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Yann Martel, adapted and directed by Bruce Smith

infinitheatre, Factory Theatre, Toronto

May 21-25, 2008

As part of its Performance Spring Festival, Factory Theatre hosts its third Toronto premiere of the series, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martel.  Reader will know Martel because of his Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi (2001), but back in 1993 he published a collection of short stories of which Helsinki is the title story.  Later that year writer/director Bruce Smith adapted it for the stage.  The present production is a revival from Montreal’s infinitheatre.

The story set in 1986 concerns two straight male friends from Trent University.  Three years earlier, Paul, the younger, had received a tainted blood transfusion and is now dying of AIDS.  Initially to make the visits of the older friend and Narrator (Eric Goulem) fun, the two decide to make up a serial story together of the lives of Helsinki Roccamatios (rhymes with “patios”), a Finnish family of Italian descent.  To give the series structure each story will reflect an event in each year of the 20th century beginning with 1901.  The Narrator takes the odd years, Paul the even ones.  While we would very much like to hear these stories, the Narrator tells us they are private, but he will tells us the facts behind them.  Thus, 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death becomes the death of the matriarch of the Roccamatios.             

For 90 minutes the play perhaps too strictly alternates between the Narrator telling us the chosen event of each succeeding year while illustrating it with a title card and a slide projection, and informing us in minute detail about the small improvements or ghastly declines in Paul’s health as virus after virus infects his body.  It soon becomes clear that the emphasis on fact and detail is intentionally meant to keep emotion in the narrative at bay so that the few times the Narrator allows his unbearable feelings to show are shocking.  It also becomes clear that the tale of the Helsinki Roccamatios becomes a means for the two friends to communicate to each other on a deeper level.  The worse Paul feels the more likely the Narrator is to choose a grim rather than uplifting event from history, such as for 1921 the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti rather than the discovery of insulin by Banting and Best.  Thus, while Martel explores the palliative function of fiction, he also explores the ways in which fact and fiction can mold each other.  Goulem gives a moving portrait of a regular guy caught up in a tragedy that devastates him and Paul’s entire family.  The facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios may be dry but they become code words for the depths of incommunicable grief and sorrow that underlie both the Narrator’s experience and the experience of a metastasizing humankind in the first half of the last century. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-05-22.

Photo: Yann Martel. ©Marc Tessier.