Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
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by George F. Walker, directed by Ken Gass
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
April 3-July 1, 2008
For its now annual George F. Walker play Factory Theatre has reached way back to 1974 for his Beyond Mozambique, a play that shows the author more interested in genre-bending and shocking the bourgeoisie than in telling a good story. Walker has taken the theme of white men living in outposts in the jungle from such films as Night of the Iguana, The Naked Jungle, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The African Queen, blended them together and extracted a group of exaggerated character types. The problem is that there is no story and his six selected types pointlessly interact for 90 minutes until the play ends.
Sarah Orenstein and Joe Cobden gives performances of such subdued comic flair that they almost make the evening worth while. Orenstein plays Olga, a woman of unknown origin, who believes she is one of the three sisters of Chekhov’s play. The setting may be a rustic cabin set not in a jungle but a garbage dump strewn eventually with various body parts, but Orenstein’s Olga languishes in 19th-century gowns and insists on propriety and formality in a world where only savagery reigns. Cobden is wonderfully funny as Liduc, a gangly junior priest who snorts cocaine from an open bible and confuses the rush from his hit with divine inspiration.
Unfortunately, they are the only two who know that playing their absurd roles completely straight increases the humour. Oliver Becker plays Rocco, an Italian Nazi doctor who thinks he will find a cure for cancer by dissecting fresh cadavers. Besides mumbling in an indeterminate accent, Becker follows none of the many models of mad scientists in jungles and thus has no clear take on his character. Tara Nicodemo as Rita, a porn star supposedly researching a role, refers to Susan Hayward and Rita Hayworth as her models but acts more like a modern teenager without the voice or poise to be the irresistible tropical temptress her models were. Richard Zeppieri as Corporal, an ex-Mountie, captures the sense of a man crazed by fever but rushes his lines to the point of incomprehensibility. Dmitry Chepovetsky, as Rocco’s Igor-like assistant Tomas, makes the most of his few lines half of which are in Greek but also acts like a modern person stuck in a period play.
With such a mixed group of characters it’s perverse that Walker explores none of the multiple tensions that could exist within it. Instead the characters are absorbed in their separate madnesses until the simmering revolution off-stage explodes. Chekhov also examined groups of people wasting their lives before social change swept their way of life away, but he dealt in humanity not caricatures. Walker’s play may have been delightfully outrageous in the 1970s. Now it seems like an empty riff on old movies, but without their style.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-04-07.
Photo: Dmitry Chepovetsky and Tara Nicodemo. ©Ed Gass Donnelly.
2008-04-07
Beyond Mozambique