amidst all the very accurately rendered banalities of everyday conversation is any clue why Jean particularly should be so deeply affected or why his parents’ response to his death should be a drastic step condemned by their religion.  Besides this, why does Murphy mention so often the real name of the Montreal murderer but not one name of his fourteen real victims?  She may think she has something important to say by means of her fictional victims, but in the end, she does not.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-04-11.

Photo: Nicola Lipman. ©Ian Jackson.